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

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.

I think that it is safe to assume that we have reached the tipping point when you see these sorts of announcements. An Enterprise Edition of Wordpress strikes me as a significant indicator that corporate blogging is about to enjoy the sort of uptake that personal blogging has over the last 2-3 years.

However, before we get too caught up in the hype, as the article goes on to note the availability of the product is in no way equivalent to its success. Does this quote ring true for you?

Enterprise folks are notoriously slow to adopt new technologies, especially something like blogs, which many people in big business still see as “dangerous” and uncontrollable. Hopefully, this shift towards enterprise self-publishing will improve the speediness with which businesses react to customer demands.

It will also be entertaining to see how many businesses hop onto blogs without fully understanding the secret ingredients that make them unique — right before they fall on their faces.

I particularly like the bit about “dangerous and uncontrollable.” The whole issue of control is worthy of a post in itself…

I would also argue that the ingredients are not all that secret but, apart from that, I would second the cautionary note – in the public sector anyway. Not because I think that we aren’t ready for blogs, but because I don’t think that there are (currently) all that many situations where a blog would be the best solution for a communications strategy.

The glaring exception to this (sweeping) statement is internal comms. If your agency is looking at firing up an internal comms plan for a particular project, then I would urge you to consider a blog as a powerful tool to help communicate with your staff. Any takers?

So how does it impact upon public sector communicators? Or maybe the first question should be, what is it? For a quick intro, read this quickstart guide. Running an RSS aggregator allows you to keep track of multiple websites -and in some cases the discussion threads on those sites- from one application, either on your desktop, or in a web browser.

This means that, rather than visiting 30 or 40 websites and blogs a day, you just open your RSS aggregator and scan through the ‘headlines’ of what has been recently posted to each site [see screenshot]. Clicking on the headline (2) displays the feed item (3) which can be a full text or partial text feed, depending on the source. You can then make an informed decision about whether or not you want to visit the site and read the article.

Trust me, this will save you hours over the course of a week.

Once you have settled on your regular line-up of daily feeds, it means that you can get a real feel for what is engaging the blogosphere at any given time. It also means that you can begin to identify bloggers, commentators, or other media that are relevant to your organisations – people with whom it would be worth your time engaging.

Of course, we are only talking about consuming RSS. You should also be thinking about using it to syndicate the content on your websites (and I think that this was the killer app that Russell was alluding to).

Using RSS, you can syndicate your web content to almost any other website – and we are not talking rocket science here. It would help if your content was well structured and semantically marked up, but given our widespread adherence to the Government Web Guidelines, we should all be in pretty good shape…

This means that, as public sector communicators, we need to stop thinking in terms of publishing to a particular site, and start thinking of publishing content that can be displayed anywhere and used by anyone. Now that is open government.