People invest an enormous amount of identity and personal energy into their own names. Names are our unique identifiers, defining us as separate to others – even for people with common names. So when organisations make rules about the names people can use online it can create signficant distress and dislocation for people. It also…
Laws have always struggled to keep up with society, however rarely in such a vivid and public way as in Wednesday’s arrest of Sydney Morning Herald journalist, Ben Grubb, and the confiscation of his iPad. The incident, well reported in the SMH, occurred when Queensland Police responded to a complaint regarding a photo hacked from…
At least one state agency in the US, Maryland Division of Correction, recently started requiring employees to provide their personal Facebook password and allow their employer to scrutinise their account as a condition of continued employment. Apparently this request wasn’t illegal – although it breaches Facebook’s usage policy (which could mean the employee loses their…
The internet is increasingly defining the 21st century. It has become the primary medium used to find and share information, the most commonly used news and entertainment medium and has unleashed an outpouring of creativity which commentators, such as Clay Shirky have described as “the greatest in human history”. Equally there have been pressures to…
I’ve been tracking the discussion on the outing of Greg Jericho as author of the Grog’s Gamut blog by The Australian journalist James Massola. In the last seven days there have been over 100 posts, articles and interviews and nearly 2,000 tweets on the topic – discussing freedom of speech, anonymity, media power and public…
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…
I’ve written this post based on my comments in response to the post at the Gov 2.0 Taskforce site, If I could start with a blank piece of paper… (part 2). In that comment I made a point that it is relatively easy for government agencies to technically adopt Gov 2.0 approaches. The technology, legal…
Sometimes it is difficult for those of us who are new to the public sector to really appreciate the scope of the changes required to transition government institutions and cultures from a 1.0 to 2.0 mentality. It’s not simply a process of mandating a directional change from political levels (though this is an important and…
The Victorian Government’s Economic Development and Infrastructure Committee recently released the final report (PDF) for its Inquiry into Improving Access to Victorian Public Sector Information and Data. The Inquiry was designed to look at and report back to the Victorian Parliament on the potential application of open content and open source licensing to Victorian Government…
Single sign-on is often seen as one of the Holy Grails of the internet – the ability to use a single logon to access all your secure online accounts and conduct transactions with whoever you choose. This is seen as a way to make life easier for citizens/customers, allowing them to move easily from provider…
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); })();