I’ve been tracking the active Twitter accounts of Australian government agencies and councils for over four years now. In February 2013 I reported that the number of tweets by government agencies and councils had reached one million in January of that year, and eleven months laters in November 2013 I reported that the number of…
At GovHack a few weeks ago my team, The Hack Warriors, wanted to integrate ACT crime data into our project ‘Where Should I?‘ While the ACT makes the data available visually in the awesome Crime Statistics site, it wasn’t available as open data from data.act.gov.au. So during the weekend I went through the code for the…
A challenge today for politicians and public servants is how easy it is for a photo or frame from a video to be reused out-of-context to parody, well, literally anything. We’ve seen the increasing use of ‘photoshopped’ images on social media to support all kinds of political and social positions, ranging from the clever and…
I’ve been tracking the number of Australian federal politicians using social media channels for some time, with the proportion using these channels (principally Facebook and Twitter) sitting at the low-mid 70% level for several years (see my last post on this from June 2012). However I’ve just finished updating the figures based on the September…
Government reports are often dry – really, really, really dry. They are also often wordy, complex, long and, due to these properties, largely incomprehensible to the broader community. Government policy and consultation documents can suffer from similar conditions. They are often quite complex, long and structured in ways that make sense to career bureaucrats but…
Last weekend (31 May – 2 June) was a big weekend for Government 2.0 in Australia, with the first truly national GovHack held across eight locations, including seven of Australia’s eight major states and territories. With over $170,000 in prizes, and around 100 national and local prizes on offer, GovHack 2013 attracted 900 participants, who…
I’ve mapped the 222 local government Twitter accounts I track to their geographic locations around Australia (excluding NT), and it forms an interesting picture. UPDATE: I’ve updated the map data to include NT data, thanks to the help of @Maxious, who found an ABS dataset which includes them. Local government use of Twitter in Australia…
Last Friday the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner released a major report on the release of public sector information by Australian Government agencies. The report, Open public sector information: from principles to practice, is available online and is a relative straightforward read. The OAIC also released the aggregated data for the report into data.gov.au…
In January 2013 I found that the total tweets by all government agencies and councils in Australia I track had exceeded one million. As a reflection of that achievement I’ve worked through the data I have on the use of Twitter by government agencies and councils in Australia to produce the following infographic (scroll for…
Google has released a fascinating infographic detailing the mobile use of Aussies in their blog post, Insights into the Mobile Aussie Weekend. Useful for communications and policy people in government, it provides insights into how Australians are using their mobile phone to search the internet over weekends based on Google’s statistical data. A Day in the Mobile Aussie…
This archive mirrors the original eGov AU blog — Craig’s professional commentary on AI, digital government and technology in public life, running since 2006.
'; loop.parentNode.insertBefore(w,loop); })();