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.

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.