stories: issue 1 – August 2009

Welcome to Issue Number 1 of our new magazine: stories.

The internet can give you instant access to a plethora of information and tools. Working on the web is a fast-paced field of learning, and the resources available via the internet can be a web designer’s best friend. But perhaps the greatest way we can teach each other our experiences is by telling a good story. Reading a tutorial, a text book, or wiki page might bring you to learn the same information, but when you hear it from someone first hand it makes that information “real” and something you might relate to.

This magazine, printed and online, is a platform for people working in government and in industry to share their experiences, and maybe start a conversation. Perhaps during our conference and through our networks online, you can ask each other – what’s your story? Together, by sharing our stories, we might help each other build the web a better way.

- Diana Mounter and Reem Abdelaty

See contents below for list of articles online, or download the PDF version.

Stories Issue 1 – August 2009: PDF version (1.9MB)
(this edition includes the conference section for We Believe in Community 2009)

Contents:

Does your council even need a website?

By Bernard De Broglio

We love the web. But we don’t love council websites. Local Government gets just 0.14% of all visits made by Australians on the internet – and a significant slice of that is to our library catalogues and tourism portals. What are Australians doing online?

Web Review Wednesday

By Rachel MacDonald

Encouraging staff to update their web content can take a disproportionate amount of an administrator’s time. By holding a review event you can increase participation while reducing the time spent chasing updates.

Digital communication – ignore it at our own peril

By Kate Walsh

Recent events in Iran and China have highlighted the power of electronic media and social networks. Local Government should ignore the lessons here and the opportunities of digital communications only if they want to risk being left in the dark ages.

OOOG! Uh What Is It Good For?

By James Purser

Open source, Open standards, Open Government. We are potentially at the cusp of major change in the way that we view our Government and how it works. As the internet embeds itself further and further into our society and culture we need a way to measure how well Government is reacting to the changes.

Coffee Theory

By Ben Buchanan

Ask web professionals about the tools they use, and it’s likely they’ll start talking about hardware, software and web applications. That’s understandable, but it’s not the whole picture. Things like software pale in comparison with the most powerful tool available: coffee.

Twittering the live local challenge

By John MacFarlane

There are many tips on how to best use Twitter, most either painfully obvious or of dubious validity. Our back-of-envelope advice is this: Engage in conversations on Twitter first, grow a following and then experiment. The golden rule is to keep it personal, compelling … and short – 140 characters, to be precise!

Intranets and usability

By Matthew Hodgson

Building corporate Intranets can turn into a battle for real estate on the front page. All too often what results is an Intranet designed by committee – little more than a laundry list of links. The best and easiest means for building an Intranet so it will actually be usable is to involve those people who are actually going to use it.

Don’t forget the RSS

By James Dellow

Amongst all the other concerns and constraints of running a Local Government website, it’s easy for ‘Really Simple Syndication’ (RSS) feeds to be consigned to the too hard basket. But the big secret of RSS is that it can provide a whole lot of usefulness for relatively little effort.

The State of JavaScript

By Dmitry Baranovskiy

The web is a rapidly changing thing. JavaScript, is an important part of it, and has gone through many different stages: from a promising, but useless initiative from Netscape (we still remember how annoying jumping text and popups were), to the bread and butter of Web 2.0. Now is the time for the JavaScript renaissance.

OpenAustralia

By Kat Szuminska

Two people who didn’t know anything about building websites or the Australian Government came to build a website giving the community Hansard and Australian Government data. This is the story of Open Australia.

Our future on the web

By Diana Mounter

When asked at a conference recently “is print dead?”. The answer was no, not yet. For now it continues to be a format that compliments our efforts online. Local Governments would be unwise though if they continued to rely on print and didn’t ready themselves for the future web.

Credits

Managing editor: Diana Mounter

Copy editors: Kate Walsh and Fay Daoud

Expert reviewer: Reem Abdelaty

Cover design (print): Jamie Seckold

Design and layout (print): Tariq Ghomari

Website design: Diana Mounter