Around the world governments are tightening their belts. After the recent global financial crisis many countries’ governments have borrowed heavily from financial markets and released these funds as stimulus packages – placing them in deficit. Australia is no different, although we have very successfully kept our deficit to a smaller percentage of GDP than most…
The title of this post reflects the key statement that stood out for me in the London.gov.uk blog’s post Economic benefits of data release This article puts some solid numbers behind the value of open data initiatives in government, from the US’s Apps for Democracy mash-up competition (50 entries in 30 days, valued at $2.5m…
On 21 June Victoria announced the winners of its App My State competition, with prizes being given out by the Premier. A list of the winners and a video of the presentation is here. A few days later on 24 June NSW announced the winners of the Apps4NSW competition, with their own video. Most competitions…
A concern I often hear raised in the public sector is that they can’t release public data yet because it may not be 100% perfectly accurate, or it needs to be accessible to 100% of the population, or it needs approvals from all the involved areas first. The UK has taken a clear step to…
To kick-off this week, I thought it might be useful to link to an excellent video from the US’s Sunlight Foundation providing a glimpse into why there’s growing interest in making public information collected and managed by governments public. It doubles as an introduction to the Public = Online campaign, which is being used in…
I was reading an article at Mashable today about What Facebook gets right and it got me thinking. Facebook, despite its many failings, does some things very well. Things that if governments also did well would help them be successful in the 21st Century. Consider if Facebook was a country, with 500 million citizens –…
Victoria’s App My State competition has now closed to entries, and has already been an enormous success for the Gov 2.0 efforts in that state. The competition attracted 171 entries, 75 applications and 96 ideas, over 12 weeks. Judging has now commenced – with the public able to vote for the ‘popular choice’ award and…
Media commentators have called the Australian Government’s budget “austere”, “responsible” and “boring but good”. I call it historic. Why so? Look at the copyright information in Budget Paper 1: BUDGET STRATEGY AND OUTLOOK. Budget Papers 2, 3 and 4 have been released on a similar basis. What is different? For the first time in history…
One of the trends with Government 2.0 is for jurisdictions to make more of their information available online in more readily accessible, machine readable and useful forms. We’ve seen the rise of data.gov, data.gov.uk and a host of open data sites for nations and states around the world. The latest addition has been the World…
In the last 24 hours, over 30 US Federal agencies have released their Open Government plans in a strategic outpouring that demonstrates some of the best whole-of-government Gove 2.0 leadership in the world. Govloop has published a complete list of these Open Government plans via the free online public database service Socrata (a 3rd party…
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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