by msweeks
Sydney-based IBSG Director, heading up the IBSG public sector team in Asia Pacific for Cisco. Co-author of the Connected Republic 2.0 More about msweeks
Australia's eGovt awards
A good overview of the 10 finalists and winners at this year's eGov awards Down Under.
http://www.finance.gov.au/e-government/better-practice-and-collaboration/e-government-awards.html
Without in any way wishing to diminish the value and success of the winners, it struck me that all of them, except the YouthCentral site in Victoria perhaps, were very firmly in the Government 1.0 camp. No signs yet, at least in these kinds of competition arenas, of ground breaking work in the social networking, collaborative space we're all calling Govt 2.0. Although I think it's always good to recognise and reward people who do good work, it might be argued that fixing up Australia's visa system or the tax assessment process is pretty much what governments are supposed to be doing anyway? Unfair? It's not meant to be and it's certainly no reflection on the great work done by those agencies - anything that makes government easier to do business with is good and has important ripple effects in terms of trust and credibility. Good work.
But in the spirit of those who argue that we should be shifitng our focus away from eGovernment and towards "what government can do to enable eCitizens" (a bit clunky, but you get the idea), perhaps next year's awards could look outside of government agencies and add into the mix great work being done, as it often is, on the 'edge' to discover new ways to make government more useful and adaptive to the things citizens want to do or say.
Comments
Let me have a go at playing devil's advocate! Take a great initiative such as http://www.fixmystreet.com/. It was created three or four years ago and it was a fabulous idea, but is it a success? I haven't got the usage statistics, but my impression is that it has stalled at a pretty low level of usage. Where will it be in five years time? Probably just seen as a great pioneering project that never got taken up. Now you can certainly blame existing agencies for this and in order for fixmystreet to become a thriving service it would have had to have been actively taken up by local authorities in a way that it has not been, but what has happened certainly could provide a basis for arguing that in practice adding the ability to pay by credit card to local authority sites has delivered more real benefit to citizens than fixmystreet. So which of these two initiatives deserves the prize? Perhaps one in terms of real, measurable benefit and the other in terms of pointing the way to better ways of doing things even if itself (for understandable reasons) not really delivering on it?
posted over 2 years ago