Despite the evidence and regular predictions about the central role that mobile devices will play in the future of the web, public sector agencies (most of them anyway) have yet to recognize this and build or adapt their existing sites to accomodate these users.

One obvious reason is that public sector agencies’ investment cycles are a lot longer than twelve months and that we will start to see mobile-friendly sites developed increasingly over then next 36 months. That may be the case, but it points at what I believe is the fundamental problem with the .govt.nz domain space: that the management of government websites is mostly considered to be a technical function.

These are not, however, technical issues. The technology has been developed, is already widely used and understood. It is a question of business managers understanding how they can use these tools to better achieve their outcomes.

One possibility

Let me give you an example. We know that the telephone is New Zealander’s preferred means of interacting with government. We also know that it is the channel that causes the most grief for customers (and hence materially impacts upon the agency’s customer satisfaction ratings).

Yet how many government websites offer real-time interaction via the web, using instant messaging, for example? None that I am aware of (happy to be contradicted, point to examples in the comments).

Think about the advantages. You still have people in the ‘holding pattern,’ waiting to interact with a human being, but staff can see the nature of the query/complaint and make a judgement about moving it up or down in the queue.

You can also track contact drop outs against the logged query/complaint and garner much more data about the effectiveness of the interactions, because it can all be stored and – more importantly, given the volume of data we are talking about, searched.

Now to really add public value, you could have the customer service representative tag the data as it is entered during the exchange, for example applying microformats to describe attributes like location and time, which would effectively create a rich dataset for the agency — and for any enterprising third parties, much like Adrian Holovaty’s EveryBlock.

The solution

The first couple of aspects of the scenario above are pedestrian in both conception and execution. The notion of introducing semantics to the process has the potential to transform the agency’s interaction with its publics.

As I suggested above, the lack of coordinated and strategic development of the namespace is because what are essentially communications issues are decided by technologists.

A small part of the solution is wresting back control of the way our agencies interact with their publics; the greater challenge is to understand the technology sufficiently to effectively engage with management and the technologists in these discussions. Otherwise we will be doomed to keep arriving just in time for the ribbon cutting…

Photo: Waponi

Bob Conrad at The Good, the Bad, the Spin has a great post about why PR people should be using blogs, and it triggered a few thoughts about how we could be using them.

Yes, you can use them as a standard corporate communications tool, either internal or external, in the way that most often springs to mind when people start talking about blogging in the public sector. You can also use this incredible technology in some other more innovative ways.

Internal applications

In addition to the obvious applications like the corporate newsletter or management team meeting digest, there are a couple of other creative uses of a blog for your internal communications.

Issues register

Allow people in your communications or senior management team to post emerging issues. The comms team can also add comments detailing mitigations and tactics and include links to media coverage. Anyone else in your organization (with access) can then add material via the comment function. The blog becomes a chronological record of issues and how they were managed. Once an issue is dead, close the comments and update the post with a summary for the record.

Link blog

Set up a del.icio.us bookmarking account and, using the RSS feeds, syndicate the links (and the notes to each link) to an internal blog. Staff can then subscribe to the blog by RSS or, for those that don’t have this functionality in their agency, via email to receive a list of links relevant to their business.

If you are not using del.icio.us (or a similar tool like Ma.gnolia), I strongly urge you to experiment with it. To get a feel for it, have a look at the State Services Commission’s e-government bookmarks.

External applications

I believe that public sector communicators should trial blogs internally before they make the move to the world wide web, but once you have got your feet wet, you may want to consider some other ways to use this tool.

Crisis management

As Bob notes in his post:

Blogs publish information in real time. It’s obvious to say, but the need to release and respond to information in a timely manner is ever more critical. Organizations that fail to respond quickly to allegations and attacks will in effect be giving tacit approval to their critics’ complaints. Blogs offer a mechanism to respond quickly and affirmatively.
The Good, the Bad, the Spin.

This is never more important than when you are faced with a crisis. Your publics will expect an immediate (online) response and a blog will be far more responsive and versatile in a crisis that a traditional, over-engineered corporate website.

Keep the blog dark while you pre-populate all the pages that you will need: contact details, organizational information, pre-formatted media release templates etc. Then, once the crisis arrives, you flip the switch and you are ready to respond.

Another advantage of a blog in this situation is that you can have multiple authors, updating the blog from anywhere there is Internet or cell phone coverage.

Social media newsroom

Todd Defren, who cooked up the social media release template, has also developed a social media newsroom template and, while it is an excellent template, it may be a little sophisticated for most (New Zealand) government agencies. However, it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be thinking about ways to maximize the effectiveness of your media releases. Using a blog as your publishing platform will immediately deliver a host of benefits.

It will mean that your media releases are native to the blogosphere, therefore the nature and extent of their take up will be more visible through trackbacks and specialist search engines. The commenting function will lead to much better engagement (if properly managed) and, best of all, you will be more easily able to use the hRelease microformat to mark them up.

Conclusion

Blogging in the public sector is a relatively new discipline, and I am sure there are other obvious applications for the technology that haven’t occurred to me. If you have any suggestions, please drop them in the comments.

The review proposes a simple vision:

that citizens, consumers and government can create, reuse and distribute information in ways that add maximum value.
p.20

The authors then go on to propose a three point strategy to enable government to make the most of the opportunities afforded by unlocking its information. They suggest government:

• welcomes and engages with users and operators of user-generated sites in pursuit of common social and economic objectives;
• supplies potential re-users with the public sector information they, when they need it, in a way that maximizes the long-term benefits for all citizens; and
• protects the public interest by preparing citizens for a world of plentiful (and sometimes unreliable) information, and helps excluded groups take advantage.

In the post on the principles of Govt 2.0, I discussed the importance of this practice, ‘open sourcing government.’ But before we (here in New Zealand, or any other jurisdictions for that matter) are in a position to transform the .govt.nz namespace into one that actively encourages this sort of value transfer, we need to look at how we are making the information available in the first place.

Data web

The use and re-use of government information is predicated on the ability to find the right information at the right time, and for it to be made available in a way that enables people and/or machines to access and, where necessary, manipulate it. The review has an interesting counter example of this:

‘I got in touch with the Stern report team, because I wanted to republish it in a format that people could easily read and discuss on the internet. I couldn’t make the person at the other end of the phone line understand why I didn’t want the report in 600 page PDF format. So I said I wanted to be able to read it on my phone. He told me to get a better phone.’
p. 19

The irony of this review only being available as a PDF aside, this anecdote illustrates a classic public sector myopia around the publishing process: “We’ve put it on the web, we’re done.” When what is really called for is a vision of the publishing process as a value chain that begins when agency information is being marked up for publication.

However, this requires a revolution in the thinking that we bring to the management of government information. Everything that we publish becomes viewed as a potential resource for the public and private sectors to consume, syndicate, mashup and reinvent for social and economic benefit.

A local example is Statistics New Zealand, who have just launched a programme to make their data available to businesses.

The Cabinet Office review cites 2006 figures from the Office of Fair Trading that estimate that improved availability of information to re-users could double the direct market value of public sector information to £1.1 billion per year (another pdf).

Unlocking some of this value is the challenge before us. Microformats and semantic markup in general are a good first step, and another compelling reason why public sector communicators should be familiar with HTML. It is our job to describe and champion this value chain within our agencies.

Conclusion

Mor Naaman, in his post The Emerging-Semantics Web (”The Semantic Web is Dead”), points out that most people will be unwilling to mark their pages up semantically therefore what we will see emerge is a ‘bottom-up’ semantic web built from lightweight solutions like microformats and Flickr machine tags. This is probably the case, and a good reminder that web standards are not an end in themselves.

It should also remind us that as public servants we have an additional responsibility to ensure that the information that we publish – in addition to being accessible by all – can be re-used by people and businesses to generate social and economic value.

Photo: dltq

Given that Web 2.0 is a term that means so many different things to people, I thought it might be helpful to try and nail down some of the principles that might be critical to Govt 2.0. If nothing else, to serve as a common frame of reference as we start the discussion.

I think that there are (at least) five principles to Govt 2.0 (but I am open to suggestions), which while not direct correlates with O’Reilly’s seven principles, are significantly influenced by his thinking.

The five principles are:

1. Data web
2. Personalisation
3. Open source government
4. Search
5. Authentication

Progress in each of these strands alone would significantly improve the .govt.nz namespace, deliver more value to both agencies and their publics and, importantly, align user experience in this space with best practice on the rest of the web.

Data web

As I have previously noted, the real issue for Govt 2.0 is around the data: who owns it and how is it managed? Microformats, semantic markup in general, and the approach that agency content is a resource to be shared are critical enablers to moving government web interactions beyond the current limited model.

Imagine you are building a new website for your agency. Do you view the content you are publishing (and/or aggregating) as being your agency’s IP, or do you see it as just a part of the wider mosaic, contributing to the whole namespace? If the latter, then you need to build in interoperability, web standards and some forward thinking about how the web might evolve so that the system benefits from your site.

Personalisation

Users across the web expect to be able to tailor their experience to their own requirements. Government is no different. The use of folksonomies, collabularies and the ability for users to create, for example, their own government homepage – to manage different agency accounts from the one place – would be a good indicator of a move towards Govt 2.0.

Ideally, users would also be able to save particular searches (see below), access records of their email, IMs or telephone calls with agency representatives and choose to release (or not) this information to other agencies. They would also be able to sign up for personalised RSS feeds that notified them when their rates/licenses/consultation documents are due. Essentially, enjoy a one-to-one relationship with government as a single entity.

Open source government

I don’t necessarily mean that government will be running on open source software (not a bad thing, in my view) but that individuals, communities and businesses are able to interact with government web applications in ways that are useful to them. So, we build web applications that allow the people who have funded to them to build, deploy and access their own APIs.

Sites like TheyWorkForYou, and MAPLight.org are managing to do this sort of thing almost in spite of the way most government sites are currently built. With a little more imagination, and a lot more structured data, most government content could be accessed in so many more ways: mashed up with maps to provide geographic context/information, syndicated to community built portals to capture information of specific interest to farmers or small business operators, etc. The potential to distill disparate sources down to content interesting and useful to an array of niche interests is just waiting to be tapped.

Where applicable, government could share the APIs with groups to assist them to develop their own. If you want to drive economic transformation, give people the tools to discover information both relevant and useful to them, and give them a way to use that information.

Search

This should really have been higher up in the list in terms of priority, but as part of the narrative it sort of sits beneath the other three. The information must be discoverable. And once it has been discovered, it has to be able to be repackaged according to user interests. So, if I search newzealand.govt.nz for, say, information on a driver license, I should not only see the top returns, but the most followed links, feedback from other users in which pages were the most useful, recommendations from LTNZ about which pages may be of help and perhaps some contextual links to related searches.

Once this is in place, it becomes quite easy to create portals based on vertical or horizontal search. Government won’t need to keep putting up taxpayer dollars for sector or issue related websites, it will all just run off search.govt.nz.

Authentication

All of this, of course, will be pointless unless we can move high-value transactions online. Being able to share my tax returns with a new accountant, or medical records with my GP, stuff that is dependent upon me establishing my identity with the agency and being sure that the party I am about to release my information to is who they claim to be.

We already have a government logon service where you can manage your usernames and passwords for government accounts (or credentials for higher level authentication, such as two-factor). This year will see the pilot of the Identity Verification Service, which will

provide government agencies with a high level of confidence regarding the identity of the online user, while placing people in control of the transaction and protecting their privacy. This is the online approximation of a person presenting a passport or other proof of identity document in-person to an agency.

In many ways authentication is both the culmination of this story and the starting point. If we really want to deliver transformed government to New Zealanders, then adding an identity layer to the Internet here is the first step.

Conclusion

Whether or not I am right about these five principles, what remains abundantly clear is the fact that for government to be responsive, to engage effectively and to deliver value to New Zealanders in the age of Web 2.0 will require a reinvention of the way we think and work.

And, to be clear, this is not about technology: it is about developing solutions for social and governance challenges. The fact that it is happening on the web is just a reflection of the way that our culture is changing. In ten years time, most Kiwis will regard the Internet with the same sense of awe that they regard the television. The question we need to ask is, do we have to wait that long to deliver Govt 2.0?

Photo: tsak_d

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?

Rather than just comment from the sidelines, I thought I would prepare and publish a media release as a hRelease, the proposed microformat for the social media release. I hesitate to call this a social media release because –being a government release– it doesn’t look like the templates that have been proposed. However, under the hood, it is very much an attempt (albeit preemptive — hRelease has not yet made it to ‘draft’ status yet) to publish a semantically enhanced media release.

So here it is: just off the shelf, the first New Zealand government hRelease: SSC signs all-of-govt deal for Google boxes.

The real departure from the examples that are already in the wild (one, two and three) is the detail in the markup. If you view the source of these pages, you will see that the content is just jammed into (for the most part) a ratmangle of nested tables, font tags and other cruft that severely undermines the principles of microformatting content in the first place.

Yes, the content should be usable by humans first. For public sector communicators, that means everyone. People using text readers because of vision impairments or people on 28k dialup in Taihape. The content should also be usable by machines, hence the microformatting. Publish it once at the authoritative source (your agency) and ensure that it can be syndicated and reused by whoever chooses to do so with minimum effort.

The Markup

I have tried to use existing microfomat properties and work from the elements for hRelease as outlined by Chris Heuer. It was also a given that the page would validate. The best way to see this is to look at the code:

1. <div class="hrelease">
2. <h2 class="headline"> SSC signs all...
3. <abbr class="dtreleased" title="20070227">February 27, 2007</abbr></span
4. <p>The <span class="fn org">State Services Commission</span> today...

You can see how the content is marked up so as to make it semantically rich. The heading is given the class headline, the agency is marked as "fn org", full name organisation etc, all of which makes the whole document much more usable — for people and for machines. This is critical for search. You could, for example only spider for hrelease results, or for contact details vcard. So within the hRelease, I have added my contact details as an hCard:

1. <p><div class="vcard">Contact:
2. <span class="fn">Jason Ryan</span><br / >
3. <span class="tel">
4. <span class="type">DDI</span>:
5. <span class="value">04 495 2850</span>...

Not only is this format more accessible to people and machines, it is actually usable. There is a Firefox extension that allows you to click on microformatted information in web pages and it will initiate application sequences. So, in the case of hCard, clicking on the microformat will open your address book (in Thunderbird or Outlook, say) and you can save all the information then and there. Geo formatted information will open Google Maps and show you exactly where the place or event is, hCalendar will open your calendar application and allow you to save the event. Pure genius. This functionality will be fully integrated into Firefox 3.

From here on in it gets a bit more opaque, so I should note that the rest of the markup is provisional only, until hRelease makes it to draft and some of the properties are specified.

I wanted to add resources, in this case an image, del.icio.us links and Technorati tags. I dropped the first two into a <div class="links">. A property for the image had already been described in the hCard spec, so that saved some improvisation.

The tags were another matter. I created a <div class="tags"> (I know, crazy eh?) on a best-guess basis, but I am happy to consider alternatives.

That is about the extent of it. Have a look at the release and, bearing in mind that it is a work in progress, let me know where I went wrong. Or just tell me if you think all the extra markup is a complete waste of time…

Updated 22/7/07

After reading this post from the Web Standards Group on the accessibility issues around abbreviations in microformats, I have reworked the code for the most recent e-government hRelease (on new search for newzealand.govt.nz). The dateline now looks like this:

1. <h3 class="dateline"><span class="dtreleased" title="20070717">July 17, 2007</span></h3>

While, not an ideal solution, it does make it more accessible for people using assistive technologies.

Social media release?

This is a media release that is tailored for a world where the environment in which media operate has changed significantly over the last couple of years. Tools like search engines, RSS and social media have together created an online space where news is syndicated and aggregated in ways that make it almost ambient.

The Social Media Release is intended to make it easier on people to identify and share the most important pieces of information with others around the globe while adding their own valuable perspective and/or editorial. It also takes full advantage of HTML, multimedia and the network effects enabled by the Internet by using structured data via the Microformat, which ultimately increases its findability by interested parties – which is ultimately the driving purpose of public relations and the press release specifically.
Chris Heuer

Microformats?

Microformats are simple, standard formats for semantically marking up information, making that information easier to discover and share. Perhaps the best known microformat is hCard, the format for contact information. Using an open data format for this information means that it is discoverable by people and by machines. hCard information can be downloaded and easily saved into your existing contact book, like Outlook or Thunderbird and – more importantly – it can be searched, indexed and syndicated by machines (browsers, web crawlers or custom scripts).

You can see microformatted information in action on Upcoming.org, a social events calendar that spiders and presents hCalendar information, or on Flickr, where all the personal profiles are stored in hCard.

The social media release group are proposing a microformat for media releases, hRelease.

So what?

For public sector communicators there are probably at least two salient points. One, the development of the template and the microformat are a good indication that we should be paying attention to the elements of the format, if not putting out releases this way ourselves: can you really see Ministry X putting out a release with a digg this! link at the bottom?

Two, microformats have tremendous potential. With the launch of the new search technology in 2007, we will have the power not just to index HTML pages, but elements of those pages. So, for example, we could index all the published hCard information in the .govt namespace and then republish/syndicate it any number of ways. Same with hCalendar, or hResume for www.jobs.govt.nz.

By using open data formats, we transform the way government information is published, discovered and shared. It is published once, from an authoritative source, and then can be syndicated and repackaged inside and outside government. It means we stop thinking of government websites as a single repository for agency specific information, and start seeing those sites as part of the publishing vehicle for all-of-government information. Another piece in the mosaic…

That is starting to sound like transformed government to me. Your thoughts?