acidlabs » posts

Taking money from AGIMO doesn’t help

Stephen Collins — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 10:05:13 +0000

Andrea Di Maio of Gartner has written a pointed post with respect to the government taking $440M out of innovation funding to reduce our already tiny by global standards deficit. The AFR has identified this reallocation of dollars as a real risk to AGIMO, suggesting its future may be at risk.

I certainly hope not, as in the last 18 months, AGIMO has proven itself a real leader in the innovation, open government and Government 2.0 stakes. Gutting AGIMO of money it could have accessed to advance the open government agenda strikes me as a major risk; one that could have serious flow-on impact. The people at AGIMO, at all levels, that I know work incredibly hard to champion ICT and open government working hand-in-hand must feel a little unsure of their future as the weekend arrives.

We’re in an election, money is being sought everywhere. Butchering of innovative thinking and budget allocation is as common here as it is anywhere else during an election.

That said, I think Andrea is absolutely right. In spite of all the right noises being made and smart things being said, politicians, particularly, are rarely well-informed about IT. But no more so than senior executives within bureaucracies.

Like HR, communications or marketing, IT is a “cost”. If you need savings, you reduce costs.

Longer-term thinking would see IT and other cost centres identified as strategic investment where costs are borne in order to reap return over time. If this was the view taken, I think the practices around IT and the like that see them as expensive and wasteful (not without reason given high failure rates of IT projects) would have the opportunity to mature and we’d see smarter attitudes more often.

Given our incredibly low deficit by global standards, is this shift of funds no more than a response to electoral pressure and the fears of an ill-informed electorate?

Announcing Government 2.0 workshops from acidlabs

Stephen Collins — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 05:37:59 +0000

As a result of some recent work and a number of conversations, I’ve made a decision to put together some workshops that there seems to be a demand for.

As of today, acidlabs is offering three workshops focussed on Government 2.0. Designed for participants in all levels of government and at all levels of seniority, the workshops are:

Overview of Government 2.0 – a half-day introduction to issues and practicalities of Government 2.0
Government 2.0 Core Strategies – a full day workshop taking an in-depth look at Government 2.0 including strategy, policy, influences and scenarios
Implementing Government 2.0 – a deeper look at executing on Government 2.0 for agencies and staff including a range of relevant case studies and practical approaches

I’ll be offering these workshops initially as internal only. However, if there is enough interest for a publicly available instance, that can certainly be done.

Pricing and other details are available on the new Workshops page.

Gov 2.0 culture needs nurture (and a catalyst) – and we’re not there yet

Stephen Collins — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 03:40:12 +0000

Earlier this week, I attended the FutureGov Forum Australia.

It was an interesting event, not least because the talking head component was kept to a reasonable minimum, with the model focussed on rotating tables with each new table hosting a discussion with attendees on a particular topic associated with the future of government. It worked well, although a few less topics (or some refinement) so we could spend longer with each group would have been a bonus. I spent the two days of the event mostly seated at the Government 2.0 table (thanks to Martin Stewart-Weeks of Cisco And the Government 2.0 Taskforce who generously let me horn in on his subject of expertise), but also paid visits to the Open Data and Citizen Engagement tables.

Much has been made in subsequent days of AGIMO’s Ann Steward’s comments that public servants need to be “Gov 2.0 activists”, driving change in their own agencies toward the Taskforce’s vision of Government 2.0. I agree with her, wholeheartedly.

That said, as I spoke at the forum with a range of public servants from all three levels of government and a wide range of agencies, one telling fact was apparent – in spite of all the scaffolding being in place for agencies to take real, substantial steps towards Government 2.0 in their agencies, many blocks, predominantly cultural ones, continue to persist.

Let’s be abundantly clear here, everything that needs to be done to make Government 2.0 a reality from the perspective of the legislative and executive arms of government has been done:

the government has accepted the Government 2.0 Taskforce’s recommendations
the government has also accepted all of the recommendations of the Moran Review, which supports and expands on the work of the Taskforce
the APSC has issued crystal clear guidance for public servants on using social tools
several agencies have issued their own policies and guidance that could be adopted by other agencies

Yet, the reticence to engage persists. The predominant use of social tools by government remains outward bound, transmitting old style messages via new tools. Rarely, if at all, do public servants at any level in this country actively and openly participate in public social spaces with respect to their work and the work of their agencies. As Taskforce Chairman, Nicholas Gruen notes, “…can’t we just take some baby steps. Pleeeesse?”

That post by Nick Gruen is worth reading, actually. It makes abundantly clear that the barriers are down, but that the public servants seem not to be daring to step over. To my mind, it’s that next step that needs to take place. Now, or sooner.

So, to hark back to the people I spoke with this week at the FutureGov Forum, the same old chestnuts kept coming up:

their IT security people wouldn’t approve access to these tools – frankly, IT security people need to get the hell out of the way, and to read this
their senior executive see no reason to grant access – what, an explicit imprimatur from the government isn’t enough?
they don’t understand the tools – just have a go, it’s not that hard
they are afraid of what people will do with their open data – erm, who’s doing evil with their data now and if there are unpleasant messages in the data, maybe the policy or program the data is related to needs fixing

All these (the list isn’t limited to those things, but they are the obvious ones) are matters of culture. They are things that could, with the right catalyst and nurturing, be changed over the relatively short term.

It’s time that a senior minister (yes, yes, we’re in an election – but we won’t be soon) and some very senior public servants – say the APSC Commissioner and the Secretary of PM&C – had a quiet sit down with the Secretaries and other agency heads and told them to make this happen. Now. We need an active catalyst or catalysts on the inside – an Australian equivalent to Tim Berners-Lee, Vivek Kundra or Andrew Stott. An ongoing irritant for the slow-movers.

Beyond making it happen, politicians and public servants need to explicitly move to a place where participation by public servants in the discourse about their work isn’t seen as a negative behavior laden with career risk. No wonder people are reticent when they think their actions will see them hauled before management or a Senate Estimates hearing. This must change.

We also need an active, high profile and necessarily noisy catalyst outside the government making things happen and being an irritant to those holding things up. In the US, Tim O’Reilly and Craig Newmark are ably filling that role. As passionate as Nicholas Gruen is here in Australia, I think he’s not publicly visible enough beyond the politico-tragic-media-wonk-o-sphere™ (I’m delighted, by the way, that I got to use that phrase twice today) – Newmark and O’Reilly appear regularly front-and-center in the US media.

I don’t have the answers, but have a significant number of ideas. They seem doable to me and they seem to align with the ideas of people like Ann Steward and Nicholas Gruen.

So what’s the problem?

Not the social media election you were looking for

Stephen Collins — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 00:57:30 +0000

Ever since Barack Obama came to the US Presidency on the back of a grassroots campaign, a good proportion of which was activated via a thorough and well-executed social media campaign, various pundits have been breathlessly predicting that, in Australia, the election campaign currently underway would be the social media election.

Not least of all, I’ve been known to express the view that if social media could have an effect in an Australian election, it could be significant. After all, with over 9 million Australians using Facebook, and somewhere north of 1.1 million of us on Twitter (via ABC), social media is certainly mainstream in this country.

But it’s just not going to happen. At least not this time around.

I think there are three parts to the reason why.

First, despite the mainstream media merrily jumping in and running polls and trackers like the ABC’s Campaign Pulse, and parts of the ad, PR and digital industry running sites focussed keenly on social media activity around the election such as Amnesia Razorfish’s The Social Election and BuzzNumbers’ BuzzElection, the voter activation by social media phenomenon is just not happening. These sites, despite all the truly fascinating information they are surfacing up are, for this election, all very much a part of the massive echo chamber that is a self-absorbed hybrid of the social media gurus (something I have been accused more than once of being a part – happily accepted) and, as Jeff Waugh puts it so eloquently the politico-tragic-media-wonk-o-sphere™ (also something I am gladly a part of).

Now, don’t get me wrong. I love all this stuff. I think the effort that has gone into all this tracking, monitoring and analysis is laudable. And I’m certainly watching it all and taking it all in. But I’m self-admittedly not your average voter.

I am yet to see any voter outside this hybrid circle have their political opinion swayed through social media. This isn’t tipping point stuff. The connectors, mavens and salesmen using social media aren’t connecting, mavening (is that a word?) and selling the vote-changing message. The average punter is still relying on the tabloids, commercial radio and mainstream evening news and current affairs for their political information. If social media was having a real effect in this country on the level of political debate, the argument over matters like the Internet filter would be done and dusted; we’ve been ranting for three years about it and there’s still widespread community ignorance.

Second, politicians aren’t really using social media effectively. There are a few well-known examples that have taken the time and effort to reach out and connect online (and offline, let it be said) with their constituencies, but for most politicians social tools are still new, somewhat misunderstood and not especially well utilised. Our Prime Minister, after all, has only been on Twitter a month (I don’t, by the way, expect her to do all her own tweeting, she has other priorities, even beyond the election).

Most politicians (and their party machinery and people), even if they are using social tools, aren’t especially effective. The message remains mostly broadcast, disconnected from the social media using constituency. It’s not surprising in this instance that voters aren’t relating to them and connecting to their issues. Do we all want to move forward with Julia on Twitter? I don’t think so.

Third, as a voting nation, we’re more than a little different to the USA. I’m no political scientist, but to my amateur (albeit politico-tragic-media-wonk) eyes, the Australian electorate is noticeably more disconnected from political issues in a vote-changing way than our friends in countries without compulsory suffrage. Here, for the vast majority of the electorate, it’s paying the mortgage and car loan, buying groceries and paying school fees that matters. Beyond that, it’s the race-to-the-bottom issues of leaky borders invaded by leaky boats and the reduction of tax that we care about. Big-picture, informed political view isn’t something that you’d ascribe to the majority of the population.

Yes, social media is seeing massive growth in this country. Yes, it is important in many people’s lives (including people that are very mainstream). But social media, as an influence on the average voter isn’t yet a major player in this country. For that to be the case, we need to see a widespread maturing of social media use at the political level and a concomitant rise in depth of interest in politics amongst the wider population.

Open Government declaration – don’t conflate it with something else

Stephen Collins — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 21:34:43 +0000

Fulfilling one of the recommendations of the Government 2.0 Taskforce Report, the government released its Declaration of Open Government last week. This is an extremely good thing and bodes well for the progress of Government 2.0 in Australia. Personally, I had hoped to see this declaration made in the Parliament, backed by new legislation or a commitment signed by both Houses. It would have been a strong, final show from the government before the election. As it stands, it’s somewhat less firm than the Taskforce had recommended, as noted by iTWire.

Regardless, the step that has been taken is an important one and sets the Australian Government 2.0 World somewhat at the head of the game, as Andrea di Maio notes.

As ever with these things, there is a great deal of commentary from those who see both positives and negatives in this action, with many accusing the current (now caretaker) government of disingenuousness in making the declaration now.

I understand their concerns, and they are valid, but a very clear distinction needs to be made here between the legislative and executive arms of government and which part is most affected by and acts in respect to Government 2.0. To my mind, it is very much the executive – the public sector – that is in play here rather than the politicians. This is an important distinction.

We need to recognise too, that an unfortunate confluence of circumstances has taken place that has likely had an affect on the commentary:

there is a large portion of the electorate angry and disillusioned with the Rudd and Gillard governments for maintaining an agenda where matters such as the Internet filter and traffic monitoring remain in play
there is the imminent retirement of a highly respected minister in Lindsay Tanner, who has been a major catalyst in driving the Government 2.0 agenda
the FoI reforms remain incomplete and many people still real difficultly face in making successful FoI requests
and, of course, the calling of a Federal election

It needs to be made abundantly clear that the Declaration of Open Government has no direct connection to the government’s filtering and other related policies. Those filling the comments at the announcement are shouting at the wrong place. In the wrong way. As Stilgherrian noted recently at ABC Unleashed, viewing all policies and changes through this prism is misguided. The filtering policy, while defining this government for many (including me in no small part) is very far from the only policy the government has.

One thing that is clear if you work in and around government for any length of time is that this government, in spite of any other failings we may perceive, is very supportive of a more open, responsive and accountable public sector that is engaged with and serving the greater public. While there is still a very long road to travel, the Australian Public Service is in the midst of a series of very major reforms that seek to make it more adaptable, more agile, more innovative and more citizen-centric. The Government 2.0 agenda is a big part of that and the existence of the declaration on an agency web site (rather than a ministerial web site) is important and firmly places a flag in the ground.

EDIT (thanks to Craig Thomler for the prompt): However, with the departure of Minister Tanner, there is no senior catalysing force for Government 2.0 in the Ministry any more. This presents a real risk. Without someone like Minister Tanner, the ongoing progress of the Government 2.0 agenda faces a clear and present danger of being put to the side or ignored as public sector management that isn’t yet convinced of the value of open government places it in the “too hard” basket or suggests it isn’t appropriate for their agency or that it will cost too much money. All of these are common excuses for inaction that I hope aren’t used.

As Craig Thomler notes below, Government 2.0 and open government “…is still fragile in Australia at the Federal level. Key planks have been put in place, however it has not yet been firmly embedded in the DNA of the public service.” He’s right, and as much as Government 2.0 advocates like Kate Lundy are popular and respected in our community, I’m under no illusion as to her wider influence in the Labor Party; it’s not nearly as great as we might wish. As for the Liberal party, where is their open government advocate? I’ve seen nary a peep from any Liberal politician in all the time I’ve been thinking and talking about this issue.

Culture change in the public sector, an issue I have been pointing out for a significant length of time, is the real issue here – for both public servants and politicians. Until the needed culture change occurs amongst the legislature and executive such that they accept as read that an open, engaged innovative and collaborative public sector is the natural state of things, Government 2.0 and other open government moves face the real risk of only part-acceptance rather than being embedded in the DNA of government.

Change must come from the top. The very top office in the land. I suspect the Prime Minister doesn’t have Government 2.0 on her agenda.

To all those who I know have been working especially hard to get the Declaration done, I say well done! But we must keep the momentum going and make this the way we do things.

Walls come tumbling down

Stephen Collins — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 23:08:52 +0000

Leigh Blackall has published an interesting post on the increasing elite participation in discussion around the subject matter of Government 2.0 in Australia. He sees a noticeable spike in “politicians, public servant bosses and big business” as the principal participants in the public (or near-public) discourse on the subject matter.

It’s an interesting view that I find myself both agreeing with yet disagreeing with. So, let me explain.

Yes, the discourse that’s happening, especially at the conferences organised by event management companies such as CeBIT, is visibly limited to an elite few. Agency budgets for those sorts of events are rarely spent on the people who might most benefit – those doing the work on the ground and those with the most expertise. That’s not to say senior management shouldn’t go along, they should. But access to these high-level strategic discussions needs to be given to a far broader range of individuals who might contribute.

Of course, it’s very much the case that the people involved in the public discourse on Government 2.0 are, in fact, able to access very many places – both physical and virtual – that permits them a voice.

Looking only at the virtual spaces, there are several active and thriving places:

GovLoop, an online community of over 30,000 public and private sector workers involved in government work, including a growing and active group of Australians
OzLoop, an Australian equivalent to GovLoop focussed on the APS as well as state and local government
several groups on LinkedIn focussed on Government 2.0 and public sector communication, including an Australian one
the Gov 2.0 Australia Google Group

All of these spaces, as well as physical world events such as the various professional forums anyone is free to attend, provide a real ecosystem for participation that any public sector worker interested in Government 2.0, or indeed any subject related to their profession, should be taking active advantage of. To paraphrase a rather more distasteful quote, “if it exists, there is online community of it”.

I understand Leigh’s point, though. Where is the open, all-comers discourse that is then fed back to policy and decision makers in order to influence the way our public sector engages? It can be hard to find.

So too, many agencies remain walled gardens. Their workers, desperate to engage in the conversation with their colleagues and the public, live in a rarified world, bound to IE6 and with tools already approved for use across the public sector blocked from access by misguided perceptions of time wasting, value to agency business and mythical security risks.

With the wealth of information publicly available and with a growing body of policy and reform advice already in place in this country and amongst our friends overseas, it is high time that government agencies were mandated to at the very least begin the process of bringing down the wall to participation by their staff.

Until that time, until the walls come tumbling down, Leigh remains absolutely right. The public sphere will be public, but its participants will be a very privileged few. For Government 2.0 in this country to be a success, that cannot and must not be the case.

With apologies to the Style Council.

Is there value in live conference blogging?

Stephen Collins — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 04:20:56 +0000

Like Stilgherrian, I’ve been invited by the organisers of X|Media|Lab Sydney to attend their event tomorrow and talk about their event online.

I appreciate the gesture. And attend I will. And write I will.

But like Stil, I attend very many of these sorts of events, and am of the mind that liveblogging them, or live tweeting them, unless one has an especially cogent observation to make, actually detracts from the value of attending the event.

So, I’ve made a decision. I will attend the event. I will occasionally tweet if I or a speaker or another attendee has something especially noteworthy to say.

But I’m not going to live blog. Rather, I’m going to make notes, compile them, and post a summary tomorrow evening or Saturday.

Once I’ve had the opportunity to digest the material from the event.

Here’s why. After attending a great number of these “big thinking” events – TED, TEDx, Interesting South and others (that don’t annoy me nearly as much as they do Stil) – I find that trying to digest the content and report on it in real time dramatically reduces my experience of the event. I don’t focus on the speakers and other attendees. Rather, I focus on rapidly getting out what I think at the time is the message those watching might want. I don’t absorb.

In a breathless, media right now, attempt to broadcast my own and the presenter’s message, I actually dilute the experience for myself and others. It’s a mile wide and way less than an inch deep.

And that’s not what I want.

I want a rich, deep, relevant, cognitively expansive experience where my own interaction with the event is rewarding. I want to be, as Jay Rosen notes, “the people formerly known as the audience”. And I want my fellow attendees to do the same.

To do that, I need to focus on being at and in an event. Not scattershot partial attention.

The prosaic politics of the tweet

Stephen Collins — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 06:45:36 +0000

Bernard Keane has an especially interesting piece in Crikey today entitled Twitter and the prosaic reality of Digital Democracy (registration required). It’s an insightful look at the emergence of Australian politicians into the world of social media and just how well (or not) they are doing.

Of particular note is Keane’s observation that:

It’s now well-established that some politicians use Twitter effectively and some — well, most, do not. Some recognise the opportunity to interact with voters and communicate with overlapping communities of interest. Others see it merely as just another medium for pumping out their message and distributing their press releases.

Put another way, that’s the media’s favoured political dichotomy of authenticity v spin.

He’s spot-on.

The feet-first, mostly blind jumping in of politicians (or at least their supposedly well-informed (cough) staffers) into the world of social media is an especially interesting aspect of the emergence of Government 2.0 (or in this case, and more accurately, Politics 2.0).

Engaging with their constituencies online is a massive opportunity for politicians. But it is, as Bernard notes, fraught with risk, particularly the risk of coming off as focussed on broadcast and being disingenuous. There are few politicians with social media presences, especially in Australia, who end up looking and sounding as if they really care about a conversation on substantive issues between themselves and their voting public. It really is a wall of noise most of the time. Ill-considered, party political, non-conversational noise.

In Australia, where we have compulsory suffrage, I actually think the opportunity afforded politicians by engaging in social media is greater than that overseas, where social media is often used as a tool to “get out the vote”. Here, instead, politicians have the opportunity to listen and respond to issues in the public mind on a scale they have never had before.

Evidence of the level of engaged Australians interested in politics is there in spades each week as the Australian public watch Q and A and use the#qanda hashtag. This ought to be prompt enough. Let alone #730report, #insiders, #lateline and others such as the commentary and follow-along when Question Time is on through #qt.

They have an effective 24×7 town hall running; something where they can deeply connect with constituents who have strong and well-considered views on issues rather than the “nothing better to do” crowd of NIMBYs and fringe opinions who lob up at the local shopping center and school hall meetings.

What we have here is an opportunity to reimagine our democracy in the shape of Habermas‘ Public Sphere – where the discourse amongst the public resolves and shapes opinion, policy and legislation to truly meet the demands of the nation.

More than anything, I’d like to see the politicians joining the online world seeking out really good advice (maybe even mine) so that they can and do engage in a way the growing public on social media channels is ready to respond to constructively rather than shutting down.

The impending federal election is certainly seeing the federal politicians come out of hiding and into the social media world. They’ve all come a good long way since before the last election. But not nearly far enough.

As a microcosm of this phenomenon, let’s just look at the ACT, where I live. The experience extrapolates out for any of you reading.

I contacted the offices of all the candidates (Senate and House) in the two local electorates prior to the 2007 election and offered to help them (gratis) with some digital and social media ideas for their campaigns, just to see what happened. Every one of them knocked me back with a resounding “not interested”.

For some of the locals, Kate Lundy being an obvious stand out, things have changed dramatically. For others, not so much.

Where, for example, are the two new Labor candidates in the ACT‘s seats – Gai Brodtmann and Andrew Leigh? Sure, their election to the House is pretty much fait accompli, but that doesn’t mean they ought to ignore the online and social world. Even more importantly, where are the Liberal candidates? They are visibly MIA. The Greens? Mostly silent (though several of the Greens, and the party generally are active on Twitter in a mostly positive way). Though Lin Hatfield-Dodds does have a presence it is all broadcast and no conversation – why, Lin, why?

Politicians everywhere have a massive opportunity for engagement and conversation through social media. My greatest hope is that they can learn and understand that it’s not another soapbox. Of course, it’s far from the only channel politics and politicians need to be present in; I’m not so naive as to think that. Politics must go on as it always has, in the physical world. The online is simply a specific and useful opportunity that can be exploited in a positive and valuable way.

Curiosity and #telstradesire

Stephen Collins — Wed, 19 May 2010 06:43:46 +0000

Like Mark Pesce and Chris Rowland, I think I should make abundantly clear my reasons for getting involved in Telstra’s Social Review program, not least because of some of the bile that’s being sprayed about on Twitter.

Like the others, it’s not a ridiculous purchase for me to go out and spend between $700-$1200 on a smart phone I use for work. It strikes me as a reasonable spend. I was, and may still, use my iPhone 3GS as a device to keep me connected while I’m away from my office. The way I do my work makes having a smart device that keeps me connected to all the networks, feeds and information I consider valuable for my job.

I don’t need a free HTC Desire from Telstra for that, I can afford it myself.

I’ve got a pretty decent public profile. I don’t really need to build it up any more than it is.

I don’t need a free HTC Desire from Telstra for that, I have a rich, working, growing network.

So why get involved in this exercise. Well, the answer is simple, really.

Curiosity.

I’m curious about the device itself and how it, as an alternative to the iPhone, fits my connected life as a device with which I can conduct my business.

I’m curious as to how Telstra came up with the idea of the Social Review and how it reflects on and blends with the work I do with clients. It’s an interesting hybrid of crowdsource, crowd wisdom and careful selection through and open application process (which all the reviewers did).

I’m curious about how different types of users will use the device. I’m certainly coming from a geek and business point-of-view, others definitely are not.

Mostly, I’m curious as to how all these moving parts fit together in a hyperconnected world and what that might mean for influence, for social media marketing, for relationships. What it means to do something like this together and what sort of benefit to decision making that might offer the rest of you.

That’s new and interesting and why I’m involved.

I’m sure Telstra are being smart about this; they know what they’re doing, they know they have a reasonably good device on their hands and they know they’ll get a level of benefit out of the program. After all, that’s the point, right?

However, we’ve all been tasked with reviewing the Desire any way we like, using social channels to do so. That’s happening, and it looks to be working.

I Desire more memory

Stephen Collins — Tue, 18 May 2010 10:20:02 +0000

It looks like I’ve found the first big Achilles Heel of this thing, and for me, it might just be a deal breaker.

The Telstra edition of the Desire does not have enough memory. The specs say it has 512Mb ROM, which is where I’m assuming the apps are stored and run from. That doesn’t sound like much, but most Android apps that I’ve found take up a few hundred Kb or less. With several in the 1-5Mb range. The apps I have installed add up to a grand total of 30Mb. If I add up all the apps and storage in my apps list under Menu>Settings>SD and phone storage, it comes to a touch over 120Mb.

Even considering how much space Android OS (unzipped, Eclair is around 250Mb, I’m unsure how much more space Sense uses) takes up, I’ve got to imagine that’s nowhere near 512Mb.

You’d think I had plenty of app storage left, but apparently, this is not the case. I’ve already had to uninstall some apps that I downloaded as I had begun getting storage space warnings. Where’s all the memory gone? Until the Froyo version of Android, I can’t install apps to my MicroSD card unless I root the device and run apps2sd.

I’m not averse to doing that, but I shouldn’t have to, right? I’ve installed nearly 100 apps on my iPhone 3GS and it hasn’t even blinked.

I’m thinking this is a problem. So, how to solve it?

I know, delete the Telstra apps and icons that are preinstalled and of no use to me. Good idea, right? Wrong. You can’t delete them. Typically of telcos and their modded phone OSes, there’s a wealth (around 20) of largely useless and not very good quality Telstra or BigPond branded apps and links that are tightly bound into the install. They register as 0Kb in size, but they must consume some space, right?

So now, I’m just annoyed. I am running out of storage and I can’t remove the preinstalled apps that are the likely cause of my pain.

Disclaimer: I’ve been gifted an HTC Desire by Telstra and they want me to review it here, on Twitter, etc. Sorry if my tweets (and those of my fellow reviewers) have irritated you. I noticed they were getting up the collective noses of a few folk today.

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