I applaud Victoria Police for their latest foray into online engagement, MyPlace. As highlighted in Victoria’s eGovernment Resource Centre, the Victorian Police have launched MyPlace as, An interactive mapping service provide by Victoria Police which is updated every three months so you can see what is happening in your suburbs and hear directly from your…
Information held by the Government is a national resource and should be managed in the public interest. Access to government information increases public participation, and leads to increased scrutiny, discussion, comment and review of government activity. It would be great to hear an Australian government make a statement like the above, acknowledging that much of…
In the US President Obama’s newly appointed (and first) Federal Government CIO Vivek Kundra has committed to finding new ways to make government data open and accessible. The Computer World article, First federal CIO wants to ‘democratize’ U.S. government data, discusses how, In a conference call with reporters, Kundra said he plans to create a…
Accenture has released an international report, Leadership in Customer Service: Creating Shared Responsibility for Better Outcomes looking at the opinions of 8,600 citizens in 21 countries towards their governments. Australia, one of the countries studied, performed moderately well. Australians were almost evenly split amongst those who felt that government was good at seeking their opinions,…
The National Diabetes Services Scheme (NDSS), an Australian Government initiative administered by Diabetes Australia, last month released the a national online map of the spread of diabetes in Australia. Located at www.diabetesmap.com.au), the service is a wonderful example of how online map systems (in this case Microsoft’s free Virtual Earth tool) can be ‘mashed-up’ with…
Governments collect and distribute a massive amount of public data each year. It is a continual challenge to make this data accessible and usable for citizens, commercial organisations, researchers, scientists and policy makers. This challenge isn’t limited to a few dedicated statistical organisations, such as the ABS. Many other government departments collect, collate and publish…
I’ve been reading an article in the New York Times regarding the public competition Netflix has been holding. The competition, named the Netflix Prize, has a prize of US$1 million for the individual or group who can improve their movie/TV recommendations engine by 10%. The article, If you liked this, sure to like that, discusses…
It has always struck me as a little contradictory that while one of the government’s primary goals is to build citizen awareness of various services, issues, initiatives and opportunities, at the same time many government communications and publications (than need to be) are protected under rigid copyright disclaimers. I’ve even seen situations where government agencies…
Google has released into beta a set of major improvements to Google Analytics that will make it an even more robust web metrics tool. Including advanced data segmentation, data visualisation using ‘motion charts’, improved adsense integration, a more advanced administration console and an API for enterprise integration, this is the largest upgrade of Google Analytics…
My team has been throwing around approaches for improving our internal agency staff directory on the intranet to make it more of a knowledge resource for staff. As this is the most used tool in our intranet (people need to contact other people), improving the service contributes measurably to our staff’s capacity to collaborate and…
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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