Gov Web2.0 showcase

HREOC listening tour blog

Now this is your traditional blog, running on WordPress and allowing comments to promote the Listening Tour of the HREOC Commissioner Broderick as she travels around Australia and to gather your feedback on the direction HREOC should take over the next five years. The comments are moderated as expected and are governed by an acceptable use policy. A couple of the more interesting conditions are:

• do protect your personal privacy and that of others by not including personal information of about yourself or about others in your posts to the blog, (such as names, email addresses, private addresses or phone numbers);

• do represent your own views and not impersonate or falsely represent any other person;

Overall a positive use of a blog to interact with their audience.

What I found interesting was while the blog and main HREOC site look identical they have different domain names and hosting half a world apart. The blog’s domain name is hreocblog.com and hosted on a commercial provider in the US. While www.humanrights.gov.au is hosted in Australia, probably inhouse. This does not surprise me, I know of more that a few Government IT departments that are unwilling to host a blog inhouse because of security fears(ie fear of the unknown), lack of skills and/or knowledge or just because it is easier to say NO. It also looks like the communications staff of HREOC, who I assume are responsible for the blog where unable or unwilling to get their IT people to delegate a subdomain name like blog.humanrights.gov.au and point that to their blog on the other side of the world.

News blog of the Department of Defence

By the Wikipedia definition of blog the News blog of the Department of Defence is a blog, is a website where entries are commonly displayed in reverse chronological order. However, like most people I expect a blog to allow the readers to interact, which is not the case here.

Given that it is a specific tool for delivering media releases and related material to a very specific audience, media outlets. Does it need to interact with it’s intended audience? If this website does it’s job, the conversations will be carried out by the media and their audience, not by the News blog of the Department of Defence. The only people likely to interact with this website are people who have an axe to grind with the Department of Defence, so I understand the logic behind not allowing comments.

Is it a blog? I will let you decide, but as a tool to deliver media material to media outlets it does it’s job. Though a RSS feed in addition to email announcement list would be effective way to deliver material to media outlets and other interested parties..

I was doing some quick research on Creative Common licensing and came across two reports written this year for the Queensland Government dealing with copyright and use of government information online. They make interesting reading, though I have only managed to skim through both reports, they are large reports and rather hefty PDF files.

Legal Aspects of Web 2.0 Activities: weighs in at over 150 pages and looks at the legal implication of government agencies using YouTube, MySpace and SecondLife. If you are involved in government or business and looking at using YouTube, MySpace or SecondLife, get this report it will clarify a number of issues for you. I found the section on copyright very interesting:

There is increasing support for the view that providing broad usage rights for Government copyright material is of social, economic and cultural benefit to the State

Citing Access the Government Information and Open Content Licensing: an Access and Use Strategy a 100 page report looking in detail at how Queensland Government information should be licensed. The conclusion, an open content model based on creative commons.

Both reports practise what they preach, they licensed under Creative Commons 2.5 Attribution Licence and well worth the effort to read, even if I have only consumed the excutive summary of both reports and few sections.

Vic eGovernment Resource Centre - RSS Feeds

The Victoria eGovernment Resource Centre is an interesting collection of resources, with the expected Victorian eGovernment strategies, policies and website standards. In addition there plenty of information on international eGovernment initiatives and research.

If you head over to their RSS feed page you will find three feeds, of most interest is the eGov Daily Digest. It is not what I expect from a daily digest. You get half a dozen or more items each weekday. Each item is a short summary of news article about eGovernment initiatives and research from around the world. You have to go through the eGovernment Resource Centre to get to the original article. While you can do the Web2.0 thing and vote for the article, I just click through.

There is a lot of news items each day, and most are not of interest to me, there are always a couple of articles I glad to find each week, and with out this feed it is unlikely I would of found them. Because this feed covers an incredible range of news sources, highly recommended.

7th Circuit Practitioners Guide Wiki

Hat tip to Anthony D. Williams for this one. Do not know the original source of quotes on Anthony’s post, but they are good.

Chief Judge Frank H. Easterbrook

As a group, the attorneys practicing before our court know more about appellate practice than any single person. With our wiki, we’re drawing on that wisdom.

I would consider legal arms of government and particularly the court system to be one the most risk adverse sections of government. Yet the US 7th Circuit Court of Appeals has used a wiki for their Practitioner’s Guide. From the looks of it, the wiki has been success, a great way of sharing the accumulated knowledge of number of a professional group people.

Quotes came from an article in The Third Branch the newsletter of the federal court.

Ripped Off blog

The NSW Office of Fair Trading has created a blog which allows NSW consumers to tell their stories about being ripped off. Their conditions of use and moderation policy are fairly restrictive. To be fair, the Office of Fair Trading needs to protect themselves from somebody naming a business and then making claims that are slanderous.

The blog is a great move, hopefully it will provide the Office of Fair Trading with information about consumer behaviour, particularly those who do not approach the office for assistance. As well as informing and educating consumers about the risks out there and hopefully get more of those who did get ripped off to get real help.

AGIMO consultation blog discussion paper

So the first item I want to highlight is not making use of web 2.0 technology. It is a formal discussion paper about using a blog as a consultation tool, requiring formal written responses. That is the limit of technology, distribute a discussion paper as a PDF and allowing responses by email.

I am just cynical but using a pre-web consultation process on a project that would of been a great test case for a consultation blog, just seems old fashioned and excessively conservative. Has AGIMO not heard of iterative development.