AGIMO (the Australian Government Information Management Office) has a blog which is dedicated to the review of the Web Publishing Guide. Hopefully this blog will lead by example in showing how a Government department can communicate using a blog, lead to a more useful and usable Web Publishing Guide. As well as AGIMO beginning to understand web 2.0 tools and will start making use of other web 2.0 tools.

The big surprise for me (blogging more than a year after I expected is only minor), is that it is hosted in the cloud by wordpress.com. Not that there is anything wrong with this. I would actually recommend hosting a blog with wordpress.com as this resolves issues regarding security and keeping the wordpress current. It is just a conservative government department with I assume considerable IT resources surrendering the total control of hosting in house for the less secure external hosting.

The legal enforcement unit is using Facebook to track down people. Some people make themselves difficult to find by normal means but keep updating their Facebook account and provide investigators with details of their friends, who might know their location.

Of course, the head of the legal section needed to write a formal business case just to get one staff member access to Facebook. In a Department that strictly controls access to social media for staff, is now using social media to find people that it can not find using traditional methods.

The roundtable could be seen as getting the big end of town (I was the only male not wearing a tie, but hey I was on holidays) together and talking about the issues. The problem was most those issues where still web1.0 issues like accessibility and not web2.0 issues like effective engagement.

What the roundtable reinforced for me, other than WA is falling well behind the Commonwealth and other states, was that local councils had the most to gain from adopting web2.0 tools.

The stories where surprisingly familiar, one local council decided it was time to put itself on facebook. Only to find that there where already 8 groups on facebook used by staff to engage the ratepayers. The surprise was the IT manager proudly claiming, the most effective was for a council run festival which had over 600 friends and is now was being used as the example of how the council can use facebook effectively.

The roadshow was a collection of familiar faces from a number of state government agencies and a mix of people I did not know from the commonwealth, state and local government and even a couple from the private sector. This time the issues where web2.0, particularly rules of engagement, including legal issues and getting executive support.

The great majority are waiting for the directive from above, along with a neat package of guidelines on how to use web2.0 to engage their clients. The minority are out there doing it, starting with small pilot projects and using the success of these to convince executive to continue these projects and explore other possibilities.

I was invited by the Ark Group to present at their Web 2.0 for Business seminar on how the State Library was using Web 2.0 applications. The presentation before mine was from the Office of Crime Prevention, which is part of the WA Police Department on their use of Facebook for School Leavers week. They have been using Facebook since 2005 to promote their stay safe and look after your mates messages as well their events. All very low key and well target, that is why most people over 21 knew nothing about them but from all accounts very effective.

Unfortunately, the school leavers site is undergoing major revision and the facebook presence for 2009 has not been launched. So like me you will have to check back in September or October.

Buried deep inside the Department of Broadband, Communications and Digital Economy is the two day old Digital Economy Future Directions blog.

Unfortunately, the blog was set up by people without a good understanding of social media, this is apparent as you read through the about page. With a promise that a future post will be on:

How do we maintain the same civil society we enjoy offline in an online world?

Clearly this blog was set up as a one way conduit for collecting input into issues that are to be included in a Future directions paper, that will delivered early next year. It will be interesting to see if this blog develops beyond that limited scope into a device for conversation.

Bad points

• The blog is buried deep inside the regular department web site, with no individual identity of it’s own. Just look at the URL: http://www.dbcde.gov.au/communications_for_business/industry_development/digital_economy/future_directions_blog
• The Terms of Use is written by lawyers for lawyers not humans. The Moderation Policy at least is better, at least I can understand it on the first read.
• The first real post Digital Economy reads like an extra dry Government report. Minister Tanner’s welcome is far better as blog content.
• Promotion of the blog appears to be solely the domain of the trusty old press release to traditional media outlets. However, it quickly made it’ way to new media, which is how I discovered it.

Good Points

• It is a Federal Government blog on a fairly high profile subject.
• People are willing to get involved, there have been over 600 comments on two posts in less than two days. The bad news is most are diatribes about internet filtering.

It is a baptism of fire for the team behind the blog and it will be interesting to see what will happen. This blog will either evolve or be buried under the landslide of comments about internet filtering. It is a case of unfortunate timing, if this blog was launched a couple of months ago, it could of been a good tool in the debate on internet filtering. Now most people have a strong opinion on internet filtering and are willing to voice them. The blog team needs to weather this storm of comments and stay focused. Otherwise this blog will be buried as will the chances of seeing any other blogs from the Australian Federal Government on high profile topics.

My words of advice to the communications team at the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy. Look at how other government high profile blogs that work successfully, Evolution of Security is my favourite example. Find people inside your department who use social media and get their advice. If that fails, hire somebody who knows their way around social media ( two Canberrans that spring to mind are Trib and NathanaelB spring to mind) for guidance. Finally good blogs are not about making announcements and receiving comments, it is about conversation. So please make the effort to converse with us.

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.

transperth.wa.gov.au

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.

Future Melbourne

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.

Finally a WA Gov blog?

Well not quite, it is a blog complete with comments, but it is not strictly from a WA State Government Agency. Bentley technology precinct is combined efforts of the WA Department of Industry and Resources, two local governments, the City of South Perth and the Town of Victoria Park and Curtin University of Technology.

The aim to promote the Bentley technology precinct as a centre for ICT development in WA and the region. And what better way than using a blog. A few cynics will say a blog is passe but it is far better than 10Mb PDF newsletters (which you can download from the site).

Seriously, this is an attempt to engage the community and hopefully it will become a good tool and an example to WA State Government agencies that blogs can be effective two way communication devices.