The Template Strategy, it must be said, is an excellent idea. The plethora of information available on the web is of variable quality and there isn’t much specific to government. I imagine that this document will be welcomed across Whitehall and in many other jurisdictions.

There are many things to commend the document. It addresses the objectives and metrics that agencies should consider when they think about starting a Twitter account. There is a section on risks and mitigations that should start a healthy discussion among managers who enjoy that sort of thing. But mostly there is a lot of good, practical advice about how government agencies should consider integrating Twitter into their overall communications program.

Naturally, there are also a couple of points that I would make regarding the suitability of the document for the New Zealand context.

My primary concern is around the notion that corporate communications people need to approve all posts:

5.6 All other tweets will be cleared by staff at Information Officer grade and above in the digital media team, consulting relevant colleagues in comms and private offices as necessary. (p. 7)

The State Services Commission has issued guidelines for State servants using social media, together with the Code of Conduct there exits sufficient guidance for State servants to use their judgement when engaging with these tools.

My view is that with some training, some guidance and the trust of their organizations, New Zealand State servants should be able to blog and tweet responsibly and with an authenticity that would not be possible if their posts had to go past corporate communications.

This would also eliminate the risk of

criticism arising from the perceptions that our use of Twitter is out of keeping with the ethos of the platform (such as too formal/corporate, self-promoting or ‘dry’). (p.3)

The second area where I would encourage New Zealand practitioners to adopt a different approach is regarding followers. The template recommends that:

We will however, follow back anyone who follows our account, using an automated service…
(p.9) emphasis in original

I can not urge agencies strongly enough to disregard this advice. Forget about trying to follow people; follower counts are irrelevant. Focus on responding to those people who choose to interact with your agency via the service. Similarly the number of followers that you have is not a metric that has any value to a government agency — and trying to spend any time determining the relevance of those followers would be a criminal waste of taxpayer funds…

Those two reservations aside, I think this document is an excellent tool for agencies to start thinking about how they expand their social media presence.

Recently, Glen Barnes and Nat Torkington launched the Open Data Catalogue and it is encouraging to see how much government data has been submitted in such a short space of time. There are currently more than fourty data sets on the site, from central and local government agencies. These sets range from economic data provided by the Treasury, geospatial data, various sets of energy data and a collection of directories and registers.

The point to bear in mind as you scroll down this list, though, is that these sets represent a fraction of the data the Crown holds. This catalogue could easily extend to hundreds of pages…

So, while we celebrate the initiative of the Ministry for the Environment releasing data under a Creative Commons license, for example, it might be worth pausing and considering how we can accelerate this process.

That conversation is already taking place on the Open Government Ninjas List, where one of the threads has been about the barriers to opening up government data.

While I agree that most of these reasons have some currency, none resonate as much as the senior American official talking to John Geraci of O’Reilly:

There were some interesting apps in there, but overall they didn’t meet with the mayor’s agenda for the city.
Open Gov Is a Dialogue, Not a Monologue

This (completely guileless?) admission underscores for me what is the critical issue in opening up government data: culture change.

It’s not about the technology. It’s not about data quality. Or privacy. Or commercial sensitivity, or any of that stuff. That should all be dealt to as part of the everyday functioning of any administration. It is about accepting that we, the government, collect and manage this information on behalf of citizens and that it is our fundamental responsibility to make it available to them in a way that supports the creation of public and economic value.

This isn’t an add-on, or a ‘nice to do.’ It’s an integral part of our operating environment now.

There is an Open Data BarCamp planned for later this year. Come along and be part of the change.

Photo: Justin Marty

The topline results of our usage habits are fairly unremarkable: 78% of Kiwis use the Internet, 6% are ex-users and 16% have never used it. What is more revealing is the data on our attitudes to the Internet:

New Zealanders who use the Internet rely on it heavily. 61% think it would be a problem if they lost access, while only 2% think this would make life better.

More tellingly, as a source of information, the Internet is rated important by more users than are family and friends – 71% compared to 56%. Word of mouth, particularly that of family and friends, is generally quoted as being the most trusted source of information about companies and their products.

Perhaps Kiwis think of the Internet as more a source of news than product information? That makes more sense when you consider that newspapers or television only rate as important with 52% of the respondents.

Government

What are New Zealanders’ views with regard to government on the Internet?

New Zealanders use the Internet to access government, mainly for information about services (47%), from both local and central government sites. Unsurprisingly, the most common activity is accessing information about government or council services.

What I was both encouraged and delighted to see was that 33% use the Internet to obtain information on government policy. One third of respondents are interested enough in government policy to research in online: that is an impressive result.

Unfortunately, the Australian report [PDF 3.9 MB] – which is in many ways a more interesting read – focussed on peoples’ interest in politics, rather than government, so there is no opportunity for comparison with our closest neighbours… Although it is worth noting that only 25% of users agree or strongly agree with the statement that by using the internet public officials will care more what people like you think.

Fewer Kiwis, only 15%, seek information online about political parties or MPs. In terms of e-government, payments such as rates, taxes or fines are made online by 21% of users.

All of these results contrast markedly with the findings in the Kiwis Count survey that SSC ran at roughly the same time. Only 4% of respondents used a website to contact a government agency about a service. That 17% gap is one that needs to be explored and understood.

Social media

To return to a recurring theme of this blog, it is the behaviour of younger Kiwis (and by extension, younger public servants) that should serve as a harbinger of change in the workplace.

A significant minority of users are active in posting different forms of material on the Internet. 27% have posted messages on discussion or message boards, 34% have posted pictures, photos or videos, while just 8% have posted audio material.

However, it is not just ‘casual’ use of social media. The report notes that a significant minority of users are engaged in forms of online content creation. 13% maintain their own website and 10% keep
their own blog. How are agencies planning for this influx of behaviour into their organizations? What sort of strategies do they have in place to support and manage this creativity?

Of course, it doesn’t begin and end there. The report’s authors note, with classic antipodean understatement, that socializing is a major use of the Internet. They found that 77% of users check their email every day. At least weekly, 34% use IM and 28% participate in social networking sites like MySpace or Facebook.

Accordingly,

most users say that the Internet has increased their contact with other people, especially overseas (65%). There is increased contact with people in the same profession (51%), those who share recreational interests (33%), and people generally in New Zealand (42%). [My emphasis]

Over half of the respondents use the Internet to connect with professional networks. It’s probably not such a good idea to block access to those sites then, is it?

Conclusion

There is a tremendous amount of material to sift through in this report. It is the first that New Zealand has contributed to the project (some of the other countries have notched up six or seven), and it provides a valuable insight into the behaviour of Kiwis on- and off-line.

It also provides yet more evidence (if you are still holding on to the forlorn hope that you can ignore this whole online thing…) that, as a profession, we need to be doing a lot more and urgently about getting our agencies in shape to adapt to — and manage this change.

Photo: kenyee

I have posted before about the seismic change that social media is bringing about for the public sector. As communicators, more than most other staff, we need to be able to track the impact of this change and begin to experiment and engage in order to provide our managers with the advice they need to remain abreast of developments or, in a perfect world, capitalize on this changing environment.

Are you getting the support and the tools you need to do your job well now and to grow and develop professionally? Or are you stuck in a backwater where managers are dismissive of the impact of this change and are determined to continue to pursue a course that was first plotted in the late ’90’s?

Unsure? Here’s how you can tell.

Internet access

Do you have unrestricted access to the Internet? No blocking of social media sites?

What about the ability to download files to your local machine? Do you have a bandwidth limit that means you have to prioritize your podcasts? Or is your internet traffic one-way only?

What about the ability to FTP files to a remote server?

Do you have a configurable web browser like Firefox, or are you stuck with Internet Explorer (I call IE7 ‘the pendulum,’ because it spends most of the time hanging…)?

RSS

If you haven’t got your head around this yet, then it should be at the top of your priority list. Being able to source, process and file an enormous quantity of fresh content from news sites, blogs and search engines is a basic competency for a communicator.

Do you have access to an online feed reader or aggregator, like Google Reader, Pageflakes or Bloglines?

Or have you installed a desktop client, like the free and brilliant NetNewsWire?

Mobility

Do you have a mobile device that allows you to access the Internet? What about reading your RSS feeds on the commute to work in the morning? Can you visit your agency website in a meeting and retrieve relevant documents quickly and easily? That last one is probably unfair, as we know it is not the technology that is the problem…

Conclusion

If you found yourself nodding smugly as you read through this post then you are obviously working in the public sector somewhere, but probably not here in New Zealand. If you were running at around 50%, then you are way ahead of the curve and you should probably contact me so I can hand over responsibility for this blog.

If, on the other hand, at the end of that list you realized that your agency is in the social media equivalent of the dark ages, then you have two choices:

1. start agitating for change
2. embrace the 21st Century

The clock is ticking. What are you going to do?

Photo: J.McPherson

This week saw another incremental shift as I published the first of these social media releases (SMR) with commenting enabled. Most of you will no doubt be wondering why I have buried the lead (SSC has a blog?), but I figure that there are plenty of other capable people to spread the word.

In any event, IABC has now taken up the leadership of the Social Media Release and, as I will continue to contribute a public sector perspective to the process, I thought that it might be helpful to share some observations about the the impact for SSC of issuing semantic media releases over the past 12 months.

How effective is it?

Naturally, it depends upon where you draw the bottom line: media pick-up, comments, saves to social sites, there are any number of valid approaches to the issue. In most of these cases, however, these releases would have to be judged abject failures.

Another way of making the same point: at the launch I was chatting with a journalist, and I asked him if there was any value in the SMR for him. He stared blankly back. Figuring that I was talking passed him, I tried a more practical tack. Was he finding the del.icio.us links helpful? The reply? What’s delicious?.

Now that doesn’t mean that the del.icio.us links are a waste of time. There are currently six people who have at least a passing interest in what is being bookmarked, it just so happens that none of them work in the local media…

On the other hand, a couple of hours after the portal launch SMR went out, I issued this traditional release about changes to the ICT branch. The result? See for yourself.

Is it worth the candle?

Marking up your releases semantically does impose an overhead. Is that a justified use of resource? I would argue yes. Journalists here may be slow to pick up on the new format, but with every release, you are making an investment in the future capability of the namespace.

If all government news releases were marked up using this format, the newzealand.govt.nz search tool could return search results for all news items restricted to a certain geographic area, or about specific topics, within timeframes etc. These results could in turn be parsed into news feeds for local or topic specific sites (including those outside the .govt.nz domain), thus creating far more public value than an individual agency release buried on its site.

Another point that I have made in the past is that public sector communicators can’t afford to think of metrics solely in terms of media. They are a primary audience, but we have a responsibility to ensure that these news releases are discoverable and accessible by the widest possible constituency.

Conclusion

Whether or not hRelease makes it to a draft microformat stage is really an academic issue for me. I will continue to mark up the releases as semantically as possible and to argue for others to do the same. Yes, you should cover the basics and write sharp, factual and informative news releases. The question you should also be asking yourself is, why don’t I spend at least as much time ensuring that the release is as well crafted semantically as it is grammatically. That just is the reality of communicating in the age of the Internet.

What I found interesting about his first post (he has posted two more on the topic with the fourth to come) Reputation: where the personal and the participatory meet up was that the discussion (so far) is limited to individuals; the implications of what online reputations mean for organizations doesn’t feature. So I thought I might explore some of those implications, particularly as they relate to government agencies.

Before I get to the 3-step approach to a reputation management, it might be worth pausing to consider what exactly we mean by an agency reputation. I’m not sure that I necessarily agree with the definition Andy derives from the symposium, at least not in a public sector context:

reputation can be seen as a market in which people invest in reputation, store it, exchange it, and expend it as necessary for other goods.

My take on it is that reputation is a product of the degree of trust that your publics have in your agency. It is not an end in itself — and it is certainly not something that we are in a position to trade. Public sector agencies have public monies and public authority ceded to them by the citizens of the state. The extent to which we effectively manage that money and authority determines the level of trust that the citizens have in their public institutions; reputation is one expression of that degree of trust.

Other expressions of trust may be, for example, the willingness to comply with taxation policies, to engage in public consultations or elections or to participate in the census. None of which, in a functioning democracy, you would want to see compromised…

The 3 Steps

A public sector communicator’s job consists in part as being the curator of their agency’s trust. While their fellow managers have responsibility for the effective discharge of the public’s money and authority, the communicator is responsible for ensuring that this is transparent to that authorizing public.

Within this framework, what then can a public sector communicator do to effectively manage their agency’s online reputation?

Online/offline

Any consideration of an agency’s online reputation must first acknowledge that, no matter how much work you do in cyberspace, most of the transactions that impact upon your reputation will still take place offline. For that reason, you might want to focus your attentions on your internal communications. If you can engage your staff and have them embrace the vision of your agency (and the values of the public service), then you have a solid foundation on which to build your management strategy.

Online, all the time

Your online presence is, for all intents and purposes, ubiquitous. No matter how many people you have in the field, at the counter or behind the wheel, the simple fact of the matter is that your web sites are available 24/7 to anyone, anywhere. Or they should be.

And, as more and more people use their phones and other portable devices to access the Internet, the smart money would be on those agencies that make a strategic investment in exceeding these customers’ expectations.

Not busy, engaged

Social media offer real opportunities, if deployed intelligently, for an agency to engage with it’s publics in ways that are both convenient, transparent and, increasingly, expected by younger citizens who are only just forming their own impressions of what it is like to deal with government agencies.

Conclusion

Ultimately, any and all of these tactics are only ever going to assist you to manage the outputs of your online reputation, not the outcomes. These are contingent upon the nature of the many and complex interactions that your publics have with your agency. However, while you can’t control the outcomes, you are obliged to do your best to manage those elements within your control.

Trust in government is an indicator of a lot more than reputation. It is not just a measure of credibility or a record of successful transactions (the TradeMe model) but is the fundamental social and political legitimacy that we have to keep earning every day.

Photo: sonicbloom

The focus of the project is to consider:

• how can administrations create long-term strategies that shape society while still being responsive to a changing environment?
• how do administrations identify changes in the environment and what kinds of structures and processes are necessary to respond?

The paper begins by asking what is agility, and puts forward Eric Beinhocker’s argument that agility depends on both hard and soft elements. The hard elements are the institutional or structural systems and there are three changes that can increase an organization’s adaptability/agility:

1. Reduce hierarchy
2. Increase autonomy
3. Encourage diversity

The changes to the soft elements, or cultural norms, are about opening up the organization to experimentation within the framework of a strong and consistent set of values that provide focus and coherence:

1. Create a culture of cooperation
2. Foster a high performance culture
3. Develop a culture of innovation

Taking a step back and looking at the six changes that are proposed, it seems to me that the overall culture that is being described here can be summarized as one of high trust.

Managers would need to give their staff the mandate, the tools and the support to pursue ambitious, innovative and experimental approaches to their policy and service challenges. This latitude would be offset, however, by a clearly understood shared vision or purpose.

Why does this matter? Again, it comes back to trust. As the authors note:

Private markets are offering consumers unprecedented levels of product choice and service responsiveness …[this] certainly creates an expectation that public services should be better attuned to citizen’s wants and needs. If governments cannot keep up, they risk diminishing levels of public trust in their capacity to deliver. Without public trust, the operating legitimacy of public agencies is undermined. (8)

Agile capabilities

The paper then looks at the five capabilities that are entailed by the notion of agile government. Three of these warrant further comment.

Outward-oriented culture

What we refer to in Wellington as the outside/in view. The shift to a more customer/citizen centric view in the public sector is both welcome and, from a communicator’s perspective, overdue. Unfortunately, I would argue that the authors do not go far enough, agencies do not only need to look outwards and scan the environment they need to actively engage with their various publics. Trust is built on two-way interactions.

Workforce adaptability

Yes, we need a versatile and adaptable workforce. Again, this is not just about demands on staff. Managers need to trust their staff to experiment (and to make the occasional mistake) but more importantly, we need to re-engineer our working environment to better match the social norms of the workforce. Digital natives bring a very different world view and skills to the public sector, and we need to respond to their expectations around connectedness and mobility.

Successful use of information

The value of government information can not be underestimated. The potential is not just limited to

the creation of more responsive relationships with citizens, who can now get more information to make their own decisions and use channels such as the Internet to access services. (12)

While this is undoubtedly true, what must also be considered is the (largely untapped) value of social and economic benefit that this information represents, should it be published in an accessible format for people to reuse and mashup.

Conclusion

The authors close the paper by posing five questions, inviting readers to submit their answers/responses to be fed into the next phase of the project.

The provocation questions are:

1. How can government reconcile agility with the inherently slower processes of deliberation and accountability under which the public sector operates?
2. What advantages might government have over other sectors when it comes to scanning, responding and shaping?
3. To what extent are public sector functions aligned, or not, to enable rapid adaptation to changing circumstances?
4. What are government’s most significant constraints against agility and how might these be addressed?
5. What does agile government look like in practice?

I would also put forward another question: how can government move to this platform of enhanced capability without further impact on baseline funding?

Finally, I can’t help thinking that, given the nature of the project, how a much better a blog would have been for enabling transparent feedback and higher quality engagement — a missed opportunity.

Photo: Kwong Yee Cheng.

Written by David C. Wyld, a Professor of Management and Director of the Strategic e-Commerce/e-Government Initiative at Southeastern Louisiana University, it is a comprehensive (if scholarly) introduction to:

the phenomenon of blogging in the context of the larger revolutionary forces at play in the development—or redevelopment— of a second generation Internet.
p6.

For me, however, I found the experience of reading the document to be something of an anti-climax. I had downloaded it with high expectations, but as I read through it these expectations were steadily deflated by (principally) two factors.

First and foremost, despite the impressive bibliography at the back of the report – as you would expect for an academic work, Professor Wyld doesn’t actually seem to have read any of the blogs that are written by, for want of a better word, bureaucrats (and no, I wasn’t expecting a citation).

His focus is almost entirely on the use of blogs by elected officials. There is a case study on the military’s use of a strategic blog, but otherwise we see examples of congressional, gubernatorial, mayoral and civic leaders who blog. Which in itself is fine, but it is not exactly representative of the public sector, is it?

The second aspect of the report that annoyed me was the fact that, while the research was impressive enough, it was just that, research. It may be unfair to criticize an academic for doing his job, but if you are going to publish a document that includes ‘Tips for Blogging by Public Sector Executives,’ then you would be well advised to rack up some experience blogging.

There is nothing in here about the relational aspects of blogging. There is lots of references to blogging as a tool for engagement, for getting in touch with your constituents, etc., but no real understanding of how that is supposed to happen. Link love, commenting on other blogs and furthering the discussion: the actual mechanics of engagement.

With those quibbles aside, there is a lot of sound advice in the paper and, for that reason, I would recommend it as a starting point for your colleagues, staff and managers. If nothing else, it may help senior managers to turn their minds to the question of how we bureaucrats are going to effectively engage in the age of social media.

That is when we are not busy at the ramparts, in our rumpled suits, defending the integrity of our system of government…

I’m afraid I can’t really share my overall impressions of the conference, much as I would like to, because the organizers scheduled this years conference (it runs every 18 months) the week before an annual event in government that tends to focus the attention of a lot of people, the Budget. Consequently I was only able to attend three sessions.

Fortunately, all of the sessions were recorded and are available as a rich media stream, so – provided you install the requisite proprietary software – you can knock yourself out watching some impressive presentations by the likes of Jon Udell, Tara Hunt, and Hans Rosling.

I was privileged to sit on a panel that discussed ‘Blogging in the State Services’ with Che Tibby, Hadyn Green and Matt Lane. We covered a bit of ground and, as people began to ask questions, moved into areas like OIAs and knowledge management (not stuff any of us are really qualified to talk about, but I don’t think any of us were game to disappoint an attentive audience).

I also spoke on the last day on Govt 2.0. The presentation is available on the Network site (it’s an s5 show you access via your browser), but it was under prepared and is pretty much just a ramble through some of the ideas I posted a couple of weeks ago.

One final observation: I am thrilled that all of these presentations are recorded, because it means they will be available to people who couldn’t make it, but the format is not exactly friendly. There are no URLs, so I can’t link to the individual presentations – you just have to find your way through the hideously inaccessible and not very usable list of all the presentations. Nice try, just not that innovative.

Before we get to the report itself, by way of an introduction: if you are not entirely sure what this whole Web 2.0 thing is, then you should probably have a look at this seminal article by Tim O’Reilly, What Is Web 2.0.

Back to the Gartner report. The opening sentence summarizes the nature of the analysts’ thinking and conclusions:

Web 2.0 will affect several industries, but none will feel such a pervasive impact as government.

I would argue that the first half of the sentence is already looking anachronistic (Web 2.0 is not just affecting industries now, it is driving them) and, given this, the second half doesn’t necessarily augur all that well for governments.

Why not? Because most governments are still trying to come to terms with Web 1.0, let alone adapt to the rapidly changing expectations of citizens who are experiencing seismic shifts in personalisation, data control and accessibility in their dealings with Web 2.0 businesses.

And this ‘expectation gap’ will manifest inside agencies as much as it will in their dealings with citizens. I have already posted about the importance of agencies evolving into the sorts of workplaces that match younger generations cultural expectations, but I can’t stress how important this is.

Governments, like every other employer, are desperate to attract and retain quality staff and ensuring that employees work in an environment that is socially and technologically similar to their existing experience of the world is critical. You wouldn’t expect a young public servant to work without a phone, why would you expect them to work in an environment where they can’t IM, blog or collaborate with colleagues on a wiki?

This strikes me as one of the shortcomings of the Gartner paper: there is no consideration of how Web 2.0 technologies will influence the internal processes and cultures of agencies. I would expect that internally driven change was just as significant a contributor to transformed government as changing citizen expectations.

Gartner go on to predict (I believe, accurately) that mashups will provide government with opportunities to operate more efficiently and effectively:

(Examples of mashups) requires governments to rethink the way they make their data and services accessible to external consumers, be they constituents or intermediaries.

This is the real crux of the implementation of Web 2.0 for government: who owns the data? And how do we manage it? I started to cover this when I wrote about microformats, and their potential for government. By making the data available for syndication and reuse, we are essentially saying to people “this is authoritative, go out and use it in ways that will make it valuable for you.” This could mean mashing up geo data with contact details (hCards) and agency address (adr) to provide a map of agency contacts that would be updated in realtime as the respective agencies updated their websites.

As Tim O’Reilly observed in Wired this week:

A lot of people still think, “Oh, it’s about social networking. It’s about blogging. It’s about wikis.” I think it’s about the data that’s created by those mechanisms, and the businesses that that data will make possible.

And the more of that data that is structured, the more that is semantic, the greater the payload of value that government will be able to deliver; both in terms of increased efficiencies and effectiveness, and in terms of opportunities for businesses and communities.

Of course, this requires a fundamental change in the way agencies view the data that they collect and maintain. It amounts to, in many ways, the open sourcing of government. Is that a step that we are ready (or able) to take? Will we have a choice?

The Gartner paper acknowledges this as a risk, stating:

As far as re-intermediation — which is where greatest potential benefit of Web 2.0 may lie — regulatory, privacy and data issues and politics must be considered. Much data that could produce benefits is not sharable. Different jurisdictions are struggling with how to produce the requisite policy/legal changes.

What does this mean for communicators?

The vanguard of Web 2.0 in government is social media. And as communicators we are at the front and center of managing this change process. Understanding social media, and successfully implementing it in your agency, is an important step towards Web 2.0, and it is one that will largely rest upon your shoulders.

We may be only taking the first, tentative steps towards Govt 2.0, but our publics will increasingly expect more personalisation, more responsive and agile government. Our fellow public servants will increasingly expect a work environment that reflects their interests, their networks and ways of communicating with their colleagues and peers. And all of this represents a tremendous opportunity for us to reinvent the way that government serves the people. Who wouldn’t want to be a part of that?