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So, we’ve extended the Early Bird discount period for Transform 2017 in Canberra (29-30 March) by one week to this Friday, 3 March. In the meantime, here’s another Wrap summary from last year’s Transform, this one a look at a partnership between government and a commercial agency.

Common Ground, A Content Case Study

Mel Flanagan, Producer, Nook Studios

Common Ground is a NSW Government web service designed to improve transparency, communication and understanding of the complex issues related to exploration and mining in NSW.

Key points

Common Ground is an example of a project where the information to meet community user needs exists, but in such a form that the community cannot easily access it or understand it.

The New South Wales state government needed to give people meaningful access to information about mining operations.

Existing information sources were designed to meet the needs of government and industry stakeholders and were not focused on community concerns.

Key documents were difficult to access and often impenetrable to community members.

The government needed to find a new way to communicate with the community but didn’t know how to do it.

Nook Studios set out to aggregate, collate and present data from a range of sources that would meet community information needs about mining in NSW.

“The nature of the project changed the more we learned.”

Takeaways

User research is critical to understand what the community does know, doesn’t know, wants to know and needs to know.

Content research is critical to understand the context, purpose and relationships of the data.

Once you have everyone’s support, coming in with an outsider’s view is beneficial.

Common Ground took a whole-of-government approach to a broad but specific interest area, in this case mining.

It’s important that the project presents information in a neutral way, especially because the topic is emotional, controversial and politically sensitive.

The over-riding focus remained the community, but both industry and government found benefit.

Creative, innovative, agile, project focused: private agencies can help government achieve transformation.

“Getting the right people in the room is very very important and can be quite difficult.”

Caveats

Specialist skill is needed in wrangling the technologies that collect the data and present in a structured, meaningful way.

Specialist skill is needed to research, produce and manage the content for the intended audience.

Government procurement systems are not sympathetic to small external agencies.

We had a really hard time getting the department’s head around the fact that Common Ground was not just a website. It’s a service and should be continuously improved and added to.

The project took longer than planned, not least because getting live data to work with took 18 months.

Resources

@nookstudios
website

Tweets

These extracts are taken from Wrap magazine, the free digital magazine we publish after every conference that summarises every presentation (and a bit more). You are welcome to download this and every issue of Wrap. Transform 2016 took place at Old Parliament House in Canberra, 18-19 May 2016.