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

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?

Anyway, there has been quite a lot of comment, but I think Allan Jenkin’s summed it up best, in his rather colourfully titled post, Tim O’Reilly can eat my ethical shorts:

I make ethical judgements about what I write, and about what I allow others to write on my blog, every damned day. I think I do pretty good. My “badge,” in other words, is Desirable Roasted Coffee. Read it… if you think I am ethical, keep reading. If you think I am unethical, don’t read it.. and let me know. I don’t need a badge to proclaim my honesty. If I did, you’d have every right to be skeptical.

As public sector communicators, we already have a code: it governs not just the way we blog, but every facet of the way that we work (and to a limited extent, the way we conduct ourselves out of the office as well). But in this age of the increasing proliferation of social media, it is not a bad idea to think about some of the issues raised by O’Reilly’s proposal.

When I posted the principles for public sector social media, I touched on the notion of acceptable comment, but I wasn’t nearly as prescriptive as O’Reilly. The reason for this is that, much like Allan Jenkins, I believe that public sector communicators are acutely aware of their ethical responsibilities and this sort of thing does not need to be spelled out. [Nate Anderson at Ars Technica has a good piece on why this sort of prescriptivism will not succeed in the private sector either. Robert Scoble also has some pretty good points from a bloggers perspective.]

What does it mean for us in the public sector? Certainly, we are not immune to ugly blogging, and indeed given our profile are probably more at risk to elements of this.

It means being particularly vigilant when we do launch social media: 9-5 just won’t make the cut, you need to moderate after hours and on weekends to maintain (or develop) your credibility and to ensure that the space is one that is ethically pristine.

It means that we link out cautiously and develop relationships that reflect the integrity of our endeavour – and we do this by engaging before we launch and remaining sedulously active thereafter.

And finally it means that by modelling the behaviour that we would like to see in the social media we participate in, we contribute to making our online society a more inclusive, welcoming and enjoyable space for everyone. Just like the rest our job, really.

I can see why Tim O’Reilly wants a code of conduct for bloggers. I just don’t agree that we need one, and I certainly don’t think that an attempt to regulate people’s behaviour on the Internet is either feasible or necessarily desirable.