Today, the Department of Internal Afairs launched data.govt.nz, a beta site where government agencies can register their non-personal data sets for use by members of the public and organizations. The department has also created a Twitter account @data_govt_nz to support engagement with communities of interest around the data sets.
As I said when I posted [...]
There has been quite a lot of discussion about opening up government data over the last couple of months, both here and in other jurisdictions. In 2007, I posted on the UK government’s Power of Information report, and the potential social and economic value that could be unlocked. At that time Statistics New Zealand were [...]
Last week, as part of the World Internet Project, Auckland University published The Internet in New Zealand 2007, a survey of 1430 New Zealanders’ use of and attitude towards the Internet. It has some interesting findings, particularly for public sector communicators.
The topline results of our usage habits are fairly unremarkable: 78% of Kiwis use the [...]
In April last year, I published a post on what I considered to be the 5 principles for Govt 2.0, one of which was open source government. This week, some academics form Princeton University have published a paper, still in draft, with the wonderful – if only slightly melodramatic – title, Government Data and the [...]
As we approach the end of the financial year, public servants (with varying degrees of apprehension) start to turn their minds to their performance reviews. And while typically this is when you demonstrate your unswerving devotion to the cause and highlight the prodigious efforts you have been making throughout the year, it is also an [...]
This post began as a review of how well government websites are doing making their content available to mobile devices. I had looked at this in February last year, and had hoped that over those 12 months we might have seen an improvement. These hopes proved, as you might guess, somewhat optimistic. This exercise did, [...]
Chris Wilson posted an interesting article on Slate last week, The Wisdom of the Chaperones, that uses some interesting data on Wikipedia and Digg contributors to look critically at the notion of the wisdom of the crowd.
Essentially, Wilson points out that these social sites are not built and maintained by the masses, rather they are [...]
For two days earlier this week I was at the Online Social Networking conference in Sydney, the highlight of which was a terrific presentation by Seb Chan from the Powerhouse Museum.
Seb’s presentation, with the rather meandering title, A brief introduction to web 2.0 for government and non-profits: a perspective from the cultural sector included a [...]
When I first posted about the principles for public sector social media, sovereignty was the first of the ten principles I discussed because, once you have decided that you need to incorporate social media into your communications plan, the next most important decision is where you host the project. The answer at the time was, [...]
The volume of content on government websites is rapidly, and in some cases has already, outstripping the ability of conventional navigation and information architecture to make that content easily discoverable. When you pause to think that most government sites are only a decade old and, if you also consider the rate of content growth, you [...]
