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Transforming Policy and Delivery

Agile, human centred, research driven government service delivery is increasingly at the heart of the development of government digital services. But these services exist to implement policies. And yet how are these policies made, and isn’t it time the development of policy became more agile, human centred, and research driven? This will be a key theme for Transform 17.

An extraordinary chance to work with Government

Regular readers will know that here in Australia, and around the World, the way in which Government services are delivered is undergoing a revolutionary change. “Digital by default“, user-centred not technology-driven (in the words of Leisa Reichelt, Head of Service Design at the Digital Transformation Office (DTO), “GOV.AU is not a technology project“), Governments are […]

Tatham Oddie – Practicing Web Standards in the Large

Tatham Oddie PortraitWeb standards might be second nature to all of us here, but they don’t always fly so easily in the enterprise. Obscure browsers and CIOs watching their bottom line can often leave a passionate development team feeling stifled. In this session we’ll look at how a number of large scale websites successfully adopted new standards and opened their content to more audiences and devices than ever before.

Paul Hagon – Enriching large data sets

Paul Hagon PortraitLibraries contain masses of beautifully structured data collected over many years. But these records may have their flaws and might now want to be used in ways, such as location based services, that weren’t imagined 30 years ago. How can we use existing API’s and web services to enrich this data to enable it to be used in a variety of ways. This data also needs to be exposed for others to use and build upon. With the recent release of the Government response to the Web 2.0 taskforce, how can institutions comply with these recommendations by providing their data in usable forms for the public. What’s involved in building an API into our resources and how can our data be given more meaning through semantic linkages like RDFa?

Grant Young – Creating platforms for social innovation

Grant Young PortraitIn this presentation Grant Young will examine how innovative organisations are using social technologies and design methods to create multi-dimensional value — both for the organisational and community — and will explore the themes that underpin the examples with a view to applying them in your context.

David Hayward – Mapping

A presentation given at Web Directions Government, Old Parliament House, Canberra, May 19 2008.

David Hayward PortraitGovernment has huge amounts of information but how can this be effectively managed and delivered through the web? This session will ‘lift the lid’ on web mapping technology and identify some of the key issues that must be addressed to achieve a successful outcome.

The NSW government SIX Viewer web mapping portal will be used as a case study to demonstrate how terabytes of data can be integrated and delivered via the Internet.

Ralph Douglas – GovDex: Collaborating online in a secure environment

A presentation given at at Web Directions Government, Old Parliament House, Canberra, May 19 2008.

Ralph Douglas PortraitThis 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.

Matthew Hodgson – Social computing for knowledge management

A presentation given at Web Directions User Experience, Old Parliament House, Canberra, May 19 2008.

Matthew Hodgson PortraitThe 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.

Some see all this as a big waste of corporate time, but is it? Is there value in handing over control of collaboration and sharing knowledge to individuals, rather than hoarding it in records systems, knowledge systems, and thousands of network dive folders? Is there a way you can harness this social revolution to help improve our organisation’s knowledge management practices? Is there actually a solid business value proposition for social computing?

Matthew will look at knowledge management in modern organisations, and how you can benefit by learning from the principles of social computing and Web 2.0 technologies. Matthew will introduce two case studies in government that demonstrate successful and not-so-successful ways of employing social computing tools, the factors that contributed to their success, and the pitfalls to watch out for. In particular, he will look at the issues in relation to corporate culture by drawing on recent research in blogs and wikis based on work in organisational psychology by Hofstede.

José Manuel Alonso – Improving Government through better use of the Web

A presentation given at Web Directions User Experience, Old Parliament House, Canberra, May 19 2008.

José Manuel Alonso PortraitIt’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.

But how to do it well is still something of a black art.

In this keynote presentation, the lead of the W3C’s eGovernment initiative, José Manuel Alonso, looks at the opportunities the web provides governments, the challenges, old and new, the web poses, and the role of the W3C in helping to develop underlying, interoperable technologies with which to build these services.

José’s presentation will cover best practices and methodologies for providing eGovernment services, and look at case studies of how governments and communities are connecting via the web around the world.

Jenny Telford – Opening up government data

A presentation given at Web Directions Government, Old Parliament House, Canberra, May 19 2008.

Jenny Telford PortraitMapping 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.

Jason Ryan – Govt 2.0: the public management challenge

A presentation given at Web Directions User Experience, Old Parliament House, Canberra, May 19 2008.

Jason Ryan PortraitTechnology 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.

Andrew Kesper – ABC’s election site: making the most of dry data

A presentation given at at Web Directions User Experience, Melbourne Town Hall, May 16 2008, and Web Directions Government, Old Parliament House, Canberra, May 19 2008.

Andrew Kesper PortraitWhile 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.

In this session, the ABC’s Andrew Kesper takes us through the election site, looking at the design decisions, and uses of technology like Ajax, Flash, and interactive maps – tools which have wide applicability for government sites looking to present data in more user-friendly and attractive ways.

Tara Hunt – Government 2.0: Architecting for collaboration

A presentation given at Web Directions North, Vancouver Canada, January 30 2008.

Tara Hunt Portrait

What does Web 2.0 mean and, specifically, what does it mean for the future of governments? Tara Hunt has been speaking all over the world, talking to government audiences on this subject. She believes that Web 2.0 has very little to do with the technology and everything to do with people. Her talk will cover the main tenets of Web 2.0: openness, collaboration and community and what it means for government.

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