As I said when I posted on open data earlier this year:

It’s not about the technology. It’s not about data quality. Or privacy. Or commercial sensitivity, or any of that stuff. That should all be dealt to as part of the everyday functioning of any administration. It is about accepting that we, the government, collect and manage this information on behalf of citizens and that it is our fundamental responsibility to make it available to them in a way that supports the creation of public and economic value.

The open data site is a very positive step forward in that direction.

A not so positive step forward; indeed, more a cautionary tale for public sector managers, is the headlong rush to capitalize on the positive engagement that open government initiatives are triggering around the world. It is genuinely difficult to understand the emergence of cardigan chic, but it is a phenomenon nonetheless. Transforming government is a business that everyone wants to be in; from social media consultants whose experience in the sector can be measured in a page full of tweets to corporations blinded by a sense of their own beneficence…

Adobe’s Open Gov site is an alarming example of the latter. The site is 100% Flash based. It’s like building a website to promote philanthropy — and charging people to view the content. The site is intended to:

promote the use of Adobe technologies to achieve the goal of “opening up Washington,” as well as highlighting ways in which federal, state, and local governments have implemented these technologies. Ars Technica

Publishing data in proprietary formats alone, or as the primary media, is a very bad idea. It does not lead to openness, it does not lead to transparency and it most certainly isn’t in the public interest. As the Sunlight Foundation rightly point out:

if the data format has an ® by its name, it probably isn’t great for transparency or open data. Sunlight Labs

Currently, sixty-seven percent of New Zealand public sector agencies hold some information that they can no longer access. Publishing agency data in proprietary formats is only going to exacerbate that issue…

DIA should be applauded for building the open data catalogue. It is an important step in opening up government information. It is, however, only one step. Agencies should be looking at registering their data sets, but they should also be looking at using open standards for that data.

By way of a disclosure, I have provided a small amount of advice to DIA about this project, but certainly not enough to prevent me commending the initiative (or sufficient for me to legitimately bask in any reflected approbation).

Photo: Swiv

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.

Wikipedia defines astroturfing as:

formal public relations (PR) campaigns which seek to create the impression of being a spontaneous, grassroots behavior. Hence the reference to the “AstroTurf” (artificial grass) is a metaphor to indicate “fake grassroots,” or sometimes “fake environmentalism.”

And, I know you will be shocked to learn -as I was, this practice is surprisingly commonplace. Walmart, the largest retailer in the US, has recently been outed for this sort of dodgy campaign.

They cunningly sent up a blog purporting to be the record of a couple of ‘ordinary Americans’ travelling in a motor home across the US, stopping in Walmart parking lots. Yeah, killer material.

Now, I am not sure what tipped people off to the fact that this was a stunt (other than the content of the blog), but what is really interesting is that the genius behind this “cutting-edge” marketing ploy (at least I imagine that is how it was sold to the Walmart execs) is a long time PR guru who has his own blog.

Does this strike you as odd? Here is a guy who blogs himself, but was insufficiently savvy to realize that this venture was, to use the technical term, a really stupid idea. Of course the ruse would be seen through. Of course it would be traced back to the PR firm. It’s Walmart, people! They are not exactly a low-profile, under-the-radar sort of organisation, are they?

This is a textbook example of applying old models of thinking about public afffairs and communications to new media. And guess what? They just don’t work. A blog, as the PR guru should know, is a specific sort of channel that is defined, in part, by the wider community of bloggers, the ‘blogosphere.’ It is not a simple case of signing on to WordPress and spruiking your wares. There are conventions to observe, like, for example:

• be honest
• allow comments, so it is a discussion
• don’t fill it with the corporate orthodoxy
• engage people

Now PR guru-guy has been blogging since September 2004, which pretty much puts him up-there in the early adopter stakes, but the fact that he still cooked up, or approved, this lame campaign suggests that he hasn’t really grasped the fundamentals of the new media.

And there is a lesson here for all of us: yes, blogs are cool; they are a channel that we all should be aware of and understand, just don’t go rushing out and launching a blog for your agency without giving it a great deal of considered thought. In fact, the question you should really be asking is: why should (insert agency name here) be blogging? Not: why not?

UPDATE

Russell Brown links to this story about Roche’s astroturfing over Herceptin. It sort of makes PR guru-guy above look like a dilettante…