Over the last week a rogue IT employee in the San Francisco Department of Technology Information Services has held the city to ransom – locking down many of the city’s services by refusing to disclose an administration password. The employee, Terry Childs, helped create the city’s FiberWAN network , used for controlling the city’s emails,…
As reported in NextGov, Barack Obama, the Democratic Presidential candidate, has pledged to appoint a direct report focusing on online security. “As president, I’ll make cybersecurity the top priority that it should be in the 21st century,” Obama said during a summit on national security at Purdue University. “I’ll declare our cyber-infrastructure a strategic asset,…
The question in my title is of course a little provocative – who is to say whether a website is better or worse? The answer, in my view, is our users. For some reason in Australian we have never, to my knowledge, asked our citizens to compare government websites against universal categories such as awareness,…
For a fantastic (satirical) look into the halls of power in Canberra, the ABC’s The Hollowmen is a great watch. What does this have to do with eGovernment? Well in Episode 2 it does suggest that 90% of what most of our overseas embassies do could be done remotely via the internet with a few…
The Investments blog posted a thought-provoking post a few days ago, asking Should Government Websites Be Allowed to Post Google Ads to Offset Deficient Budgets? This was based on a question put to ‘Father of the internet’ and Google head evangelist, Vinton Cerf, who was asked at an eGovernment seminar, “if he thought that there…
This post has been inspired by a post in the blog Here Comes Everybody, titled Gin, Television and Social Surplus. I strongly suggest that you also read this and think about the ramifications. With the globe’s total knowledge doubling every two years, being innovative is not longer simply an economic advantage for nations – it’s…
The Web Industry Professionals Association (WIPA) have published a guide to help webmasters migrating websites from the the W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) version 1.0 to the soon-to-be-released WCAG 2.0.The HTML version of “Migrating from WCAG 1.0 to WCAG 2.0” is at http://wipa.org.au/papers/wcag-migration.htm As WCAG 1.0 is mandatory for Australian government agency websites, this…
The Australian government has an opportunity to expand its support for national fixed line broadband to include mobile broadband, spearheaded by the release of the Apple iPhone this week. The phone is a revolutionary device and reports out of the US indicate that people using the phone are using internet data services 50x as frequently…
The McKinsley Quarterly has published a very interesting piece on the future of innovation, The next step in open innovation. This explores the concept that companies – and government departments – have traditionally been ‘closed shops’ for innovation. All their innovation has occurred internally with few linkages to the work underway at other organisations. However…
There are many approaches in government – and the private sector – to managing their online channel. The area is still young and as yet I’ve not seen best practice structures emerge, as has occurred within other areas of organisation management. In this post I intend to reflect on the different approaches and my own…
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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