The New Zealand Labour Party have released an Open Government policy, proudly claiming it as first in New Zealand. The policy focuses on transparency of political offices as the core principle, but also commits the party to producing a comprehensive “Open Government Charter‟, based on a set of principles developed by NZ Labour MPs in consultation with members…
As this article in Fast Company illustrates, social media is now normal, an integrated set of tools for ongoing human interaction. We’ve known for several years that Australians are enormous users of social media, with Nielsen research indicating that the average Australian Internet user (and 95% of us are users based on Sensis figures) spends…
I’ve been a little busy this week, what with my wedding on Saturday, however here, belatedly, is my presentation from last Friday at RightClick. Gov 2.0 in a gov 1.0 world View more presentations from Craig Thomler.
Steve Davies over at OzLoop has just published a thesis by Dr Derek Ambrose that looks at the topic of leadership in the Australian public sector. It is a fascinating read (particularly from pages 68-80 and 113-185 including the conclusion from pp160), and provides insights into challenges the public sector has experienced in encouraging new…
The Open Government Partnership is “a global effort to make governments better“, led by Brazil and the USA. The concept was announced a few months ago and countries have been rapidly signing up to the commitments required to demonstrate their willingness to take action to improve transparency and accountability in government. As their website states,…
The US has launched an interesting discussion asking citizens how they think the Federal government can improve government websites. Run using Ideascale, an online idea management system, the National Dialogue on improving Federal websites is running for two weeks and involves both ideas submission and voting as well as live online discussions(or dialogue-a-thons) on specific…
Recently Luke Fretwell over at Govfresh asked the question Time for government to plug into one platform? While I am a big fan of Luke’s and agree with his view that transferring government websites to Facebook, granting partial control over them to a foreign-jurisdiction company, is not a good idea, I find it harder to…
data.gov.uk has dramatically revised its layout (for the better!) and recently released 557 datasets (1.8 million entries) representing all UK government spending over 25,000 pounds under the section Open Spending. This represents a new milestone in open data releases around the world and provide a new range of insights into the financial decisions of the…
The EU Government’s 2009 Directive banning “unnecessary” cookies in websites (if the site doesn’t ask users to accept the cookie first) has just begun coming into effect – causing havoc and distress amongst European webmasters. Cookies are small text files that websites store on a user’s computer in order to reduce the need for users…
One of the assumptions often applied to government funding for aid and governance reform programs is that the funding must be granted to established corporations, NGOs or not-for-profits that have hierarchies, governance structures, offices and methodologies for achieving outcomes. It only makes sense – when investing government money into development activities there needs to be…
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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