As reported in Friday’s Sydney Morning Herald in the article, Australian court serves documents via Facebook, Today in what appears to be a first in Australia and perhaps the world, Master Harper of the ACT Supreme Court ordered that a default judgement could be served on defendants by notification on Facebook. Previously both email and…
The W3C has finally released the final version of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0. Announced in a press release this morning Australian time, W3C Web Standard Defines Accessibility for Next Generation Web, the W3C states that, This new standard from the W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) will advance accessibility across the full range…
In one of the more misguided approaches to internet regulation, the UK government banned the majority of UK citizens from editing Wikipedia earlier this week. This was done, according to the SMH article, Wikipedia added to child pornography blacklist, due to the identification of a photo in one article (of the more than 2.6 million…
It has always struck me as a little contradictory that while one of the government’s primary goals is to build citizen awareness of various services, issues, initiatives and opportunities, at the same time many government communications and publications (than need to be) are protected under rigid copyright disclaimers. I’ve even seen situations where government agencies…
This is based on some thinking (and rewriting of a reply) around a post by Stephen Collins from Acidlabs on the topic of how and why to implement ‘Enterprise 2.0 technologies in organisations, entitled Enterprise 2.0 – Identify problem. Determine solution. Then tools. Stephen was making a good point – that it is important to…
Forbes magazine has asked whether IT departments are their own worst enemies, in an article, The un-marketing of IT, citing examples such as, Promoting e-mail use but limiting inbox storage and file attachment sizes. Touting the Internet as a data goldmine, then blocking people from visiting so-called non-business sites. Providing people with a PC as…
The first public comments from the government on the Gershon Report are beginning to emerge, with The Australian reporting on Thursday, Tanner targets agency wastage in bid to save $1bn. The article basically focuses on duplication of effort and costs by departments who separately procure IT equipment, software, services and office rent. My feeling is that…
On Friday the Disability Discrimination Commissioner, Graeme Innes, at the Australian Human Rights Commission released a media statement, Climate change secretariat excludes people with disabilities, indicating the Commmision was prepared to ‘out’ government publishers who did not meet Australia’s mandatory accessibility requirements for online material. “I recently said that, if things did not start to…
The US has had a number of voting dramas over the last ten years, probably none so well documented as that of the Florida recount in the 2000 Presidential election that saw George Bush Jnr win. As a result of the paper ballet issues uncovered by this and other elections, the US has introduced e-voting systems,…
From my experience in government, both as a customer and as a public servant, I’ve discovered that when addressing emails from citizens, government agencies often treat email as surface mail rather than as a phone call. This means that citizens who choose an electronic communications route can often expect response times measured in weeks 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.
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