Government Blog: blog.training.gov.au
Craig Thomler has already blogged about this new Australian Government blog that I was involved in setting up, but I just want to mention a few things about the blog; it’s purpose, some of the background, the implementation and so forth.
I’m currently working in the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations (DEEWR) as a UI/UX designer and team leader on a project to develop a range of web sites and online services to replace NTIS and Training.com.au - key components of the information and data storage and access aspects of the National Training System.
There are many stakeholders involved in this project including the 4,500 Registered Training Organisations across Australia plus current and expected users of the system and various Federal, State and Territory departments and bodies.
In-person meetings with key stakeholders is costly and not very efficient in terms of travelling to another city to talk to one or two people. Phone calls and emails is a less person option but still is quite inefficient.
So our solution to ensuring we could produce and broadcast regular updates relating to the project was to set up a WordPress blog. This means less time wasted with one-on-one communication and more effort spent on increasing the frequency of updates.
Don’t get me wrong - personal communication and “touching base” with stakeholders is still vitally important to the success of a project. Our blog does not replace that. It takes away some of the needless repetition and complements existing practices as well as giving us a platform that ensures the consistency of information and provides the ability embed interactive elements. Document distribution and version control is also easier than disseminating a file to individual recipients.
Not to mention that it allows users and stakeholders to comment on information posted on the blog and talk to the project team, even individual people within the project team as full blog post author’s names are displayed against each post and article along with a list of the project governance team and their roles in the project. We’ve opened it right up, to give stakeholders as much visibility as possible as to what’s going on.
The blogging platform made it easy to put together an interface and theme for the site; we customised the the Silver Light theme and I hacked the PHP a bit to add, modify and remove various style and functional elements of the theme and WordPress.
About four days all up to install and customise WordPress, a couple of days for content and another few for system configuration, tweaking, setting up Google Analytics, code validation and tweaking and DNS changes … although this all probably wouldn’t have been possible if we hadn’t had our own outsourced server infrastructure with SSH access to set up the database and modify the PHP and Apache configuration … so for many Government business areas you probably wouldn’t be able to do this.
The alternative?
GovDex
GovDex is an AGIMO-run initiative; a centralised wiki platform based on Atlassian’s Confluence that at the moment has about 145 established online communities where users can read posted information and collaborate. It can be used for internal government projects, programs and committees, inter-departmental initiatives and even facilitate discussions and collaboration between government and the public. It has access control so you can have separate public and private areas of content, post files, plug in RSS feeds etc.
So why didn’t we use GovDex for our project blog?
Primarily because GovDex is a wiki, not a blog, so in its current state it doesn’t suit our purposes. There are plans to have forum functionality available in GovDex some time in August using JForum which will certainly aid online conversation but still doesn’t do much in the way of facilitating the chronologically ordered publication of information such as blogging software does.
However I hope that one day GovDex will have that functionality and I’ll be assisting them with input on what I would like to see in GovDex by way of support for blogging … and when it does I will look at moving the content of our project blog into the GovDex repository as I fully support the idea of centralised infrastructure for government consultation and collaboration and I admit I feel somewhat guilty that I’ve gone and created “yet another Department website” but the business need neccessitated it in this case.
So if you work in Australian Government and are involved in communications, stakeholder liaison, web, cross-departmental projects, public focus groups and so on then you really should check out GovDex, but if it doesn’t meet your needs then know that blogs within government has been done. Australia might be behind the US, UK and New Zealand in the adoption of blogging by government but there are some around - including ours.
July 11th, 2008 at 6:08 pm
I would see about being able to get rid of the “theme by blogohblog” line in the bottom of the page, looks a tad un-government-like
July 11th, 2008 at 7:13 pm
Yeah I wrote to the theme author, requesting permission to change it from “theme by bob” to “theme by blogohblog” … but nonetheless just having a blog is a bit “un-government like” so perhaps we need to let go of our squeaky-clean starchy corporate norms and descend to the gritty, noisy level of the rest of the web. Soon enough you’ll start to see Google Ads on government sites … in fact I’m pretty sure I’ve seen it on government or at least government-funded sites.