Over the last two years we’ve seen a concerted effort by governments across Australia to increase the level of online engagement, debate and discussion involving public agencies. In 2009 the Government 2.0 Taskforce, commissioned by then Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner and chaired by Dr Nicholas Gruen, conducted a six month process of engaging public servants…
On Saturday 19 March Canberra is hosting the 4th BarCamp Canberra, a free one-day user-generated not-for-profit ‘unconference’ covering topics ranging from social innovation, Gov 2.0, web, technical development, science communication, critical thinking, sustainability and the environment. If you’ve attended previous BarCamps you’ll know how exciting and fun they can be, packed full of interesting and…
Last Friday I presented on a personal basis at the Seamless CMS Government Conference in Melbourne to a collection of Councils from around Australia and New Zealand about the state of Government 2.0 in Australia. I’ve included my presentation below. It was an interesting conference. Councils are struggling with the same issues regarding Government 2.0…
According to The Australia, at least one Australian Government agency is full of ‘Bureaucrats twitting at our expense‘ (sic – the correct term is ‘tweeting’). Based on a question which identified that, in a single week of measurement last year, staff at the Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research (DIISR), spent 400 hours using…
Mary Meeker, managing director for Morgan Stanley’s global technology research unit recently gave an excellent presentation on mobile internet trends. It highlights the incredible growth of tablets and apps, the rise of Android, the new uses that smartphones are being put to (only 32% of time is spent on phone calls) and the relative effectiveness…
We’ve seen enormous movement towards the opening up of public access and permission to reuse government information in Australia over the last year, both at state and Commonwealth levels. However these attempts to improve transparency and increase the capability for information reuse shouldn’t be led by government alone. The public, media, commercial and not-for-profit sectors…
Listening to the US’s National Public Radio (NPR) last week, I caught a story about how Chinese citizens are now using micro-blogging services (similar to Twitter) to communicate about missing or stolen children and, in some cases to locate them. According to The Guardian article, Chinese parents turn to microblogging in hunt for missing children,…
The Queensland State Archives recently commissioned a whole of Government Recordkeeping and Web 2.0 online survey to investigate how Queensland’s public authorities were using Web 2.0 and social media2 tools to conduct government business. The survey also asked public authorities about the policies and procedures they had in place to guide the business use of…
Last week the Commonwealth Bank received a panning for its new social media policy. Going beyond guidance for staff in their use of social media, the policy made it a requirements that Commonwealth Bank staff tell their managers about any negative comments about the bank they see online. The policy also required that staff do…
This is a thought-provoking video that looks at where good ideas – innovation – comes from. It raises an interesting point about the correlation between connections and innovation. That the more we interact and connect with others, the more likely it is that we can combine our partial ideas, our hunches, the greatest the prospect…
This archive mirrors the original eGov AU blog — Craig’s professional commentary on AI, digital government and technology in public life, running since 2006.
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