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

If you haven’t used del.icio.us before, this video will provide you with a pretty good introduction to what should be a standard tool for a public sector communicator.

Other uses for del.icio.us

Aside from sharing bookmarks with your colleagues, there are a couple of other ways to use this service that might be of some benefit.

Media clippings

Still photocopying or clipping media articles and storing them in a filing cabinet somewhere? Why? Save them all to a social bookmarking site and, apart from saving yourself hours of drudgery, you will have an online database of clippings that can not only be tagged, making it a far more efficient system that you are likely to have in place now, but can be syndicated via RSS or exported to HTML and backed up.

Another advantage of these services is that, now the mainstream media is all online, you can bookmark video. But I would recommend that if you want to start saving video from the local news sites, you upload your own copies to YouTube; the concept of persistent URLs seems to be anathema to the local broadcasters.

Links for media releases

Part of the social media release template is a specific del.icio.us page featuring links to related material. This is particularly useful in the public sector where we have to be careful about linking to commercial web pages. Rather than host a list of links on your agency site, you can store these links in del.icio.us and point people to that page. As an example, you can see the e-government links for Google.

Reference database

I found this ingenious use of del.icio.us via delineator, a tranche of Parliamentary Questions relating to specific topics saved by kiwimp.

Unfortunately, this highlights one of the problems with this method. All of the bookmarks in kiwimp’s account point to the old Clerk of the House site and there doesn’t appear to be a sufficient level of detail in the redirect table to the new Parliament site, so every link painstakingly saved, tagged and annotated by kiwimp is broken.

Still, a brilliant idea. You could easily save, for example, all the legislation relevant to your agency and use tags to categorize it to increase it’s discoverability and usability. Or all your PQs, Minister’s media releases and speeches, videos, whatever.

Conclusion

Social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us are an invaluable tool for public relations professionals, whether working in the public or private sectors. The ability to save and tag countless web pages and share them with others that follow the same interests cannot be underestimated.

Similarly, seeing what other people are saving under tags you are interested in supports your ability to track issues and follow conversations that you might otherwise miss.

More experienced users of del.icio.us may want to have watch this Jon Udell screencast for a more detailed look at the power of social bookmarking.

[Media release for the Standards, again microformatted]

Fortunately – unless you have a burning desire – you don’t have to read the whole document. You can just use the audience page to read the sections that are relevant to your role type.

I would, however, recommend that you do read as much of the material as possible. The Internet is increasingly important as a delivery tool for content both in terms of government strategic direction and communications/public affairs practice. Understanding how the web works (and why standards are so important) is no different to understanding the printing process, or the media cycle. It is just part of our job.

If the whole web standards thing just leaves you cold, ask yourself this question: would it be considered acceptable to build a government office that had no wheelchair access? Or that was constructed from materials that were known to be of inferior quality? Or only allowed access to the wealthiest and those with the newest technologies?

Websites are no different. Taxpayers are paying for us to build them, so every New Zealander who wants to access the information or services on those sites should be able to do so. Irrespective of their physical location (and available bandwidth) and the technology they are using (assistive or otherwise).

This fundamental right to access is non-negotiable.

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?

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.

I did a quick whip around this afternoon and looked at the homepages of the 34 Public Service departments, as defined in the First Schedule to the State Sector Act 1988, to see how many sites were offering RSS feeds — and the news is not good.

Of the 34 departments, 2 offered RSS feeds. Ouch. Less than 6%. Economic Development and Environment, take a bow. If you throw in the portal and the e-government website, we are still only edging towards 12%. Which, in 2007 by any measure would have to be described as a pretty poor showing.

Why?

RSS is a lightweight tool, easy to deploy and integrate into most (reasonably) modern websites and CMS’s, so the barrier can’t really be technical. If the RSS in government site is anything to go by, perhaps it is a cultural thing (the site was last updated in May 2005 — now there is a cracking feed). The public sector is generally slower to adopt and deploy new technologies, and this is just another instance of that. Or it might be because agencies just aren’t seeing the demand for feeds.

In any case, I would be interested to hear your views on this, particularly if your agency has looked at implementing RSS and made a call either way.

This comes on the heels of Transparency International’s assessment of NZ as equal first in their annual Corruption Perceptions Index, this time we shared the top spot on the podium with Iceland and — once again — those damn Finns.

What is important to note, apart from how gratifying it is to work as a public servant in a jurisdiction where there is genuine transparency and sound practice, is that both these polls look at perceived levels of transparency and corruption. That is, they are effectively measuring our reputation.

Not the reputations that we manage day-to-day, ie., our agencies, but the reputation of the public sector. The all-of-government reputation. Small ball to drop, eh?

This is not to suggest that we should just be focussed on maintaining our reputation. In the Public Life Values (2005), New Zealanders were asked how much confidence they had in their public institutions. Around 56% that responded reported “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the Public Service. Just over half suggests we still have quite some room for improvement.

How do we improve? We start managing the collective reputation as assiduously as we manage our agency reputations. We use organisations like the Network to:

• exchange ideas, lessons and people
• develop our skills across a broader range of disciplines
• collaborate with our peers, and
• champion the values of the Code of Conduct

We also need to be much smarter in the way we approach the management of our collective reputation. As I have noted, social media like blogs, podcasts and the like, present opportunities and challenges for our organisations. We need to be aware of the nature of the conversations that New Zealanders are having, and how they touch on their relationships with government. We need to start participating in those conversations and engaging more directly with the public we serve.

If we want to build trust, we have to engage. People trust what they know.