chieftech’s blog

• 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.

Thursday July 1, 2010 at 8:00am

Urban Food Store + Cafe

Corner of Marcus Clarke and Edinburgh Streets
Acton, Australian Capital Territory 2601 Get Directions

James Dellow, Daniel Siddle and Chris Adams from Headshift invite you to join them for breakfast to chat informally about Enterprise 2.0 and other related topics like Corporate Social Networks, Knowledge Management, Intranet 2.0 and Workforce Collaboration.

As this is Canberra, we expect there to be a strong Government 2.0 flavour, but very much focused on the issues of internal collaboration and inter-agency collaboration. (As we like to say, if you want to be social on the outside, you need to be social on the inside too!)

Come along to ask questions and share your experiences of introducing social computing to the enterprise or your government agency.

Please RSVP on Upcoming or simply add a comment below.

BTW Sorry its not quite central Civic, but I've been told its a great venue and the breakfast menu looks great (PDF).

I had the honour of presenting this Vital Issues Seminar today for the Parliamentary Library, at Australia's Parliament House. In between interruptions by the bells, Sen. Kate Lundy chaired the meeting and even managed to throw me some curly questions to deal with.

Also demonstrating that the Parliamentary Library is walking the Gov 2.0 talk, you will find a copy of my slides and also a sound recording* of my presentation on the Parliament's Website. This I should add is not only a great resource for people working in parliament, but also those that wouldn't necessarily normally have access to these sessions either.

*BTW that noise at the beginning is the bells ringing through the PA system.

Glenn Archer, Department of Education: Cultural change is the most profound challenge for public servants.

No real surprises in this article, reporting on a series of roundtables held by MIS Australia with local public and private sector CIOs, talking about their experiences with collaboration technologies. It certainly reflects my own experiences with the organisations I've been interacting with this year, particularly in the government sector where my biggest concern is that the importance of internal collaboration hasn't really been debated much in the Gov 2.0 conversation (see Lee Bryant's excellent post that gets to the heart of that problem, for all sectors).

Unfortunately, no real change on the private sector front, although I do detect a little thawing of attitudes towards employee use of social networking and social media. However, its pretty much been the case for the last decade* that some companies get the value of collaboration technologies (like instant messaging, one of the oldest tools in the current collaboration suite) while others will continue to lag behind.

You can view this as a problem, but personally I think it points more to the fact that those that get the value of collaboration technology have the opportunity to use them as part of their competitive advantage. So the real issue is, are they actually getting those advantages from the tools and technologies they've invested in.

Ok. I'm going to say it again... I can't believe we are still having this debate about instant messaging technologies as if it was something new. There - I've done it.

Just to let you know that I have a couple of conferences coming up this month and in July where I'll be running workshops:

 

Knowledge Transfer and Retention, 24th-25th May, Sydney

 

On the second day of this conference, I'll be running a workshop on designing a simpler, smarter, social knowledge transfer and retention approach. In this workshop I will be using our Social Business Design framework to explain how to tap into collective intelligence, improve productivity through in-the-flow knowledge transfer and do more with less.

 

Public Sector Marketing, 28th-30th July, Canberra

 

I will be running a full-day masterclass on the last day of this conference, to provide an A-Z guide to implementing a social media marketing strategy. This will be based on Gov 2.0 Taskforce Project 8 guidelines, developed by Headshift, however I'll also be providing an overview of current current Web trends and their impact on policy setting and public sector marketing.

 

As always, come along to either of these workshops ready to participate!

Cross-posted from the Headshift Australasia blog.

AN estimated 5000 deaths, two million GP and outpatient visits and 310,000 hospital admissions could be prevented every year if an effective IT system were rolled out - saving up to $7.6 billion in health costs annually, according to an analysis for release today.

I'm always a little cynical about this kind of number of crunching. I'm all for saving lives, but remain unconvinced that we can actually build the better IT systems they call for - the health industry doesn't have a great track record here after all.

However, listening to a news report on the radio today about a community protesting about the reduction of services at their rural hospital here in NSW today, I couldn't help thinking that we don't just need better technology, but better ways of managing complex systems like the public health system. We need global systems that allow local solutions, not one big homogeneous business process engine for health care.

This is because not everything in health (and other community service areas too) can be boiled down to a transaction, like medication or lab tests. Even if we can achieve it, improving health transactions with IT will only take us so far in improving patient outcomes (and ultimately saving tax payers money).

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.

Our social web tools must start to understand the strength of ties, that we have stronger relationships with some people than with others. And with this knowledge they need to adapt.

There are three kinds of relationship ties:

• Strong ties: People we care deeply about.
• Weak ties: People we are loosely connected to, like friends of friends.
• Temporary ties: People we don’t know, and interact with temporarily.

A great Boxes and Arrows article on the need design social apps to reflect the different needs of strong, weak and temporary relationship ties.

The focus here is on public Web applications, so I suspect some minor refinements might be needs if you were building an application being used within an organisation or some other network, where the trust dynamics are different. For example, inside an organisation roles and position in the hierarchy provides an additional trust structure to use (although bear in mind, it does not necessarily embody social capital based trust).

At some point this would probably also be a good model to add to the Project 8 materials, to provide more depth to the user experience principles we put forward.

Ben - the reality is that many federal government agencies were already making use of social media before the Taskforce was announced. In this respect it is not surprising that many have started to pro-actively address the issue of providing staff with guidelines, but still remaining consistent with current APS policy. Don't forget that the APS policy addressing this area was also updated last year. While it would be good to see a formal response to the Taskforce's report, I don't think this should stop agencies moving ahead. The outcome of the Taskforce will be a decision about a whole of government mandate and supporting infrastructure for engaging online, not determining if agencies should engage at all. That, as we are seeing, is going to happen anyway.

I thought I would share my comment to a report by Ben Grubb in ZDNet.com.au about various Australian federal agencies moving ahead with developing social media guidelines. To be honest, I wasn't sure if I was reading Ben Grubb's opening point correctly:

Federal Government departments have revealed they are moving ahead to implement social media policies, despite the government having not yet responded to recommendations in the Government 2.0 Taskforce report.

You can read this as both a criticism and also as a matter of fact.

Actually, and as I was involved in writing a guide for government agencies that was commissioned by the Taskforce, I'm more concerned that:

• Agency staff aren't actually being engaged internally about social media - simply publishing a policy isn't enough; and
• Agency staff don't have access to the right tools internally to support the level of online engagement that is emerging.

Personally its these issues I worry about and this is where a mandate is needed because words in a policy are cheap, but changing how government and how people within government actually work is another story ("Enterprise 2.0 for Government", if you like).