Wednesday, July 16, 2014

Celebrate your social media successes, but don't forget that community trust is the key

In June Baltimore Police Department hit a milestone on Twitter, reaching 50,000 followers.

In celebration of this, they released the following video, reflecting the department's achievement and thanking the community for helping them make Baltimore's streets safer.



It is an awesome video and I totally support and respect organisations celebrating like this. It's important for staff to recognise when their organisation has done well and share in the success, and it can be a powerful way of connecting an organisation with its community.

This type of approach is also a great way to show that an organisation is composed of real people, who are simply performing a role when they don their uniforms. it humanises the staff and can bridge gaps between faceless bureaucracies and corporations and their constituents and customers.

Unfortunately this isn't where the story ends.

Several Baltimore Police officers have been charged with various offenses related to animal cruelty or inappropriate behaviour over the last few years, becoming the subject of significant media attention.

A local newspaper created a response to the Police Department's video using the same music (different lyrics) illustrating a number of these incidents, to paint a different picture of the Baltimore Police and, they said, as a courteous reminder for the Police Department to clean up their own act.


While this second video has only received 10% of the views of the Police video so far (it has been live for about half the time), it is a telling reminder for organisations of the importance of building and maintaining positive community relationships.

If the public are well disposed towards your organisation, they will (largely) support you on social channels. If your organisation has taken actions, or has been portrayed to have taken actions, that place it in a negative light, you will face a greater level of negativity when engaging with the public on social media.

This crosses channels, however is often most immediately visible on social channels due to their speed and reach. Ultimately a bad impression will reflect on how the public engages with your staff via other means - on the phone, in correspondence and in person - making it harder for staff to perform their roles.

Of course, it may take only one disgruntled, sarcastic or delusional individual to create and distribute material like the video above, and may not be reflective of broader community views. However how far this material will spread and how fair a representation it is seen to be depends on the pre-existing negative or positive views of your organisation.

A good reputation will have your community come out in support, a bad reputation will see the material distributed far and wide with support.

Social media isn't just a reflection of the world - it is part of the world. How your organisation conducts itself on social channels can significantly shape community views - creating a positive or negative impression.

So don't take this parody video as a reason to not celebrate your successes or shutdown your social accounts. Instead use them as ways to effectively engage with your community, helping solve problems and participating respectfully and humanly to build and maintain good relationships with the people you serve.

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Monday, July 14, 2014

Round up from GovHack 2014

GovHack is over for 2014, with teams finishing their hacks by 5:30pm on Sunday, 13 July.

With over 1,200 participants organised into 178 teams, 204 projects were developed in under two days, with 146 projects (based on my count) eligible for the approximately $70,000 in national prizes.

Note: GovHack has informed me they are still adding videos for teams with network issues, so the numbers in this post and my spreadsheet will underreport. I'll update it once final numbers are confirmed.

National prizes will be awarded in a red carpet event in Brisbane on 10 August. I'll be attending courtesy of GovHack, to live tweet and blog the event.

All the projects are visible at the GovHack website, linking to project pages. There's links to home pages and videos for projects eligible for the national awards.

I've analysed all of the GovHack projects and teams based on GovHack's site and you can view this analysis at: docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/18H4gWSuVLb5Mjt84YdymeXSlSaAxjY78lX5T90i6RmQ

Here's a few quick charts from my GovHack stats (mouseover for details):


Finally, below is the finishing video for GovHack 2014.



I hope I see you at the GovHack Red Carpet Awards!

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Friday, July 11, 2014

GovHack is underway - but what is it?

I'm participating in GovHack this year, spending my weekend working with a team to build a cool tool from open government data.

If you're a bit unclear on what a Hack is, the five minute segment below from ABS News 24, featuring GovHack national coordinator Pia Waugh should give you a better idea.



If you want to learn more about GovHack, here's the opening video - also featuring Pia Waugh, as well as the Minister for Communication Malcolm Turnbull.

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Thursday, July 10, 2014

Storify from the Innovation Month event "Google Glass as a certain reality"

This morning I attended the Innovation Month event "Google Glass as a certain reality", hosted by the Department of Education.

It was a great event, and extremely well attended (well over 100 people in the audience), featuring very engaging talks from Alexander Hayes, Matthew Purcell and seven of his students from Canberra Grammer School.

The Twitter back channel was highly engaging, and I created the Storify below from the conversation.

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Minister Turnbull launches brilliant #opendata National Map of Australia - plugs GovHack 2014

Yesterday Minister Turnbull announced the launch of the NationalMap beta - a project jointly developed by the Department of Communications and NICTA to create a single authoritative geographic view of Australia from an open data perspective.

The Minister said the Map was "part of the Government’s commitment to increasing the number of publicly available datasets."

The NationalMap beta, available at nationalmap.nicta.com.au, aggregates datasets from Geoscience Australia, the Department of Meteorology, the Department of Communication, Australian Bureau of Statistics and a host of other agencies via data.gov.au.

Ranging from topographic features to transportation networks and infrastructure to statistical boundaries (including the ABS's new mesh blocks), all of the datasets are available as open data and can be individually downloaded from within the map interface using their respective 'info' links.

There's also a link to 'Add data' to the Map, which I presume allows a user to upload custom data sets to display, although I could not get this to work.

The NationalMap is built on an open source stack of technologies, including Geoserver, Cesium and Leaflet. NICTA are contributing to these projects where relevant to help improve their capabilities.

In my view the site looks great.

I like the fisheye lens 3D approach used by default, and this can be easily switched to 2D if people prefer. The navigational controls are standard for online maps and the interface is simple to use, though a lack of visible labels means users have to mouseover each icon individually to find out what they do.

The NationalMap did load and update slowly when I used it, particularly as more layers of data were added. Given this is a beta, and presumably hosted on a lower end server with limited bandwidth, this was neither surprising nor a major problem.

Overall I think the NationalMap beta is a great step forward for Australia and provides a rich source of reusable open data for GovHack this weekend.

Hopefully this is only a taste of the projects the Coalition government is championing within government as there's tremendous value to be found in open data, if agencies receive a clear mandate to release it for reuse.

There are so many opportunities right now to use Gov 2.0 approaches to empower businesses and communities to more proactively engage in government policy development, service delivery and self-management. If the government can realise these with a clear and mandated agenda, Australia will be in a strong economic position for years to come.

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