Facebook’s active membership now exceeds 500 million users – that’s 1 in 13 humans. If it were a country it would be the third largest on earth. Its usage in Australia accounts for roughly 29% of the time spent online. Based on the average Australian internet user spending around 18.8 hours online each month (as…
While diamonds may be forever, Department and agency names, communications campaigns and government programs are not. This poses an interesting challenge when planning social media strategies – how do you effectively exit from a channel when a campaign ends (as the money stops and people go), or reframe a social media presence when your agency…
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…
According to The Australia, at least one Australian Government agency is full of ‘Bureaucrats twitting at our expense‘ (sic – the correct term is ‘tweeting’). Based on a question which identified that, in a single week of measurement last year, staff at the Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research (DIISR), spent 400 hours using…
Listening to the US’s National Public Radio (NPR) last week, I caught a story about how Chinese citizens are now using micro-blogging services (similar to Twitter) to communicate about missing or stolen children and, in some cases to locate them. According to The Guardian article, Chinese parents turn to microblogging in hunt for missing children,…
The Queensland State Archives recently commissioned a whole of Government Recordkeeping and Web 2.0 online survey to investigate how Queensland’s public authorities were using Web 2.0 and social media2 tools to conduct government business. The survey also asked public authorities about the policies and procedures they had in place to guide the business use of…
Last week the Commonwealth Bank received a panning for its new social media policy. Going beyond guidance for staff in their use of social media, the policy made it a requirements that Commonwealth Bank staff tell their managers about any negative comments about the bank they see online. The policy also required that staff do…
This is a thought-provoking video that looks at where good ideas – innovation – comes from. It raises an interesting point about the correlation between connections and innovation. That the more we interact and connect with others, the more likely it is that we can combine our partial ideas, our hunches, the greatest the prospect…
Chris Quigley of Delib is in Australia at the moment, on a trip around capital cities talking about Open Government from a UK and US perspective. Today and tomorrow he’s in Canberra meeting with various people around the traps (and speaking at the Gov 2.0 lunch). Tonight, to welcome Chris, we’re having informal drinks at…
Sometimes it surprises me how much some organisations like using email newsletters over other tools like blogs. They spend weeks or even months crafting news items, bundle them together into a single email and then send them out to a subscriber list – sometimes without even using a system to measure the response rate or…
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); })();