I was interviewed by @wraptinweb at the Gov 2.0 BarCamp BBQ a few weekends ago:
Transcription
AN: Hi Nathanael, do you want to introduce yourself and tell us a bit about what you do?
NB: Sure. My name is Nathanael Boehm. I work for the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations (DEEWR). My role is as a web designer but I do a lot of other stuff such as administering the section’s social media strategy. We look after the first ongoing Federal Government blog, which is blog.training.gov.au. We also have a Twitter account @TrainingGovAu. We have a DOPPLR account which we use for all our stakeholder engagement tracking and a few other things.
AN: So you use I guess Web 2.0 type techniques in Gov 2.0?
NB: Yes.
AN: What led you down that path and what does it mean to you and where can you take it?
NB: The reason we got onto it is because we have a lot of stakeholders. We deal with 4,500 Registered Training Organisations across Australia. Also the project we’re working on is a joint Commonwealth and State Government project so we have to deal with all our colleagues in State Governments and territories. Plus a lot of other stakeholders and of course all the users. So thousands of people. And it was just we needed a way of engaging with them rather than the traditional government, the great divide and then everyone else on the other side. So we used the blog to achieve that.
AN: Do you have any measures of how effective it is and how do you know it’s working?
NB: Well, it’s still early days. It’s been a few months now – probably six months since we launched it. Basically we’re basing our measures off feedback. We’re getting a lot of quality feedback on the blog and basically the whole engagement strategy behind it. So I’m getting a lot of positive response.
AN: So if others wanted to experiment down this path, have you got any advice on how they might go about it?
NB: I wouldn’t say experiment. You kind of have to have a plan for what you want to do, what you want to achieve with it. Don’t just launch a blog because it sounds like a fun idea. You have to have a goal, a problem you want to solve – which is what we did. So, if you can do that then go for it.
AN: Ok, thanks very much!
NB: Thank you.
// purecaffeine.com, UX, design, social media and Gov 2.0 blog by designer Nathanael Boehm, Canberra, Australia. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License.
