eGov & Government 2.0

As governments inevitably learn more about the importance of Big Data they may find that decisions made in the past - even those made by past governments or long retired bureaucrats - that were originally thought to be relatively straight forward may actually have had a number of unanticipated consequences.[read more]

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Yesterday the Liberal-National Coalition released its broadband policy for Australia, in front of a high-tech set at Sky News, in contrast to the Labor Government's NBN plan and current rollout.[read more]

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I've just learnt from an inside source that the Australian Government has decided to go several steps further than the Queensland Government (who appointed an Assistant Minister for eGovernment last year), by appointing Australia's first Government 2.0 Minister.[read more]

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Confusion can be caused when political operatives and members of a politician's own staff use social networks in ways that can mislead parts of the broader community into thinking those accounts are run by appointed professional public servants.[read more]

Open Raleigh is an online repository with open data, web and mobile applications, and links to participatory tools and organizations. It’s part of Raleigh’s open source strategy focusing on transparency, collaboration, and improved access to information.[read more]

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Connecticut’s new web portal, www.connect.ct.gov, marks the first step of the department’s wide-ranging “ConneCT” modernization initiative, designed to bring 21st Century technology to an agency working to keep up with record demand for food and medical assistance.[read more]

Image credit: David Pearson

Of course, how you get open, collaborative working practices going within a large organisation is jolly tricky and the answers probably won’t be found in a blog post. However, start small and you can achieve great things. So, the most obvious thing to do, I think, is to run your own GovCamp.[read more]

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At the Gov 2.0 lunchtime event last week (video coming soon), Darren, Manager, Media and Community Information, from the ACT's Emergency Services Agency talked about how closely he'd worked with Richard, his technical lead, to create their social media presence and new website. He proudly told us the website had cost only $43 to build,...[read more]

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Virginia has redesigned and launched anew version of its official state website, Virginia.gov. The website was redesigned with a focus on citizen usability and also includes a mobile version. The website will be considered the official state portal and contain links to all other necessary state websites and online forms.[read more]

When I read that a mere fifty years ago there was a debate about whether or not public servants should get telephones for their work, I realized that the same debate continues today and repeats itself until a government becomes a technology leader. Today, Google, Wikipedia, and other knowledge extenders are so common that they are in our pockets, on our mobile phones; and yet and some local governments STILL debate whether or not internet access is allowable.[read more]

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We now live in a different world. Close to 100% of Australians use the internet for an average of over 48 hours per month online. The overwhelming majority of Australians use broadband (96%) and it is their most popular way of engaging with governments. There is an opportunity for Australia to follow the bold leadership of other nations to mandate a more powerful and central role for the Government CIO than was previously the case.[read more]

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The Shared Service Canada website claims to be a proponent of transparency and proactive disclosure. Unfortunately, it makes information difficult to access. Is this on purpose? Or by accident? Either way, it's a failure.[read more]

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The process of requesting documents from the government, though enshrined in Australian law, can be difficult for many people - taking significant time, causing significant frustration and resulting in inconsistent and substandard outcomes - as I found when asking government agencies some simple question about which public social media channels they operated and which web browsers they used.[read more]

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How law enforcement organizations can quell concerns about reliability and availability, performance requirements, cost of migration, and the recovery of data when implementing a move to cloud computing.[read more]

I’m still not in any way convinced that the Savile and Newsnight affairs have any real and pressing read through to governance, but as we saw with the reform of the FA that followed revelations that the England Manager and the CEO were both seeing the Deputy CEO’s PA, in Britain, reform often starts from completely unconnected causes.[read more]