Posts tagged with 'Social Networking'

Government 2.0 Taskforce, Passion Fruit & the Public Sphere

  • Posted on August 18, 2009 at 6:11 pm

Following on from my blog post today there are some mistakes that the Taskforce are making in the way they are engaging constituents. The events they are running are not marketed very well at all and they fail to create the most important ingredient for success, that ingredient is passion.

Passion is what has made Senator Kate Lundy’s Public Sphere events so successful, the passion still exists and these events have created a flow on effect which is filtering down through all levels of Government. Public Sphere events are being organised and run at the grass roots level in state and local government environments. The passion and move to action has not dulled or lulled, in fact it has had a snow ball effect, people still feel a strong connection and the open collaboration continues along a strong and healthy path. My measure for judging the Taskforce effort to be wanting is the lack of re-tweeting of the #gov2au hashtag.

The Taskforce would do well to take a closer look at the Public Sphere model and how it propagates itself, speak to Kate Lundy & Pia Waugh ask them how they did it. The key will be relationships and effective use of Social Networking tools, Pia watched the twitterverse and worked out how to map the relationships of value and turned those into hands on real time marketing machines.

Regarding the Public Sphere model and it’s use by the Taskforce there are plenty of people out here with passion, knowledge and willingness to help you. We figured out through open discussion in an online forum that we needed a different model for communicating and encouraging participation from the public sector.  A barcamp model wouldn’t work and a cathedral model wouldn’t work, but a combination of the two, a slightly structured and preplanned barcamp style which is Public Sphere has now been proven to be a highly successful way of reaching out to the grass roots communities and engaging with the public sector as well.

Taskforce you have a whole community out here ready, willing and able to assist you I suggest you use it before any more of the passion dies.

ATO Major FAIL on Accessibility

  • Posted on July 9, 2009 at 5:18 pm

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.

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