It’s good to see that the NSW Government has taken the step to consult the community and public service regarding the social media policy and guidance it is planning to put in place for agencies. The consultation, visible at http://haveyoursay.nsw.gov.au/socialmedia (which unfortunately only has comments from me right now) uses a forum-based approach to solicit comments. I hope…
With some of the concerns and processes I’ve witnessed in government it would be easy to draw the conclusion that hundreds or even thousands of public servants are using social media daily in ways that damage the reputations of their departments and the government. Fortunately, a couple of articles I saw yesterday have given me…
Last week the Department of Human Services changed its policy regarding staff who participated in volunteer activities – unpaid work undertaken on their own time. The Department decided that, in order to protect against potential conflicts of interest, public servants had to report their volunteer activities to their Manager and seek approval to do it….
What do the the Arab Spring, Anonymous, the Occupy movement, Iranian election protests, Anti-Putin protests, the #VileKyle push and the #Qantasluxury incident all have in common? Each of them was a demonstration of collective action by groups of people without a clear hierarchy of leadership against traditional hierarchical organisations. In each case the traditional organisations…
A favored term amongst political operatives and advisors is ‘oxygen,, the share of the public discussion a politician, government or issue manages to obtain. Sometimes the goal is to have the largest possible share, starving other commentators and viewpoints. Other times the goal is to to minimise the share of oxygen a viewpoint or issue…
This has been an insightful week for organisations using, or considering using, social media with three successive events demonstrating how far power has shifted to the public and illustrating how Australians companies are struggling to engage effectively online. First up was Qantas with its poorly timed “Qantas luxury” promotion. Qantas launched the Twitter competition by…
When I think back over the most well known innovation successes over the last few years, and I am not specifically referring to the public sector, an aspect that springs out at me is how often these innovations occurred during a major crisis or due to a funding crunch. In other words, these innovations frequently…
Over the last year I’ve observed a couple of good and bad trends in governments around Australia. The first – the good trend – is towards the recognition that social media is a valid and significant channel for government communication and engagement. This has led to the creation of a new type of role, the…
I am presenting from 3.20pm today, and my presentation is now available on slideshare, viewable as below. Developing an agency social media infrastructure View more presentations from Craig Thomler.
With well over 20% of local governments in Australia using social media in their communication and engagement activities I’ve been please to begin seeing state Local Government Associations begin to release social media guidance papers. To my knowledge both the Municipal Association of Victoria (MAV) (whose document appears to be inaccessible online at the moment)…
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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