Putting the Australian Government Online for Remote Indigenous Communities

The 4th Annual Web Content Management for Government Conference, is 17-18 September 2007 in Canberra. The theme of the conference is "Harnessing the power of new technologies to build citizen-centric websites and encourage online activities" and I will be speaking on the first morning on how to do this for remote aboriginal communities:

Making websites accessible and functional for a diverse community:

• Communicating and engaging diverse cultural audiences in Australia and worldwide
• Providing sufficient and accurate information for people who with limited English
• Using the information and digital technologies to support users with special requirements
• Integrating web content to wireless and mobile devices
• Testing the accessibility of websites to different citizen segments

When I was approached to speak at the conference, the suggested outline I was provided with included "aboriginal audiences". I changed this to "diverse cultural audiences", as I thought explicitly mentioning indigenous issues would be too controversial for government staff. However, the recent declaration of an emergency by the Prime Minister in response to a report on Protection of Aboriginal Children from Sexual Abuse will require responses from many government agencies.

Governments can provide access to information and services via the Internet in an accessible format to help address the needs of remote indigenous communities. This could allow the communities to govern themselves, with central oversight. Mutual obligation arrangements could be implemented in a more efficient and less intrusive way than by having temporary outside government staff rotated through the community.

New remote housing could have reliable digital communications built in. New schools could have computers and telecommunications built in for flexible learning, using the same techniques which MIT developed for teaching university physics, combined with the technologies in the Indian Simputer for use in villages and the $100 laptop for education of children in the third world.