July 2009 Archives
Today the Hon Kim Carr Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, annouced the 24 members of the new IT Innovation Council.
-quote from media release-
“IT will be the principal means to deliver the economic and productivity growth needed to drive innovation across the entire economy,“ Senator Carr said.
“IT is critical to Australia’s directly employing more than 400,000 Australians.
“Council members have been drawn from across the IT spectrum and include representatives of industry, suppliers, users, education, research, government and unions.
“The breadth and depth of experience on offer in the council will ensure that it delivers on its objective to champion innovation through the use of IT.”
The Government’s National Broadband Network will be vital to delivering this smart technology.
Council Chair, Mr John Grant, Managing Director of Data#3 Pty Ltd said the Council would develop a strategic agenda.
“The Council will have a wide agenda to consider innovation within the IT industry itself plus the application of technology to create innovation across the broader economy. It will apply the Government’s published innovation framework as it works closely with all stakeholders to execute this agenda,” Mr Grant said.
“The IT sector has its own well earned reputation for having an innovative and entrepreneurial culture. Harnessing that talent for the greater benefit of Australian industry will be one of the Council’s greatest opportunities.”
-end quote-
I think this is absolutely brilliant and look forward in particular to the last statement being utilised. To date federal government have gone with a “what we know is safe” approach and have been afraid of innovation. I applaud this step in the right direction and harbour great hopes that innovation and change in IT in goverment become a reality.
On a side note the Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research might start with a revamp of their existing web site to make it accessible. It is not accessible in its current form it generates 179 warnings on the homepage alone when an accessibility tool is used on it.
Yes it’s that time of year again, income tax return time and the ATO have once again provided an eTax application. Today on twitter I discovered that a glaring issue which has been a fault of eTax since it’s inception, and has not been addressed yet again, is that it only runs on the Windows platforms. What about the thousands of Australians who are running the MAC OS or the thousands who are running a Linux OS, they are being discriminated against based on their OS of choice.
Even in my house this isn’t good enough, I am using a Dell running Vista, yay! I can lodge my tax return using the very convenient eTax application, but my 16 year old daughter who has a part-time job at Boost Juice cannot because she is using a MacBook Pro.
Something needs to be done about this, and it needs to be done right now and made available to the public in the next couple of months. The lodgement date should be extended for people who are effected by this accessibility issue.
This really is something that should also be under HREOCs jurisdiction as it is a basic Human Right to run whatever operating system you choose to run.
This is something which bothers me enormously. The following can be found on the AGIMO Web Content Accessibility Guidelines:
“Although there has been some progress in making it possible for people who are blind or vision-impaired to use online PDF forms, this option is considered inaccessible for most users. It is often possible to design online forms using non-PDF techniques. See, for example, http://www.mandoforms.com, which provides guides and tools for making online forms accessible.”
This information is incorrect, PDF documents and forms can be completely accessible and PDF is and has been for quite some time an ISO Standard.
Adobe are constantly actively participating with Standards groups to improve and enhance the platform and provide extensive up to date information regarding creating accessible PDFs.
The information contained in the Web Publishing Guidelines published by AGIMO are out of date and do not include accessibility information for Flex Applications or the Flash Platform. AGIMO are currently running a Focus Group discussing the rewriting of these Guidelines and need to pay particular attention to the Accessibility Guidelines, to allay any further misconceptions regarding accessibility and the PDF and Flash Platforms. Both Platforms are open source.
Disclaimer: I do not work for Adobe, I do run the ACT Adobe Products User Group for which I do not get paid, this is a Community group and not a Vendor group, many people other than myself donate their time to this group. I have worked with Adobe Partner companies in the past and did own my own Macromedia Premiere Partner company until 2002.
It should be noted that the above AGIMO links are to archived content and not the current Web Publishing Guidelines. The reason this post has been made is because Agencies are still using this outdated content which is quite often republished in their Corporate CMS and used by web content publishing teams as the most current information.
It should also be noted that the most current Web Publishing Guide does not address the above types of content, namely PDF and Flash Platform content. These types of content are addressed by HREOC and the information given by HREOC clearly states that ideally web content should be made available in at least three formats, being HTML, PDF and RTF.
***UPDATE*** Thursday 6 August, 2009
Adobe’s latest accessibility guidelines can be found here.
I attended the very first Government 2.0 lunch today in Canberra which included the head of the newly formed Government 2.0 Taskforce, Dr Nicholas Gruen (link to twitter profile). The topic being discussed was how do we as engaged citizens working within and outside Government, assist the taskforce in it’s mission of putting in place a pathway for Government to transform to Government 2.0. The taskforce at this point has a lifespan of 6 months, I do not think this is long enough.
Whilst the conversation was lively and animated, it was not structured and there were multiple coversations going on at once. The people involved are all very passionate about assisting with change in Government and nearly all have very strong personalities and views. There was much discussion and examples of what is currently not working in Government or is oudated and needs to be addressed. End result was that only a few people really got to speak their mind and I am not sure how much of what was being said was truly useful to the taskforce at this point in time. It was a great lunch and there was much enlightening and useful information.
My advice to the taskforce regarding Social Media would be to create a list and priortise, of course at the top of the list would be a Whole of Government Framework for Social Media Engagement. All the agencies and different levels of Government are mostly very new to this, even on an indiviual personal level (individual employees), they need a high level set of “Rules of Engagement” as a starting point. As part of the taskforces project based funding they should perhaps look at running an internal staff based Social Media program in one of the Agencies, uses could be polling staff for opinions, internal interest groups (Agency soccer team) and organising social events. At the same time they could perhaps run an external Social Media program with another Agency which engages with citizens through applications such as Facebook and Twitter.
This is a massive task, policy needs to be rewritten as does some exisiting and nonexisting legislation.
Each Agency will need existing staff either trained, and trained well in Social Media or engage an existing Social Media resource, with individual agencies adopting the Whole of Government Framework and adapting to their Agencies needs.
Possible uses and benefits to Government in engaging in Social Media are enormous, the Victorian Bushfires are a prime example of disaster monitoring, engaging with citizens for opinions on policy changes, changes in legislation etc, the feedback is in realtime and immediate, hugely powerful.
Another truth which Government needs to realise is that even though they are blocking Social Networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook, some of their employees are still using these tools through wireless and mobile devices. Social Media Policy has now become an urgent issue for Government as it is already happening and in this situation firewalls are useless.
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