I have long struggled with techniques for costing websites in Government. Due to how resources and budgets are allocated – with program areas funding and conducting some content work, corporate areas other and infrastructure and network costs often rolled into a central budget in IT teams (which provides excellent economies of scale, but makes costing…
There’s lots of interesting debates going on about ownership at the moment. Are the products and content you buy and enjoy owned by you? Do you have the right to switch formats, modify hardware, install software or make a personal copy? Sony has been fighting for years to prevent customers from modding their Playstations, arguing…
It has been a big year for Government 2.0 in Australia, both at the federal and state levels. The Victorian Government in particular has committed to releasing the majority of public sector information under an open copyright license, continued to improve its whole-of-government intranet and released the Government 2.0 Action plan: a comprehensive strategy for…
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…
There’s been discussion on Twitter over the last day about whether Australian government should be building online platforms, such as a video aggregation and distribution service, URL shortcut tools (which Victoria have done) or collective infrastructure for hosting and developing all government websites. This has been an area of on-and-off discussion for over a year…
Victoria has maintained its lead over other Australian states in the adoption of Government 2.0 through today’s release of the Government 2.0 Action Plan – Victoria. The Plan outlines four priority areas for Gov 2.0: Driving adoption in the VPS > Leadership Engaging communities and citizens > Participation Opening up government > Transparency Building capability…
Microsoft has just released a beta version of Internet Explorer 9, however is still having to ask organisations to stop using Internet Explorer 6 (IE6). Despite lacking the ability to fully view the modern web IE6, released nine years ago, is still used by a number of Australian organisations, including some government agencies. The Sydney…
Traditionally, in my experience both in the private and public sector, the way to build a ‘perfect’ website has been considered to be; invest a large quantity of resources, personnel and time at the start of the development process, use this investment to build all the functionality that the developers can dream up, write all…
Everyone who runs a website dreams of what they would do if they had more funds to spend on improving their online presence. I’ve been doing some thinking around this lately as a thought exercise around building priority lists for what needs to be done to strengthen my department’s online presence. I always come back…
The Australian Public Service (APS) has now been told three times by three different reports in the last year about the importance of releasing much of its information openly to the community. This began with reforms to Freedom of Information which, once passed, will encourage a pro-disclosure environment within the APS and make it easier…
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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