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

Seb’s presentation, with the rather meandering title, A brief introduction to web 2.0 for government and non-profits: a perspective from the cultural sector included a case study on how to use some simple web 2.0 tools to deliver public value.

Using search, collabularies and folksonomies and analytics, Seb and his team were able to not only reorganize content on the website to make it more discoverable to a wider range of visitors, but have begun to feed data back to the museum that informs how they exhibit in the bricks & mortar building.

One of the examples he uses in the presentation perfectly captures this process. The Powerhouse has a locomotive in one of the foyers. Extremely popular with visitors, it is not even in the top 10 items searched for on the website. The honour for the most searched item on the site belongs to a frock, which – until this data had been mined – had never been exhibited.

In his book, Creating Public Value, Mark Moore writes that the task of public sector marketers (and he makes no distinction between marketing and strategic communications) is to:

find out what features of governmental performance are judged to be relevant and important by those who pay for the organization’s product: namely, the citizens and their political representatives.
pp. 186-187. My emphasis.

As I noted in the post on Search and Govt 2.0, the amount of information on government websites is multiplying at a rate that is fast outstripping our ability to map it in any meaningful way using traditional navigation models. And, as Seb pointed out, this is the realm of the long tail; at the Powerhouse, 95% of all available objects were viewed at least once in the first ten weeks, and the most popular was only viewed 28,000 times.

By surfacing what is relevant to the Powerhouse’s online visitors, Seb’s team have done more than design a better web experience. Using that information to design exhibits that appeal to it’s physical visitors, and thereby increasing revenues as well as customer satisfaction, they have delivered on the organization’s strategic plan PDF [70 KB].

It’s true that this case study represents something of the best of all possible worlds; both the website and the physical organization are essentially object repositories, and this isomorphism lends itself to a relatively straightforward value chain.

However, the lessons learned at the Powerhouse can be readily translated across the Tasman and are equally applicable to service delivery and policy agencies here in New Zealand.

My presentation at the conference was on the Principles of public sector social media, it is an s5.

Some background. PageRank is the patented algorithm that Google uses to determine where your page sits on the return page of a search query. This means that a high page rank is, potentially, a very lucrative commodity:

It can be an effective and viable marketing strategy to buy link advertisements on content pages of quality and relevant sites to drive traffic and increase a webmaster’s link popularity. However, Google has publicly warned webmasters that if they are or were discovered to be selling links for the purpose of conferring PageRank and reputation, their links will be devalued (ignored in the calculation of other pages’ PageRanks).
Wikipedia.

As Darren and many others found out this week, Google’s warning went from a bark to a bite. It seems there was a PageRank update and Google decided to penalize those who were selling links.

Fair enough, you say. In the same week that saw research released showing 7 out of 10 American’s experience search engine fatigue, who doesn’t want to see link farms torched?

Incidentally, the reality of search engine fatigue for the average user is not to be underestimated:

More than three out of four (75.1 percent) of those who experience search engine fatigue report getting up and physically leaving their computer without the information they were seeking – either “always,” “usually” or “sometimes.”
search engine land.

However, as Mashable pointed out with their wonderfully titled post, Three Clicks to Spam: Google’s Hypocritical Link Selling Policy, it is a little rich for Google to take the high road when they are turning record profits doing exactly this. AdWords anyone?

Now, in terms of reputation management, antagonizing high profile bloggers by threatening their income is probably not the smartest move for any organization — unless you are Google. Third quarter earnings of $4.23billion and a virtual monopoly on search apparently mean you can pretty much ignore the whole thing.

That’s right. Despite the fact they run dozens of corporate blogs, Google just toughed this one out. Not a peep. Both the Official Google Blog and the Webmaster Central Blog studiously ignored the issue. There may have been official comment through another channel, but I couldn’t find it (search engine fatigue, alas).

Darren finished the week with nice post capturing the lessons that he learned, but despite him getting his page rank back, for me the story was a more cautionary tale.

Google is the 800lb gorilla and, despite their vaunted motto, the extent to which we rely on search – and on linking strategies, means that you would hope for a slightly more transparent and engaged approach from them in these circumstances.

Perhaps more terrifying though, is the other finding from the fatigue research; 78 percent of all survey-takers wished Google could read their minds. Apparently the respondents are unaware that they can already do this…

Of course, this is not limited to the public sector but, given our obligation to make information available and to keep it available as outlined in the Policy for Government Held Information, we are in a particularly invidious position.

One of the obvious ways to address this content crush is tagging. However, I can’t help feel that this is only part of the answer to the problem or, less optimistically, at best a short term solution.

With only 600 odd items in my delicious account, I already feel a sense of dread at the cognitive overload when I look through my list of tags trying to locate a page saved a couple of months ago. Looking at Hamish’s bookmarks renders me dumb with equal parts awe and despair.

The Answer

As I suggested in 5 Principles for Govt 2.0, the answer is Search. Or, in Jon Udell’s far more elegant phrase,

we’re in the midst of a long transition from container-based to query-based storage and retrieval
Tagging and Foldering.

An important point to qualify here is that the term long transition shouldn’t be taken to imply a process that is either leisurely or painless; in government, we can rest assured it will be neither.

I should also point out that, for the government namespace, the demand side search issue has already been solved. The new search on newzealand.govt.nz is frighteningly good (if you are a content owner in this namespace, just search your domain and you will see why it is frightening — everything you have posted in now surfacable).

As an example, when I wanted to pull up the Government Held Information Policy, I searched the SSC site using the, what I thought, obvious terms: “government held information” “policy framework” and finally (I am a lazy typist) I went for the whole phrase. Result? Nothing on the first page of the three searches. An advanced search on newzealand.govt.nz, using the phrase “government held information” restricted to “ssc.govt.nz” and, bingo! straight there.

Supply Side Search

The real issue for government is not the search tool. It is preparing the content for search — making it discoverable. This is where we will have to reinvent business processes and essentially apply a new model to the creation and publication of government held information.

However, until we have XML editors installed across government, and we continue to rely on the thoroughly broken model of trying to convert Word documents to valid HTML, then we will need to pay far more attention to these supply side techniques.

So, in the meantime, we need to focus on:

• semantic markup
• seo
• folksonomies, and last but most importantly
• validate your pages.

All these techniques will address the symptoms, but to get to the heart of the issue will require a more fundamental and profound change.

Conclusion

The exponential growth in the amount of content on government websites should be viewed as an opportunity to transform the namespace by creating social and economic value. There isn’t much point talking about the long tail if it is squashed under a fat rump of poorly marked up, irrelevant and dated or superseded content…

Photo: singleframe.

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