Australian government turns to blogging - for consultations!

Stephen Withers
Tuesday, 09 December 2008 05:05

IT Policy - Government Tech Policy

The Australian federal government has announced a co-ordinated trial of the use of blogs as a way of consulting the electorate on a series of issues. Will Australians blog on, or will they tell the Government to blog off?

Blogging, whether the reading or writing of, is one of the Net generation's most popular pastimes, whether you're one of the Net-gen's young'uns or silver surfers.

So, to capitalise on blogging's undeniable global popularity, the Australian federal government has decided to add to its existing Internet credentials by consulting with the people using the technology.

It's a very interesting development, because although some governments are relatively quick at adopting Internet technologies compared with other large organisations, there is nevertheless a tendency for them to always be a generation behind the leading edge.

Governments may have been ahead of major industrial or commercial enterprises when it came to avoiding the waste of trees involved in disseminating information, but by then the focus had already shifted to online transactions.

And by the time transactions were in place (and you still need to be using Windows if you want to file an Australian tax return via the Internet), the emphasis had moved on to 'conversations' around blogging and other tools.

Anyway, the Australian federal government is catching up with a rather grandiosely titled trial of online policy consultation.

What's the first of the trials actually about, and would it be something that Sir Humphrey Appleby could have only dreamed of in his pre-Internet era? Please read on.