Conference Round up and some training
Post conference come down? Absolutely!
But there's still much work to be done and much going on out there in the world of the web.
New Gov2 Online Forum
As part of the Gov 2 Taskforce and the adoption of it's recommendations by the previous Federal Government, steps have been taken to make real some of those recommendations. One of these inititatives is a private space for public servants of all levels of government to come together and share their experiences. This new Gov 2.0 Govdex Community is being hosted by the Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO). This new Online Forum is intended to create a community of practice, much like what we're trying to do here.
To quote from the government response (http://www.finance.gov.au/publications/govresponse20report/index.html#re...):
It is intended that this [community of practice] will be led by Finance, leveraging existing centralised technology capabilities (govdex.gov.au) hosted by Finance. This is a practical measure that will promote uptake of best practice, and learning from errors that are made.
To get involved and register for the forum, please email gov2 at finance dot gov dot au
OzIA2010
Tomorrow I'll be heading to OzIA: Australia's Information Architecture Conference. Next to our own conference, this is my favourite event of the year. This year will be my third go round and each year I learn more and meet more people who do amazing things online. The sessions I'm particularly keen to see are:
The politics of information design
Beyond information: IA and Enterprise User Interaction Strategy
Community Data Models for Humanitarian & Development Work
I will report back on the conference next week.
Local Government Information Technology Conference 2010
This year, I'll also be heading to the IT conference. There's a whole range of sessions this year very much focused on our little web world, which appears to be a bit of a change of tack for this conference. Normally it seems to focus much more on hardware and enterprise software. There are a couple of sessions I'm really keen to listen in on to get some alternative perspectives on what's going on:
- Panel discussion: Use of Social Media for Local Government
- How Can Government Departments successfully use social media?
- "Open Government"
- People Issues: Social Media Policy; Online Tools, Staff retention
- Regionalised Web Presences Done Right!
As you can see, there's a heap of stuff there that we've all been talking about for the last couple of years, so it will be great to get the "IT" point of view on these issues.
Contented.Com - Online Writing for the Web Courses
If you haven't done it yet, get on to these great courses. I just completed mine yesterday, and it was money well spent. If your organisation has a lot of content authors spread around the place, this is a great low cost way to skill them up quickly and efficiently. it also gives staff a great insight into why we do things in a certain way due to accessibility and SEO.
If you're a Local-e council get in touch, as we have heavily discounted rates for you.
Google Analytics
We got an amazing response to the Google Analytics workshop held at the conference. We want to be able to hold more of these workshops but are quite limited in budget! However, Mangold Sengers, a Google Certified partner is offering Analytics courses here in Sydney. If you attended the conference, there was a discount code in your showbag. Courses are being run in November and later in the year. I'll be sending out the discount code again to the google group!
If there's anything you want us to chase up, or if you're seeking advice or just want to talk to others about accessibility, GIPA or any one of a hundred topics, get on the groups and start a conversation.
