Ralph Douglas - GovDex: Collaborating online in a secure environment
Catch this presentation live at Web Directions Government, Old Parliament House, Canberra, May 19 2008.
This session will look at the government collaborative tool Govdex, how it is currently used by agencies, what it provides, and how you can use it for your projects. GovDex is a resource developed by the Department of Finance and Deregulation to facilitate business process collaboration across policy portfolios and jurisdictions.
GovDex, managed by the Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO) in the Department of Finance & Deregulation, promotes effective and efficient information sharing, which is core to achieving collaboration. It provides governance, tools, methods and re-usable technical components that agencies can use to assemble and deploy information services on their different technology platforms. GovDex is a key enabler to a whole of government approach to IT service development and deployment.
The world is abuzz with social computing: Facebook, My Space, YouTube, Flickr, Wikipedia, blogs, wikis and other spaces powered by Web 2.0 technology. It’s a social revolution, empowering individuals to communicate, share what they know online, and help others locate information that is important to them in both their private and working lives.
It’s no secret that just as the web has revolutionised business, the media, and many other parts of our lives, it is also revolutionising how governments and citizens interact, and how government provide services.
Mapping and other mashups have taken the web world by storm - driving innovation in business and government alike. While much of the focus has been on the actual mashup applications, without the data to mashup, we have no mashups. Government, from local to Federal level, collect and manage a significant amount of data, across a very broad range of areas. But giving access to this data to web application developers has technical, policy and legal challenges. In this presentation, Jenny Telford of the ABS looks at these issues from their experience of opening up data from the Australian Census.
Technology changes present complex challenges and rich opportunities for senior public sector managers. Finding the balance between innovation and risk management is not easy in an environment where successful engagement depends upon relinquishing control. Using examples from New Zealand’s experience, Jason will share lessons and observations about the inevitable growing pains of public sector agencies as they evolve towards Govt 2.0.
While elections can be exciting times, the underlying data - swings, booth counts, and the like is probably only riveting to psephological tragics. Yet the ABC’s election web site managed to take this raw data and make it attractive, compelling and interactive.
More than ever before there is an enormous amount of publicly held data about our community, our culture, and citizens. How can government respond to the opportunities of Web 2.0? How can government websites and databases become more citizen-centric, and more responsive by leveraging social media? In 2006 the Powerhouse Musuem, a NSW State Government institiution, opened its core information asset - its collection and research database - to public tagging, and dynamic user-driven recommendations. In the same year the Museum launched a range of public-facing blogs, inviting comment from visitors and audiences. Sebastian Chan will discuss why the museum has made these very successful forays into social media, and how a small in-house web development unit was able to push through and launch a project which is counted among Australia’s top web 2.0 applications. If you work in a large organisation and have dreams of social media, do not miss this session.
This was one of our most loved sessions last year, so much so that we decided to do it again this year, with some new faces, some new experiences. With speakers from both government/education as well as the private sector, get advice from those who’ve already been there on dealing with recalcitrant management, teams members and agencies, building by stealth and making incremental change.