I’ve noticed a tendency in Australia for government agencies to focus on having their websites work perfectly in Microsoft Internet Explorer, but not always quite so well in Firefox, Safari, Opera or other web browsers. This isn’t limited to the public sector, private sector organisations face the same issue of cross-browser compatibility. On one hand…
I was able to take part in an inpromptu live online video and text discussion this morning between Congressman John Culberson of Texas and initially with the Managing Editor of the Wall Street Journal, and then with Grover Norquist, the President of Americans against Tax Reform (pictured below) at a fund raising event in the…
To provide a little background, Funnel Back is a search technology developed and commercialised by CSIRO. It has been deployed in Australia.gov.au as their Whole-of-Government search technology as my agency’s website search tool (as a hosted solution) and in many other agencies and companies across Australia and other countries. It’s a reasonably good search engine…
As the business manager of my agency’s website and intranet I see it as part of my responsibility to understand what is happening in the medium and use the same tools being used by our website audience. It’s similar to the concept of walking 1,000 miles in another person’s shoes. For instance, this blog. One…
I’ve seen a lot of hype about SharePoint, Microsoft’s solution for, well, just about anything related to online. The product has been promoted as a Information Management system, as a Web Content Management system (Web CMS), as a replacement for shared drives and file systems, as an enterprise search tool and even as a platform…
It looks like in the US state governments are now actively using Twitter as a tool to get messages out into the public eye. As mentioned by Static{fade} in eGov status updates via Twitter, a number of states are using it to make official announcements, distribute media releases and engage with stakeholders and citizens. Given…
This post in Shifted HR reflects an area I have my eye on – Recruitment in the Australian Public Service In Allison’s words: HR areas in APS agencies need to stop focusing on the process of recruitment and use technology to do this. They should be focusing their energy in supporting, educating and training line…
In Australia website usability is important, but accessibility is law. While most government agencies are extremely diligent about meeting accessibility requirements it is also important to look at the accessibility of any online tools they use that affect their customers or clients. For example, my agency uses a third-party email marketing system, Vision6 for electronic…
CAPTCHA is a security technology for websites that works by making users verify they are a human by typing in a random string of letters or numbers displayed in an image. You could consider it a Turing test for humans. It is now widely used as it is easy to implement and has a reasonably…
This post was triggered by a question post over at Strange Attractor, asking Why isn’t social software spreading like wildfire through business? This is a question I have considered as well, in the last year from a government perspective. It particularly puzzled me late last year when I made unsuccessful efforts to get a wiki…
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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