Service delivery in one-stop government portals : observations based on a market research study in Queensland

New government service delivery models based on a “franchise” metaphor are being proposed recently to allow more citizen-centric service delivery by decoupling the government’s internal departmental structure from the way services are presented and delivered to citizens. In order to evaluate the approach from an online channel perspective, the Queensland Government commissioned a market research study to compare their websites with the online presences of the UK Government and the South Australian Government, who both have adopted the “franchise” approach. The study aimed to inform an understanding of citizens’ preferred model for interacting in the online channel and to identify the relative strengths and weaknesses of the existing websites. In this paper, we will a) report on the findings of this third party usability study and b) position the study, in the form of a critical reflection, against the background of a more comprehensive “Transformational Government” approach using a “franchise marketplace”. The critical reflection points towards limitations of the study with regard to this bigger picture and discusses the potential benefits of service bundling that remained unconsidered in the study.

Middle India as revealed by Chetan Bhagat

The middle classes form the bulk of Indian migrants who head for Australian shores today. Yet, within Australia, general knowledge of the conditions that drive Indians’ determined search for opportunities overseas is limited to the few who have contact with international students and migrants from the sub-continent, and the skewed, melodramatic antics of Bollywood. It is my suggestion that a broader understanding of the underlying reasons that push Indians to migrate to societies like Australia can be had through readings of Chetan’s Bhagat’s four hugely popular novels: Five Point Someone, One night @the Call Center, The 3 mistakes of My life and Two States. Bhagat is a graduate of India’s famed Indian Institute of Technology and a former Non-Resident Indian investment banker who has since returned to live in Delhi. His experiences make him the perfect mouthpiece for middle India and his paperbacks depict that stratum of Indian society’s obsessions with social mobility, marriage, regional and religious divides with great sympathy and conviction. Drawing on observations made during a recent visit to India, I illustrate what an exploration of Bhagat’s paperbacks reveals about everyday, contemporary India and what it adds to Australian understandings of Indians and India today.

Reorienting diaspora : China and India as franchise nations

In this paper, I outline a new approach towards media and diaspora using the concept of the ‘franchise nation’. It is my contention that current theories on migration, media and diaspora with their emphasis on exile, multiple belongings, hybrid identities and their representations are inadequate to the task of explaining the emergence of a new trend in diaspora, home and host nation relationship. This, I suggest, is a recent shift most notable in the attitudes of the Chinese and Indian governments toward their diasporas. From earlier eras where Chinese sojourners were regarded as disloyal and Indians overseas left to fend for themselves, Chinese and Indian migrants are today directly addressed and wooed by their nations of origin. This change is motivated in part by the realisation that diasporic populations are, in fact, resources that can bring significant influence to bear on home nation interests within host nations. Such sway in foreign lands gains greater importance as China and India are, by virtue of their economic rise and prominence on the world stage, subject to ever more intense international scrutiny. Members of these diasporas have willingly responded to these changes by claiming and cultivating pivotal roles for themselves within host nations as spokespersons, informants and representatives, trading on their assumed familiarity with home cultures, language and commerce. As a result, China and India have initiated a number of statecraft strategies in recent years to (re)engage their diasporas. Both nations have identified media as amongst the key instruments of their strategies. New media enhances the ability of all parties—home and host states, institutions and individuals—to participate, interact and reciprocate. While China’s centralised government has utilised the notion of soft power (ruan shili) to describe its practices, India’s efforts are diffused along the lines of nation branding via myriad labels like India Inc. and the Global Indian. To explain this emergent trend, I propose a new framework, franchise nation, defined as a reciprocal relationship between nation and diaspora that is characterised by mutual obligations and benefits. In appropriating this phrase from Stephenson, I liken contemporary statecraft operating in China and India to a business franchising system wherein benefits may be economic or cultural and; those thus connected signal their willingness for mutual exchange and concede a sense of obligation. As such, franchise nation is not concerned with remote, unidirectional interference in home nation affairs a la Anderson’s ‘long-distance nationalism’. Rather, it is a framework that seeks to reflect more closely the dynamism of the relationship between diaspora, home and host nations.

Seeing the outer suburbs : addressing the urban bias in creative place thinking

Seeing the outer suburbs: addressing the urban bias in creative place thinking, Regional Studies. This paper draws upon quantitative and qualitative research into Australian cities to question the assumption that creative industries workers inherently seek to cluster in inner-urban areas. It challenges this foundational assumption by combining a critical application of the location quotient analysis of major Australian cities with qualitative research drawn from interviews with creative workers based in suburban Melbourne and Brisbane. The findings provide analyses as to why many creative industries workers prefer to locate themselves in outer suburban places. There is also discussion of the implications of these findings for future work on the cultural geography and policies of creative industries.

Urban food futures : ICTs and opportunities

Food is a vital foundation of all human life. It is essential to a myriad of political, socio-cultural, economic and environmental practices throughout history. However, those practices of food production, consumption, and distribution have the potential to now go through immensely transformative shifts as network technologies become increasingly embedded in every domain of contemporary life. Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are one of the key foundations of global functionality and sustenance today and undoubtedly will continue to present new challenges and opportunities for the future. As such, this Symposium will bring together leading scholars across disciplines to address challenges and opportunities at the intersection of food and ICTs in everyday urban environment. In particular, the discussion will revolve around the question: What are the key roles that network technologies play in re-shaping the food systems at micro- to macroscopic level? The symposium will contribute a unique perspective on urban food futures through the lens of network society paradigm where ICTs enable innovations in production, organisation, and communication within society. Some of the topics addressed will include encouraging transparency in food commodity chains; value of cultural understanding and communication in global food sustainability; and technologies to social inclusion; all of which evoke and examine the question surrounding networked individuals as changes catalysts for urban food futures. The event will provide an avenue for new discussions and speculations on key issues surrounding urban food futures in the network era, with a particular focus on bottom-up micro actions that challenge the existing food systems towards a broader sociocultural, political, technological, and environmental transformations. One central area of concern is that current systems of food production, distribution, and consumption do not ensure food security for the future, but rather seriously threaten it. With the recent unprecedented scale of urban growth and rise of middle-class, the problem continues to intensify. This situation requires extensive distribution networks to feed urban residents, and therefore poses significant infrastructural challenges to both the public and private sectors. The symposium will also address the transferability of citizen empowerment that network technologies enable as demonstrated in various significant global political transformations from the bottom-up, such as the recent Egyptian Youth Revolution. Another key theme of the discussion will be the role of ICTs (and the practices that they mediate) in fostering transparency in commodity chains. The symposium will ask what differences these technologies can make on the practices of food consumption and production. After discussions, we will initiate an international network of food-thinkers and actors that will function as a platform for knowledge sharing and collaborations. The participants will be invited to engage in planning for the on-going future development of the network.

Looking through the corridor : Malaysia and the MSC

As part of a development plan-in-progress spanning a total of 25 years(1996 to 2020), Malaysia’s Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC) provides a unique opportunity to witness a brief and microcosmic unfolding of the reciprocally formative process between society and technology that Lewis Mumford lays out in exhaustive detail in Technics and Civilization (Mumford, 1963). The interlocking of national imagining, destiny and progress with a specific group of technologies, information and communication technologies(ICT) is, in itself, worthy of interest. However, what renders the MSC doubly remarkable is its introduction in Malaysia, one of the most well established of contemporary ethnocracies. This chapter reads the development and implementation of the MSC as the text through which the association between nation and ethnicity is examined. Broadly speaking I argue here that the MSC inflects the imagining(s) of Malaysia at two levels. At the first level where the MSC is understood to be the insertion of a new policy into Malaysia’s pre existent ethnocratic climate, I contend the MSC inflects the nation through its incongruence with prevalent conditions. At the second level, where the MSC is viewed through the position of its Chinese populace, I suggest that the MSC inflects Malaysia (perhaps to a lesser degree) through the re-emphasis it lends to issues of transnationalism and belonging for the Malaysian Chinese.

No longer Singaporean : visibilising the everyday contestations of identities

In the past decade or so, the citizens of Singapore have been vigorously urged by the state to turn their cultural and linguistic affinities with China to economic advantage. At the same time, the city-state has opened its doors to selected, skilled migrants from Asia including many of those from mainland and Greater China. These concurrent emphases have coincided with the trend and growing numbers of Singaporeans heading overseas for one reason or another. Through a reflexive journey sparked by a recent visit, I argue in this paper that the resultant change in the makeup of its population produces tensions that may well have important repercussions for a nation that is constitutionally multiethnic though pragmatically meritocratic. However, because these frictions find form only in everyday, pedestrian practices, they are often dismissed or ignored. It is my contention that as the stage on which innocuous, creeping shifts in social identities are enacted, finessed and (re)embedded into social imaginaries, these everyday contestations of identities need to studied for indications of what is at stake.

#Ausvotes : how Twitter covered the 2010 Australian federal election

While the 2007 Australian federal election was notable for the use of social media by the Australian Labor Party in campaigning, the 2010 election took place in a media landscape in which social media–especially Twitter–had become much more embedded in both political journalism and independent political commentary. This article draws on the computer-aided analysis of election-related Twitter messages, collected under the #ausvotes hashtag, to describe the key patterns of activity and thematic foci of the election’s coverage in this particular social media site. It introduces novel metrics for analysing public communication via Twitter, and describes the related methods. What emerges from this analysis is the role of the #ausvotes hashtag as a means of gathering an ad hoc ‘issue public’– a finding which is likely to be replicated for other hashtag communities.

How long is a tweet? Mapping dynamic conversation networks on Twitter using Gawk and Gephi

Twitter is now well established as the world’s second most important social media platform, after Facebook. Its 140-character updates are designed for brief messaging, and its network structures are kept relatively flat and simple: messages from users are either public and visible to all (even to unregistered visitors using the Twitter website), or private and visible only to approved ‘followers’ of the sender; there are no more complex definitions of degrees of connection (family, friends, friends of friends) as they are available in other social networks. Over time, Twitter users have developed simple, but effective mechanisms for working around these limitations: ‘#hashtags’, which enable the manual or automatic collation of all tweets containing the same #hashtag, as well allowing users to subscribe to content feeds that contain only those tweets which feature specific #hashtags; and ‘@replies’, which allow senders to direct public messages even to users whom they do not already follow. This paper documents a methodology for extracting public Twitter activity data around specific #hashtags, and for processing these data in order to analyse and visualize the @reply networks existing between participating users – both overall, as a static network, and over time, to highlight the dynamic structure of @reply conversations. Such visualizations enable us to highlight the shifting roles played by individual participants, as well as the response of the overall #hashtag community to new stimuli – such as the entry of new participants or the availability of new information. Over longer timeframes, it is also possible to identify different phases in the overall discussion, or the formation of distinct clusters of preferentially interacting participants.

Creative suburbia : rethinking urban cultural policy – the Australian case

This article considers the question of whether creative workers demonstrate a preference for inner cities or suburbs, drawing upon research findings from the ‘Creative Suburbia’ project undertaken by a team of Australian researchers over 2008–2010 in selected suburban areas of Brisbane and Melbourne. Locating this question in wider debates about the relationship of the suburbs to the city, as well as the development of new suburban forms such as master-planned communities, the article finds that the number of creative industries workers located in the suburbs is significant, and those creative workforce members living and working in suburban areas are generally happy with this experience, locating in the suburbs out of personal choice rather than economic necessity. This runs counter to the received wisdom on creative cities, which emphasize cultural amenity in inner city areas as a primary driver of location decisions for the ‘creative class’. The article draws out some implications of the findings for urban cultural policy, arguing that the focus on developing inner urban cultural amenity has been overplayed, and that more attention should be given to how to better enable distributed knowledge systems through high-speed broadband infrastructure.

Making it creatively : building sustainable careers in the arts and creative industries

Many people aspire to careers in the arts and creative industries. However, it has long been known that it can be challenging to navigate a creative career: that competition for work can be intense, particularly for entry-level positions, and that success requires advanced skill sets in addition to a high degree of artistic talent and proficiency. In this article, Dr Ruth Bridgstock draws upon her doctoral and post-doctoral research to explore the challenges involved in building a creative career in Australia and suggest ways to support emerging creatives to build satisfying and sustainable careers.

Convenience, loyal, and customising users : a survey of the behaviours and intentions of young online news users in Australia

The implications of the shift to online news consumption for journalism cultures and practices have attracted considerable scholarly attention and public debate. Less well considered are the implications of online news consumption for and by young people. This paper reports on research into the behaviours and intentions of online news consumers, 18-30 years of age, to propose three distinctive types of user (convenience, loyal and customising). Also opened up for discussion are questions about the strategic value to commercial news organisations of audience-centred empirical research that seeks to respond the crisis of professional journalism.