[LINK] Canberra looks at wiki services

[brd at iimetro.com.au]

Canberra looks at wiki services
Andrew Colley
AUGUST 01, 2006
The Australian
http://australianit.news.com.au/articles/0,7204,19973838%5E15306%5E%5Enbv%5E,00.html

THE federal government may tap the vast pool of social resources behind blogs
and websites such as Flickr and Wikipedia to boost its online information
services.

The Department of Finance's lead information technology body, AGIMO, has begun
experimenting with wikis and blogs with a view to expanding their use
throughout commonwealth departments and agencies.

"The Australian Government Information Management Office is trialling wikis and
blogs internally and is investigating the expansion of these services in the
government sphere," a spokesman for Special Minister for State Gary Nairn said.

The advisory body would also investigate increasing use of RSS and other
collaboration tools for government websites to encourage users to help improve
them, AGIMO said.

Wikis are part of an emerging breed of web-based software tools that allow
internet communities to collaborate on establishing information services.

The trial was part of a strategy to use online services to improve engagement
between the community and government by 2010, the spokesman said.

"The government is developing services aligned with Web 2.0 with its
implementation of the 2006 e-government strategy,"

Tom Burton who recently left a large media organisation to become the publisher
of a collaborative news site said Web 2.0 services offered large organisations
a low-cost means of tackling information services projects.

Amazon.com demonstrated the principles of the concept when it included customers
in a project to develop a home-grown alternative to the long-recognised book
classification scheme International Standard Book Number (ISBN).

Web 2.0 services may play a key role in improving handling of immigrants and
detainees by the Department of Immigration, Multicultural and Indigenous
Affairs.

IBM, which won a contract to overhaul the department's ageing systems in June,
has revealed that Immigration and Centrelink have begun to explore ways in
which Web 2.0 services could be used to share information and improve border
security processes.

"They want to create, on the fly, a new application that could pull in travel
information and financial information, feed in news from where you've been or
where you're going, and create a mini-application that says, based on all these
things, instantly if they need to scrutinise you more closely," IBM Australia
innovations head Brad Kassell said.

There were, however, still concerns about the security and data integrity of
services delivered by wiki.

"If you're providing these lightweight web wikis, the first thing that
enterprise people want to talk about is how you manage them and put control
points in place," he said.

"It's not quite as easy when you're providing these generic, flexible tools."

IBM said its Web 2.0 technology was 12 to 18 months away from being included in
its product line-up.



-- 
Regards
brd

Bernard Robertson-Dunn
Sydney Australia
brd at iimetro.com.au

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