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

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

Coming hot on the heels of the BBC introducing social bookmarking, I was quite keen to see what social media or Web 2.0 features the new service offered subscribers. Suffice it to say that the initial experience has proved to be underwhelming and frustrating in judiciously equal parts.

So, what is the new digital version all about? It is touted thus:

[...] every page, every section and every advertisement is presented. It provides you with a view of a newspaper page just like the print version, with the same layout and realistic page turning technology.
Dominion Post (my emphasis).

Aside from the fact that it looks just like the paper tossed haphazardly into your shrubbery every morning, what exactly is the point of this exciting new innovation?

Whatever it is, it is definitely not performance. It is slow to load, at around 40-60 seconds per page on dial-up (actually, 44 kbps when tested), and with Internet speeds what they are in this country, that is a non-trivial consideration. And as it is essentially just a series of images, it is completely useless to anyone using assistive technologies.

Even though there is a mobile version, I can’t see why you would want to download a series of large (and expensive) images to your phone – that sort of functionality is the whole point of HTML.

In any event, it is a moot point. Despite filling out a long and complex registration form (for a purportedly free trial) and using Opera Mini (v2.0.4) on a late model Nokia, I was unable to get past the sign-on stage. Frustratingly, I was just cycled back to the same ‘New user’ screen after each apparently successful attempt at completing the form. Now that was helpful.

Someone there obviously has read about Web 2.0, though. They have finally added RSS feeds to this edition of the paper. Bewilderingly, the HTML version of the paper still lacks this feature. Well, perhaps it is not so difficult to understand. There are two feed options on offer: the front page and the full paper.

This is less a reason to rejoice than you would expect. The front page feed yields a respectable 8-10 items. The only other option, the full feed, has over the last week delivered between 140-200 items per day into the aggregator. Saturday’s (at right) is 149. And the feed is, obviously, only refreshed once per 24 hour period. So at the beginning of the day you get 180-odd items dumped into your reader – it’s not so much a river of news as an overwhelming flood…

Why would you pour money into building something that is redundant on so many levels? It doesn’t work as a web site, because it excludes so many people. It doesn’t work as a news channel because you can’t access it (easily, or at all) via your feed reader or mobile phone.

What is it for? Well, if I was a shareholder I would be asking exactly that question. It looks like it is a rather lame attempt to push offline advertising onto online consumers.

It also looks like a ringing confirmation of the suspicion I expressed last year, that Fairfax executives have absolutely no clue about state-of-the-art online newspapers now, or where online news is headed in the short to medium term.

How did they fare? Poorly.

When I opened MSN the first thing I saw was a warning:

Additional plugins are required to display all media on this page. Install missing plugins now…

That is a great start: do I want to install something else onto my machine just to view your content? I don’t think so. As a consequence, a significant part of my screen was blank, so I can’t really give you an accurate assessment of the content that they are providing for their visitors — at least those that have the requisite plugins installed.

Both MSN and Yahoo!Xtra weigh in at a hefty page size: 364KB and 354KB, respectively. That means that for Kiwis accessing these pages using dialup, they are in for a wait of around 90 seconds for the pages to load. A minute and a half to load: make it my homepage? Sure, what else am I going to do with my time?

This is particularly ironic given Yahoo is partnering Telecom on this venture. As we have recently seen, New Zealander’s access to broadband is not a given.

Following my look at mobile access to government sites, I decided to put these portals to the same test. Surely the big corporates are far more aware of this stuff than the public sector and will be much better positioned to deliver content over the phone (especially when you consider how much Telecom have to gain)? In a word, no.

Neither had skip links, and both served up big irrelevant images. Yahoo! acknowledged this was a problem by including a message that told me:

Please upgrade to a more recent browser: Internet Explorer 7, FireFox 2 or Safari 1.2

My message back to them: Please upgrade to a more user-centric approach to web development.

I will, however, acknowledge that at least Yahoo! offers RSS feeds from their portal, which increases the utility of the site, sort of.

Conclusions

Looking at both sites really made me ask myself one question: why would you bother? If you want a portal, customise your Google homepage and build your own (you can even set it up to work on your phone).

These two offerings are for people who don’t understand the web, have incredibly low expectations about what sites should be delivering and have no physical or technological handicaps. Anyone else taken either for a spin and come up as disappointed?

A very interesting fact that is obvious when you read it, but very interesting at the same time, is that there are up to 4 times more mobile devices in use around the world that have web access, than there are computer and laptops with web access.
Read/Write Web: the Future of Web Apps, Day2

Of course, that is not the same as saying that there are 4 times as many people accessing the web using mobile devices, but it does give you a feel for the incredible potential that is either latent, or in some cases ignored, in this channel.

Ignored? How many of you have tried to access your agency sites via a mobile device, like your phone? Does it render:

1. properly
2. poorly
3. not at all
4. don’t know…

To satisfy my curiosity, I did a quick survey of government sites (7 public service corporate sites, 3 Crown entities and 1 from the non-public service departments), to see how they fared. I was running Opera mini on a Nokia 6255.

The results? Much like the RSS survey I did, pretty discouraging. Despite the fact that there are 3.9 million mobile phones in New Zealand (apparently 74% of us own one), based on this small random sample, government websites are not built to serve content to these devices.

What did I find?

• only 2 sites had skip links
• 7 sites loaded (irrelevant) images
• 0 sites serve a handheld stylesheet
• only 5 of the 11 homepages validate

Of course, well structured HTML and CSS should render in any user agent, be it browser, text reader or phone, so a handheld stylesheet is really only an indication of an agency approaching this space strategically. The fact that 6 of the homepages don’t validate (albeit some fail for fairly trivial reasons, like dropped alt tags) speaks for itself.

While this is not a comprehensive look (if you have tried to download any of these sites to a phone, you will know why I stopped at 11), it raises the question of how we are positioning the government webspace for mobile users. Is it because it is (prohibitively) expensive to surf the web on phones here? Or are we missing just an opportunity to really utilise this channel?