Vote Compass App for Australia abc.net.au/news/elections/federal/2013/votecompass/ The ABC has launched the Vote Compass service in Australia, designed to help the public match their policy views with the official platforms of Australian political parties. Vote Compass (votecompass.ca) was developed by political scientists in Canada, where it has been used for both Canadian and US elections. Asides…
Over the last three years we’ve seen an increasing level of sophistication and capabilities in successive generations of open data sites. To aid governments in their open data journey, I’ve mapped five generations for the progressive development of open data sites, detailed in the document below. Please feel free to reuse the information within the…
Associate Professor Axel Bruns, who has previously done marvelous work mapping Australian blogs and tracking social media activity around the Queensland bushfires, has released his team’s latest research on mapping the Australian Twittersphere. Drawing (slightly paraphrased) from the joint CCI and Queensland University of Technology media release: With as many as two million Australians now…
I like the MyUniversity website – it’s clean, useful and mostly simple. However, when using it the other day I found one extremely major flaw. It’s not mobile friendly. I recently reported that 47% of internet connections in Australia were now via mobile devices. This was based on an ABS report from the December quarter…
With the permission of Geoff Mason (@grmsn), I’ve republished his blog post Don’t dumb me down! from 21 March this year below. I thought this was a very good post on a topic that, as increasing amounts of information and discussion only appear online, is increasingly affecting how effective public servants can be and the…
A few weeks ago I became aware of a very interesting documentary project, Twittamentary, a movie that explores the intersection and interplay of peoples’ lives on Twitter. Directed by Singaporean filmmaker and Tweeter, Tan Siok Siok, the documentary takes a grass roots approach, looking at how Twitter has connected, affected and influenced individuals across America….
Facebook decides whether photos of nursing mothers are allowed to be displayed in its site (including in Australia and other nations where such photos are legal). Google leaves China to avoid complying with its national censorship laws. Gaming and gambling websites base themselves in jurisdictions where they are legal while attracting most of their customers…
I have had a great deal of respect for the Australian Policy Online (APO), produced by the Australian National University and University of Swinburne. For several years the site has been a fantastic venue for serious discussions of public policy options, and a very useful source for policy resources and research. The site also, without prompting…
Often in government there’s only two social media networks discussed and considered for community engagement and communications, Facebook and Twitter. MySpace is a distant memory, LinkedIn is used just for resumes and services like FourSquare, Plurk, Ning and others are not well-known. Also not that well known is Google Plus, and perhaps rightly so –…
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…
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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