The first thing to acknowledge is that, as much as we would like to be able to, we won’t beat the spammers. Greed and ingenuity on the one hand, and gullibility on the other, means that the problem — in one form or another — is here to stay. So what can we do?

The simplest answer is to move as much of our comms as possible into other channels. How can we do this? I don’t have all the answers, but here are some of the things that I think that we could be doing now that would have an immediate impact on the way we work across the public sector.

Instant Messaging

I am amazed (and quietly appalled) that this hasn’t taken off, at least as an inter-agency tool. The amount of cruft that could be removed from the email channel by IM would be staggering. It allows you to see if the person you want to communicate is available, exchange a quick message (if they are so inclined) and you are done. If you need a corporate record, you can always save the chat to your hardrive.

Wikis

These have the potential to revolutionize the public sector. I am confident that the widespread use of wikis across government would be one of the single biggest factors contributing to the transformation of New Zealand’s State Services. Both as an internal communications tool, and as means of opening up government to more interaction with the public.

First, as an internal comms tool, just think of the number of times a day you are sent email with documents attached for your comment/QA. If all of this traffic was removed from email and hosted on wikis, we would all be more productive, there would be a better corporate record of our work and we would be better able to manage multiple comment streams on each paper.

I know that the shared workspaces are supposed to fullfil this role, but my experience of them has been underwhelming, to say the least. A basic understanding of usability will tell you that this is a case of a poorly designed product, not at all intuitive or usable. Unlike a wiki which — and this is clearly a risk — any idiot can use…

Similarly, the process of consultation with the public would be greatly improved — for those projects where this was an appropriate technology choice. See caveat above about risks here.

Blogs

I have noted before that I think blogs are ripe for internal communications in and across the public sector. This would be another terrific tool for moving traffic out of the email channel and into a space that supports more interaction and a richer level of conversation. All easily searchable and discoverable.

RSS

To really make all of this sing, every Internet enabled desktop should have an RSS aggregator. Blogs and wikis both provide easy RSS feeds, meaning you could subscribe to the blogged/wikied projects or threads that interested you and follow the feeds from your reader, instead of repeatedly checking their status in your browser. Simple, really. And cheap.

and, finally…

The final point (that I probably don’t need to make) is that, in eight cases out of ten, it is just as easy to pick up the phone or, even better, climb the stairs and have a chat with the person you were just about to email. Nothing works like, as some management gurus describe it, face time.

If you hadn’t realized that it had come to this, if clearing your work (or home) inbox wasn’t a tedious chore that you looked forward to with the same sense of apprehension that a child with a sweet tooth anticipates a trip to their friendly dentist, then you are either a) some sort of masochist, b) in desperate need of some real friends to write to, or c) will read this post and say, “eh?”.

This does have significant repurcussions for communicators. Within government, we are protected from this by SEEMail, the Secure Electronic Environment. But if you are wanting to communicate outside this environment, then you have to accept the fact that your messages will — should you choose email as one of the channels — be just a tiny part of this wave of sludge.

My agency doesn’t do a lot of communicating with the general public, so we haven’t been forced to reconsider our channel strategy. But I would be interested to hear what those of you in the social agencies, for example, are doing to manage (what appears to me to be) the rapid decline of the sustainability and viability of this channel.

At home, I installed Thunderbird a couple of years back and have ‘trained’ it to the point where it sends 90% of the spam straight to my ‘deleted items’ folder and flags the rest as potential. It is fantastic. Anyone else have any tips on beating the evil spam overlords?