When I first posted about the principles for public sector social media, sovereignty was the first of the ten principles I discussed because, once you have decided that you need to incorporate social media into your communications plan, the next most important decision is where you host the project. The answer at the time was, rather unequivocally, the government namespace.
Disregarding the wisdom of issuing categorical imperatives for the moment, time and a little more analysis have led me to reassess my stance on the sovereignty of public sector social media initiatives. In my haste to arrive at a series of principles that would serve as a discussion guide for public sector communicators, I overlooked those instances where government agencies would be well advised to use hosted services.
The most glaringly obvious example is video sharing. It would be a waste of taxpayers’ money to try and replicate a service like YouTube in the government namespace.
The important point to note here is that the content you post to these types of sites is not beyond the control of the Crown. You are only uploading a copy that can be accessed and shared by others. In each case the content that you are ’socializing’ could, and should, remain part of the public record.
Much the same argument could be made for social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us or, somewhat less strongly, photo sharing sites like Flickr.
This isn’t intended as (additional) encouragement to start creating agency YouTube channels and Flickr streams. There are still some considerations before you go into an uploading frenzy…
As an example, let’s look at a case where your agency has produced a video. You would like a wider audience than public servants, so you just create a YouTube account and away you go? Alas, no. The Government Web Standards still apply. So, once you have posted the video to YouTube, you link to a full transcript on your agency site.
In terms of sovereignty, government agency channels on hosted sites could be thought of as a little like diplomatic posts; they may be ‘offshore,’ but the same standards still apply.
3 Comments
Good points, which I enforce all the time. The basic principle is to use existing networks to leverage them. By publishing content on existing networks (always remember to tag content properly) you can reach a wider audience than just from your own website. And of course you should link to / from your own site.
Keep spreading this message!
My view is that government does not want sticky eyeballs (unlike the private sector) – it wants the right information at the right time in the right place. Think of it as “government where the people are” rather than forcing people to come to government. Think “distributed not centralised”. Therefore anyone who measures performance based on govt website pageviews going up, is failing. Information reuse should be the measure, no matter where it occurs.
If people socially congregate in places like YouTube, Facebook, Flickr, then government should meet them there. This means government has to follow the people to the new places, and choose to move away from the old places … a more agile government.
Governments are interested in preservation, for maintaining “national identity”; we have yet to think of the implications of using offshore services for our day-to-day interactions … will we end up with a gap in our cultural history, as we use systems outside of our sovereignty?
Only where we can legitimately claim that it would be in their interest, not ours. And that legitimacy would need to be measured in terms of a wider channel and communications strategy, cost/benefit analysis and public value.
The last thing we need is government rushing in to Second Life, for example.