Thursday, November 29, 2012

Come along to the Gov 2.0 Canberra picnic (with fantastic speakers)

It is approaching the end of the year, so for the final formal Gov 2.0 event in Canberra, there's a picnic being held on Saturday 8 December from midday.

There will be a couple of speakers - starting with Julian Carver from New Zealand, who has had a long involvement with the open government movement, including working on NZ's Declaration on Open and Transparent Government.

The other speaker and the venue will be confirmed shortly.

For more information and to RSVP visit: http://gov2actdec12.eventbrite.com/

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Wednesday, November 28, 2012

Open Australia launches 'Right to Know' FOI request site

The process of requesting documents from the government, though enshrined in Australian law, can be difficult for many people - taking significant time, causing significant frustration and resulting in inconsistent and substandard outcomes - as I found when asking government agencies some simple question about which public social media channels they operated and which web browsers they used.

My experience saw 25% of agencies requested never respond to the request, several more withhold information on the web browsers they used as 'commercial in confidence' (although this information is automatically transmitted to every website visited by their staff) and several others ask for up to $800 for finding the documents that provided the answer.

In many cases there was little or no information on the FOI process on agency websites and in many cases agency FOI staff contacted me to explain their FOI processes (which differed substantially amongst agencies) - adding significant cost to a process where this information could be more clearly publicly explained through agency websites.

This is, of course, a single example and doesn't represent the bulk of FOI requests - for which there's no consolidated statistical data on whether the system works well and the satisfaction of people making requests (as agencies don't assess this or aggregate this information - as they do for most other customer service processes), making it very hard to quantify how effectively the FOI system is performing other than via anecdotal views, such as mine above.

OpenAustralia has now launched a website designed to simplify the FOI process for ordinary people, making it easier for Australians to understand what they request from which government agencies and the process of making and completing these requests, as well as collecting information on the complexities and difficulties of these processes.

The website, Right to Know, is based on a UK model which has been in operation for a number of years and offers both better transparency in the FOI process as well as potentially streamlining the process for government agencies, where they will have to spend less of their valuable FOI officer time on explaining how to make valid FOI requests.

The site will also help capture released documents and collect data on the complexity and issues with FOI processes, helping the government to improve them in the future.

The site is launching at a time when the government is reviewing the operations of the revised FOI Act, and it will also be interesting to see what this review recommends - and what is ultimately done with these recommendations.

I'm hopeful that the government and public service will look on the launch of Right to Know as a positive step that supports the goals of FOI, rather than considering it as yet another impost on their operations, even if long-term FOI stalwards such as Allan Rose believe that the culture change necessary in the public service to support FOI are yet to occur.

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Friday, November 23, 2012

The latest infographic about Twitter - Australians the third most active users

The Twitter infographic below has been brought to my attention by The Wall and I thought it worth reflecting here.

As you'll see below, Australia is rated the third most active nation on Twitter, behind the US and UK and just ahead of Brazil, Canada and India.

There's some useful general demographics on Twitter's global audience, though I'm still waiting for the time when Twitter releases country-based demographics before it becomes possible to really assess Twitter's value as a promotional medium.

Right now for I'm tracking 633 government accounts in Australia (excluding politicians), including the latest addition, @ACTGIO.

The infographic was compiled by www.website-monitoring.com.



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Thursday, November 22, 2012

Hindsight: Government by the people, for the people but not yet OF the people -

This is a great video regarding innovations in participation, citizen engagement and deliberative democracy, with a panel discussion involving,

  • Professor Archon Fung, Harvard Kennedy School
  • Mr. Richard Dobson, Founder of Asiye Etafuleni, South Africa
  • Mr. Robert Miller, Director of the Minneapolis Neighborhood Revitalization Program, USA
  • Dr. Henry Tam, Deputy Director of Community Empowerment Delivery, UK
It took place back in 2008, but remains extremely relevant and current to the trends of today.


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Wednesday, November 21, 2012

Having a website crash due to high traffic is a failure of management, not load

Today has provided an interesting lesson for several organisations, with the crash of both the David Jones and ClickFrenzy websites in Australia.

But first, some background.

ClickFrenzy is a new 24-hour sale for Australian online retailers starting from 7pm on Tuesday 20 November.

Based on the US 'Cyber Monday' sale, which now attracts over 10 million buyers, ClickFrenzy was designed to entice Australian online shoppers to buy from local online retailers by offering massive discounts on product prices for a short period of time.

The event was announced over a month before it was due to start and has been promoted through newspapers, online and in some retail stores, with the ClickFrenzy team expecting thousands of shoppers to log on, likening it to a "digital boxing day sale".

I've kept an eye on the ClickFrenzy site and signed up to receive an email alert when the sale began.

Just before the sale started I hopped back onto the ClickFrenzy site to see how it was going, and only saw a basic page of text, with no graphics or formatting. Puzzled I tried reloading - and the site wouldn't load at all.

That's when I hopped onto Twitter and learnt from the #clickfrenzy hashtag that the ClickFrenzy site had already crashed from the load and no-one had any idea when it would be back online.

This meant that the list of participating retailers (many of whom had been kept secret) was inaccessible. No shopper knew who had the specials, meaning few sales could occur. Of the retailers that were known to be participating, two-thirds of their sites crashed too (such as Priceline and Myers).

In competition with ClickFrenzy, David Jones had decided to run its own independent 24-hour sale over a similar time period. Their sale, named 'Christmas Frenzy', was to be run from their main website.

How did their launch go? Their site also crashed, and was down for several hours, taking down not only the shopping site but all their corporate information.


So we had two major online sales on the same day from Australian retails, and both experienced crashes due to the volume of traffic.

What was to blame? Both claimed the failure was due to unprecedented demand. So many people tried to get onto both sites that their servers could not cope (the same reason given for the mySchools website issues at launch in 2010 and the CFA website issues during the Victorian fires in 2009).

Let's unpick that reasoning.

The world wide web is twenty years old. Amazon.com is 18 years old. The US 'Cyber Monday' sale is six years old.

David Jones is an experienced retailer, with significant IT resources and has been operating an online store for some time. Their Christmas Frenzy sale was planned and well promoted.

Click Frenzy is being run by experienced retailers as well. They built an emailing list of people interested in the event and also widely promoted the sale. The retailers supporting them are large names and operate established online shopping sites as well.

In both cases the organisers had a wealth of experience to draw on. The growth of Amazon, the US Cyber Monday sales, their own website traffic figures and email list sign-ups, not to mention a host of public examples of how to manage web server load well, and badly, from media sites, social networks and even government sites (such as mySchools and CFA examples above).

There are many IT professionals with experience on how to manage rapid load changes on web servers.

There's scalable hosting solutions which respond almost instantly to fast-increasing loads, such as during an emergency or with breaking news, and 'scale up' the site to support much larger numbers of simultaneous users. (Though in the case of Christmas Frenzy and Click Frenzy a large increase in load was expected, rather than unexpected.)

There's even automated processes for testing how much load a website will be able to bear by simulating the impact of thousands or millions of visitors.


In other words, there's no longer any technical reason why any organisation should have their website fail due to expected or anticipated load.


Load is not a reason, it is a justification.

We have the experience, knowledge and technology to manage load changes.

What the Click Frenzy and Christmas Frenzy failures illustrate is that some organisations fail to plan for load. They haven't learnt from the experience of others, don't invest in the right infrastructure and may not even test their sites.

They are literally crossing their fingers and praying that their website won't crash.

A website crashing when it receives a high level of load that could be expected or planned for is crashing due to a failure of management.


The next time your agency's management asks you to build a website which is expected to have a big launch or large traffic spikes, ask them if they're prepared to invest the funds necessary for a scalable and tested website, built on the appropriate infrastructure to mitigate the risk of sudden large increases in traffic.

If they aren't then let them know to cross their fingers and pray - and that a website crash due to high traffic is a failure of management, not load.

You might even get a Downfall parody video to memorialise the failure - as Click Frenzy received within two hours of their launch crash.

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