FREQUENT internet users are less likely to respect the law, serve on a jury or do volunteer work, a study has found.

An Australian National University poll discovered that while regular web surfers were more politically engaged, they also had less deference for traditional societal values.

Only 38 per cent of respondents who logged on at least once a day felt it was important to obey laws and regulations, compared with 51 per cent of less regular cyberspace visitors.

“Frequent internet users were less willing than infrequent internet users to accept that traditional norms of citizenship such as obeying laws and regulations, serving on a jury if called and being active in voluntary organisations are very important in order to be a good citizen,” the report said.

Still, report researcher Juliet Pietsch said the internet wasn't causing people to withdraw from society.

Interesting to read The Australian's take on this survey. The Sydney edition of MX, the free metro newspaper, leads with this story on the front page but takes a much more positive view of the same results:

...frequent internet use is actually helping people be more social and caring... 70 per cent of those who used the internet more than once a day felt that to be a good citizen it was important to support people who were worse off than themselves.

I guess the lesson here is to by pass the media and make your own conclusions.

UPDATE: I did read the report for myself. A couple of brief comments:

• A lot of the benchmarks used in the report are from the US and are 5-10 years old. The Web has changed a lot in that time, so its a shame we don't have more recent data compare against.
• I would be interested to know if there are any particular laws and regulations that frequent Internet users don't think its necessary to obey... also bear in mind, only 51% of infrequent users said it was important to obey - that really puts that point into perspective.

What might be a bigger challenge for Australia's retailers is that they generally haven't been able to make the internet work efficiently for themselves yet. Established retailers are fumbling around much like newspaper publishers trying to work out the mix between print and internet. I've just checked the Harvey Norman site – as far as I can work out, I can't buy anything on it. Gerry Harvey tried the web and found it didn't work for him as a direct channel, so the site just exists to try to drive traffic to local stores.

This is from a column in the Sydney Morning Herald, weighing into the debate about demands from large old school retailers in Australia to charge consumers sales tax (GST) on goods bought online from overseas.

In a follow up article, they quote the Australian Retailers Association who say:

many large companies had been slow to embrace the internet. By contrast, small retailers were using social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter to promote their wares.

''Small retailers are getting very savvy,'' he said. ''Retailers are going to need to look at various forms of retailing to engage with their customers.''

Actually, I think this should be a wake up call for all large companies in all sectors in Australia. Over the last decade they haven't just been slow to adopt online retailing but have been slow to adopt Web technologies for many aspects of how they do business. This includes government and the non-profit sectors too. This failure cuts across how companies deal with their customers to how they enable their own staff to collaborate.

I used to think it was just the Australian pragmatic character that didn't buy into the technology hype in business. Now, I just wonder if its more a mix of arrogance and a lack of imagination that results in this failure to innovate?

It reminds me of a large Australian insurance company I dealt with recently online - when I encountered a bug, they told me that their Website wasn't designed for the latest Web browsers and instead I should have been using Netscape Navigator or IE 5.5. WTF!

Large Australian companies don't just need to start selling online, they have a decade of technology development to catch up on.

After reading the NBN business plan it’s actually a bit hard to remain aloof and unexcited. This is a magnificent, awe-inspiring undertaking: there has never been anything like it, not in this country and probably not anywhere in the world.

Let me be clear, I'm in the pro-NBN camp. The main arguments against the NBN appear to be based on economic foresight that:

• Not enough people will want it; and
• The technology will be obsolete before it turns a profit.

I'm less worried about the technology - fibre optic isn't a new technology but we are far from exhausting its capabilities... unless of course we can commercialise faster than the speed of light matter transmission in the near future.

But the issue of demand is something different. I remember the difficulties of explaining to business and consumer users back in the early 2000s about the benefits of moving from dial-up to plain old DSL. At that time, many people just could not see the point of a faster, always on Internet connection either.

Cost of course is always an issue, but it is also very true that people can't always imagine the benefits and value of a new technology. Trying to work out what the NBN will bring in the future by simply thinking in terms of what we do today with broadband, but doing it faster, is a mistake. The NBN will be much more than this.

Hat tip Delimiter.

I've used Question Box in some recent presentations as a example of appropriate technology. I've just become aware of this Australian innovation from the early part of the last century - the pedal radio. Invented by Alfred Traeger with the encouragement of the Royal Flying Doctor Service, it overcame the challenge of communication with remote homesteads that lacked a telephone or radio link. Traeger later improved this idea by creating a Morse keyboard.

The pedal radio solved three problems for users in the Australian bush:

• It didn't require a battery;
• It could be operated by one person; and
• With the Morse keyboard, it didn't require knowledge of Morse code to send a message

At interesting article from the Economist about the new wave of civic engagement we call social innovation. The article is heavily focused on the UK and US experience, but touches on some common issues around the drivers for social innovation, why it differs from past approaches and the new models that are appearing to address the challenge of social innovation ventures for achieving sustainability and impact.

Rather than focusing on the volunteerism aspects I've typically seen highlighted here in Australia (i.e. a few activists and technologists getting together to build a Web-based solution to a community problem in their spare time), the Economist describes social innovation as a new form of public-private partnership:

It differs from the fashion in the past couple of decades for contracting out the delivery of public services to businesses and non-profit groups in order to cut costs, in that it aims to do more than save a few dollars or pounds—although that is part of its attraction. The idea is to transform the way public services are provided, by tapping the ingenuity of people in the private sector, especially social entrepreneurs.

However, the article points out that "so far the enthusiasm for social entrepreneurship has run ahead of its effects". One of the new models for dealing with that problem is the concept of a social-impact bond, which provides funding, but only costs public money if the social innovation achieves its social impact goals. This is necessary so that social innovation can actually achieve the scale and impact it needs to make a difference to the community.

Still, this doesn't mean that there isn't an important role for volunteers in social innovation - they mention Participle in the UK, who are attempting to "redesign the welfare state 'bottom up'" with pilot projects like the Southwark Circle. BTW the most recent Tech Weekly podcast from the Guardian includes an interview with Participle's Charles Leadbeater. Listen from about the 26 minute mark.

Unfortunately as read this article I could only reflect that the social innovation conversation here in Australia is still very immature. While I am hearing some people in the Australian Government 2.0 community talk about related social innovation methods like service design, we are still very much focused on the issue of upgrading government rather than exploring the possibility of creating new kinds of public-private partnerships (and the mechanisms that will support them) that really could transform the effectiveness of public and community services.

• Enrol - I'm enroling for the first time
• Update - I've changed house or name
• Check - Check if I'm currently enrolled

This is not an official AEC website. It has been made by an independent advocacy group as part of our campaign to make enrolling easier.

Government 2.0 doesn't have to be about running nice fluffy community consultations online or getting MPs to use Twitter. It can be deeply practical too. So, with a federal election coming in Australia, advocacy group, GetUp!, have created a site to help people enrol or update their electoral role details online.

The fact that they've even created this site raises the question of why you wouldn't just use the official Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) site? Well, because you can't actually enrol online - the GetUp! site captures your enrollment electronically, but then faxes the form to the AEC.

However, according to the Sydney Morning Herald an AEC spokesperson has warned:

"A digitally constructed signature wouldn't be valid, and we would require a hardcopy signature on an enrolment form"

This is odd, because the AEC will accept a scanned form via email. However, I've always thought that an email was good enough anyway under Australian law?

However, perhaps what is more concerning it the attitude all round with this problem. Why wouldn't we want people to be able to enroll to participate in one of our most import civic rights, using the most convenient method possible? It also reminds me that digital inclusion is a two-way street.

UPDATE

Apparently, the AEC was swamped by people trying to beat the deadline for enrolments, which caused a few problems.

From the Daily Telegraph:

THE Australian Electoral Commission went into meltdown yesterday as thousands of first-time voters tried to register.

The AEC pleaded for patience as its fax lines jammed and many frantic voters swamped the phone lines trying to report the problem. A spokeswoman said the AEC was trying its best to cope with an unexpectedly large demand.

And the SMH:

The rush to join the roll ahead of the Monday night deadline was so fierce the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) at lunchtime boosted its call centre staff by 200 to 700.

The AEC website also crashed for almost an hour as Australians rushed to register to vote ahead of the August 21 poll.

The Government’s response to this report, which Senator Ludwig and I released today, shows twelve of the report’s 13 recommendations were generally agreed to.  We have deferred our response to one recommendation about tax deductibility for information philanthropy until it can be considered in the context of the review of Australia’s Future Tax System and the research report on the Contribution of the Not-for-Profit Sector.

The Taskforce’s central recommendation was that the Australian Government make a declaration of open government. The Rudd Government has accepted this recommendation and we expect to make such a declaration in the coming months.

Whilst today is the completion of one phase, it is also very much the beginning of a new one. The task now is to implement these changes, beginning with assisting agencies to make the most of the opportunities offered by Web 2.0.

Yesterday, Senator Tanner and Ludwig published the Australian federal government's official response to the Gov 2.0 Taskforce report.

The government agreed with the vast majority of recommendations, so I won't provide a point-by-point critique of their responses. The broad implication is that this provides a mandate at the federal level (and hopefully cascading down to state and local levels) for 'Open Government' and Government 2.0*. The Department of Finance and Deregulation has been appointed the lead agency, working along side the future Office of the Information Commissioner (OIC) and the Attorney Generals Department (AGD), and a multi-agency steering group, to help guide and support the implementation of Government 2.0.

One immediate implication for agencies is that the government also supported the Taskforce's call for an initial 12 month period (on top of the last 10 months of advance warning) where agencies need put together what is effectively their own Government 2.0 review and action plan. I did note that this includes not just external engagement, but "internal collaboration within their agency and between agencies".

However, with hindsight there are probably few surprises in the areas where the government didn't endorse the Taskforce's recommendations entirely or immediately:

• The role of the OIC versus the AGD in relation to public sector information and copyright;
• The didn't support the position that all consultations to be conducted in public (I actually agree with them on this point); and
• Deferment of the info-philanthropy recommendation.

The government also clearly stated that there will be no extra money for agencies to implement Government 2.0 - this is to be treated as business as usual:

The cost of agency change required to address internal technical and policy barriers will be the responsibility of agencies to absorb as part of their business-as-usual activities.

Personally, I think there are some critical steps that need to happen next:

1. The lead agency - Finance (I assume, in practice AGIMO) - needs to focus on actively facilitating the adoption of Government 2.0 through knowledge sharing and networking between people inside and outside government, not just issuing improved guidelines. In fact, the ongoing development of practices and guidelines needs to be a participatory approach by the agencies using them.
2. If individual agencies are going to address Government 2.0 as they have been mandated but also as part of business of usual, I think it will require swapping some existing ways of operating for new, innovative approaches.

Finally, on a related note - nice to see 'govspace' up and running.

*I'm a bit of heretic and don't see Open/Participatory Government as necessarily being mutually inclusive with the concept of Government 2.0, however they are mutually beneficial.

The agreement is significant to Google as it has spent more than two years trying to court the university to adopt Gmail for staff members. But the university was hesitant to move staff members on to Gmail due to regulatory and cost factors.

They were concerned that their email messages would be subject to draconian US law.

In particular, they were worried about protecting their intellectual property under the Patriot Act and Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Mr Bailey said.

"In the end, Google agreed to store that data under EU jurisdiction, which we accepted," he said.

The university had to comply with state laws, which mandated that data had to be stored in NSW.

Google was not going to build a local data centre anytime soon so Macquarie had to maintain an offline archive of data at the university, he said. In the past, Macquarie was concerned about the cost of relaying large files to and from the US, where Google's data centre resides. But this been resolved thanks to the Australia's Academic and Research Network (AARnet), which the university is a member of. "AARNet peered with Google (and Microsoft) which means it won't cost us anything more," Mr Bailey said.

A $2 million limited liability was increased to $10m in case Gmail stopped working. "You need proper recourse if your free email service stops working."

Its important to note how Macquarie Uni resolved their concerns about moving staff mailboxes to Gmail... a combination of getting their off shored data managed under a more friendly jurisdiction, creating their own archive to comply with local law, data peering and risk management through increased financial liability provisions. A good checklist for other large Australian organisations that want to go down the same path?