Google Analytics, is a great tool for analysing site usage and find out a little about your visitors. Like almost 85% of traffic to the State Library website is from Australia, and the great majority from Perth. With a few exceptions, for example the visitors to the music library pages are more likely to be Americans than Australians. But Google Analytics can only go so far, what happens when you want more detailed demographic information about your online clients than the location of their ISP.
Well, the Victorian Government carried out an online survey to find out more about the visitors to sites in .vic.gov.au domain. I know the survey was on a number of different sites, I remember completing it when chasing some information on the Department of Premier and Cabinet. The survey had over 250,000 responses and the results make interesting reading, for anybody involved in a government agency website particularly in other Australian states. Because unlike Craig, who looked from a federal level, I believe the information can be extrapolated to other states. The demographics of Victorians using a Victorian Government websites, will be very similar to those of West Australians using a West Australian Government site or any resident of their state using one of their State Government websites. I know the limited demographics, I have seen for Western Australian Government websites are very similar to the Victorian Government website demographics.
In my opinion the interesting statistics are:
Online Activities
29% of visitors read RSS feeds
29% of visitors read blogs
10% of visitors maintain their own blog
23% of visitors contribute to online communities or forums
54% of visitors watch video on the web
14% of visitors access the internet through their mobile phone
This shows that visitors to government websites are sophisticated internet users. The numbers surprised me, I had expected about half that.
Government Services
64% of visitor would like to be able to comment on government policies and initiatives
61% of visitors want information relevant to their street, suburb or region
12% of visitors would like to be able to carry out transactions with government on their mobile
This indicates just how sophisticated and experienced internet users, visitors to government sites are. They have high expectations of government sites from experiences with other sites, regionalisation and the ability to comment are what they expect.
Only 14% of participants use their mobile device to visit websites, but over 80% of those want to use their mobile device to transact with government. As the number of people using mobile devices to visit websites increase and remember this survey was carried out late last year and early this year, before the current crop of web saavy phones like the iPhone arrive in Australia.
If I take one thing away from the results of the survey is that visitors to government websites have experienced internet users and have high expectations of what government sites should do.
I am not your typical IT person, I am definitely think of myself as part of the communication in ICT. Providing assistance in the technological side of communicating over the internet. Yet I behaved like your typical IT person when asked to find a blogging solution a year ago. I wanted a local install of WordPress, because:
I knew how it worked;
in my opinion the best blogging software out there;
a local install gave us more configuration and contro options.
Due to circumstances beyond my control, a typical IT territorial dispute. No local server was available, so the WordPress.com alternative was used. At the time I thought it was far from the perfect solution, but it was the best available at the time.
A year down the track and I now realised that WordPress.com was the best solution. I provide technical advice, a little help but I am not involve in the running the blog, like I would of done with a local install. Instead, the people who wanted the blog, set it up, own it and regularly contribute to it. And to me that makes the blog a success, not whether we have the best set up, the best configuration or control.
Technosailor has just posted US Congress trying to stop Representatives from using social media. Apparently the Franking Commission, created to govern how Congress used their right to mail letters to constituents for free, does not like online communications from Congress from any other source than a House.gov space.
While the original letter (which is available in full on Technosailor) from Michael Capuano a Democrat Congressman on the Franking Commission appears to be aimed at video and YouTube. Any restrictions will impact on a wide range of social media sites, including Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and any other social media services. A number of twitterers have started a campaign Let Our Congress Tweet, so that the current twittering Congressmen John Culberson and Tim Ryan can remain twittering and hopefully others both in the Congress and Senate will join them.
What Michael Capuano and others fail to realise is:
The time, cost and effort to create these services inside the House.gov space is a waste of resources, when it can be done for next to nothing, right now using external services.
Using existing services comes with a ready made audience, creating a new service means having to attracting an audience.
What impact will restricting social media in the US Congress and Senate have in Australia. It will probably slow the adoption of social media by our politicians. With the loss of Australian Democrats Senator Andrew Bartlett there is nobody in the Australian Parliament how understands social media enough to makeuse of it. With fewer examples of effective use of social media by politicians overseas, our politicians are unlikely to adopt social media or expect government agencies to make good use of social media.
One of the reasons I started this blog, there was very few blogs in the eGov space. I recently discovered three blogs covering the .gov.uk space and if you are interest I highly recommend you subscribed to their feeds.
However, my favourite recent discovery is eGov AU, the work of prolific Craig Tholmer. I would would be happy if I could post in week what Craig posted each day. As well as being Australian, the posts are usually quality articles that make me think.
If you know any other blogs covering eGov or the .gov space please let me know in the comments.
I was following a link from the Victorian eGovernment Resource Centre feeds (highly recommend, you will find the links on the home page), to the online forum about a report into Melbourne’s east-west transport needs. I was a little disappointed to the find that the forum appears to be a glorified IRC chat session. However, tucked in the right hand corner of that page was a link to the Premier’s You Tube channel.
It is good to finally see a second Australian politician (or a media advisor), see the web and YouTube as a good way to get their message across. The 70 videos are short, most around two minutes and not all feature the Premier. Like this short second life version of Melbourne laneways.
For those non-Australian, the Premier of Victoria is the leader of the ruling party in the Victorian Parliament, the second most populated state in Australia. Roughly equivalent to a Governor of American state.
Using Wordpress.com, Flickr, Youtube and Twitter to keep the information flowing
My experience with NFP organisations, particularly the larger ones is that they are conservative in their approach to almost everything including new technology. So I was very surprised when I got pointed to the American Red Cross MidWest Flooding Online Newsroom thanks to Rex Hammock.
Somebody inside the American Red Cross has got it right, using of Wordpress.com, Youtube, Flickr and even Twitter to create a quick, low cost and effective way to get across information to the world about the impact of the recent flooding in the Mid West US and the American Red Cross’s role in providing relief.
A lesson for anybody who needs to create an effective communication tool, quickly and on a tiny budget.
There is one government agency in Western Australia who is being innovative. Their web site is very ordinary, their trip planner is clunky and do not try to download timetables. However, it is outside their website where their innovation lives.
First there is their partnership with Google Maps to provide Western Australian public transport information to Google Transit. The results is what the Transperth trip planner should be, simple, easy to use and effective. My understanding is the partnership started to provide a public transport option on Google Maps. So that if you ask Google Maps for direction, you get a button offering public transport.
I have used it a numbers of times and it has just worked. Unfortunately it is not perfect, if you are travelling on the North South rail line. Google Transit states you need get of the train at Perth Underground station and wait for the next train, instead of staying on the current train. Also there is no guarantee that the information is up to date, Google only uploads the data from Transperth every week and updates the Transit data less frequently.
The big surprise is that Transperth is not promoting the service, the answer is a mix of it shows up their own journey planner and the imperfections with the services. I am sure working with Google the imperfections could be resolved, minor changes to the format of the timetables uploaded to Google Transit and arranging urgent uploads when major timetable changes occur. It is just such a good service that needs to be promoted and used.
Another service that also has not been promoted is the new Transperth mobile site 136213.mobi. Launched about a month ago, it provides useful functionality to mobile users. Sitting at a bus stop wondering when the next bus wil arrive, point your browser at 136213.mobi, select the first option, put in your bus stop number and you get the time of the next few buses due past your stop.
In the near future, Transperth will be launching an SMS gateway. Which will suddenly make sense of the numeric .mobi URL.
The City of Melbourne is using a wiki to consult with their stakeholders about the direction the city should take for future, to 2020 and beyond.
The wiki is only one tool in consultation process, but I am very interested in seeing the direction this will take. Seeing this is first time a wiki has been used for this level of consultation as far as I know in Australia.
If it is successful and I expect it should be. I hope other Governments in Australia, on all levels, local, state and federal will look at using wikis or similar tools to provide non traditional methods of consultation.
I find it hard to believe the UN ranking New Zealand 10 spots below Australia (18th and 8th respectively) in their e-government readiness rankings.
New Zealand are doing some of the most innovate work in the world in e-government, just look at the Police Act wiki. The latest challenge taken on by NZ is their All-of-government Authentication Programme. The Identity Verification Service (IVS) is a federated identity system that citizens can use to interact with all government agencies on the web.
While there are people concerned about the privacy issues, a single identity makes data matching easier. I will assume that the current safeguards about data matching will cover any new system and that the only data that will be available to agencies is the identity and possibly contact details (address, phone number, email etc.).
The advantages to both government agencies and individuals are considerable. An individual will only have to prove their identity to one government agency to be able to interact will all government agencies online, without having to prove your identity and all that entails to each agency. For government agencies there will be some work to modify existing system to deal with the new identity system. But all future systems, will only have to deal with a single system, with the development (including costs) spread over a large number of agencies. The big plus is that the agencies will not have to create and authorise identities for all their customers, as process will be shared across all agencies.
If I was on the east coast of Australia I would be looking at going to the Managing Identity in New Zealand: Conference 08, even though I do not expect anything similar in Australia soon, due to the extra level of federal, state and local government here.
A wiki that covers a over a dozen different agency, with over 35,000 articles, 200,000 pages, 37,000 users, 100 new articles and 4,000 edits a day is pretty impressive. Especially when you find out the agencies involved are intelligence agencies who had reputation for being less than willing to share their information. It has to be said this is a very successful wiki implementation.
As access is restricted, due to the nature of the wiki you need to search from information about Intellipedia, from CIA press release and off course the Intellipedia Wikipedia entry. I would recommend reading both and looking for more information of the web on how Intellipedia became so successful. Because if you every need a good example of a cross agency wiki working, Intellipedia is it.
