The next time you or your colleagues dismiss the idea of attempting to develop a social networking strategy for a niche audience, consider that the internet is big enough (with over a billion users) for there to be many niche communities for unusual passions. Network World recently published an article, Ten of the World’s Strangest…
Most people have heard that Facebook has around 8 million active Australian accounts, and MySpace has around 2.9 million, but yesterday I was sent an email that took me a little by surprise. Apparently LinkedIn, a professional social network, has just reached a million Australian members. Now I can’t verify the truth of this, however…
Governments regularly hold consultations with their public – asking them for their views on matters as widespread as tax reform, copyright, health, culture and city planning. Whether these consultations are held through public events, print notices, online via email or social media engagement there’s one constant that governments rely on – that people are willing…
I’m a big fan for the use of gameplay to encourage people to explore concepts, test ideas, build skills and model behaviours while generating awareness – however it is a tool that I have not seen exploited anywhere near to the extent it could be in government or most commercial organisations in Australia (and yes…
I’m beginning to see more and more organisations and their various advertising and PR agencies look seriously at social media as a core communications channel for their campaigns and other customer, client and citizen engagement activities. This is beginning to make me wonder how communications professionals who know little or nothing about social media will…
There’s been a very active and engaging discussion in the Gov 2.0 Australia group regarding safe and effective social media use by government agencies. I thought it was a topic worth discussing in this blog. One of the challenges government agencies face is whether or not to get involved with the discussions already occurring about…
If you’ve ever been required to collect ideas from the public – or wanted to – have you considered the use of a ‘ideas market’ or similar system for collecting. allowing comments on, prioritising and reporting back on the use of ideas. Dell and Starbucks both use these systems extensively to seek public ideas to…
I was alerted to the release of VisualPlace at the start of this week, and have spent the last few days playing with the site to get a feel for its potential. From the site, VisualPlace’s purpose is to, …show the value of an interactive GIS-enabled service for the visualisation of location-based government information. The…
Following the lead of the Gov 2.0 Taskforce’s MashupAustralia and NSW’s Apps4nsw competition (which runs until 24 March), Victoria’s Minister for Information and Communications Technology, John Lenders, has announced the ‘Apps my state’ competition. In his media release, Minister Lenders said that, “App My State is a competition to encourage software developers and members of…
I’ve had an extended break from blogging over the holiday period to think about the direction of Gov 2.0 in Australia for 2010. Now that the Gov 2.0 Taskforce has disbanded, it’s time for the budding Gov 2.0 community to begin taking on more responsibility across Australian governments to support each other, share knowledge 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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