Disregarding the wisdom of issuing categorical imperatives for the moment, time and a little more analysis have led me to reassess my stance on the sovereignty of public sector social media initiatives. In my haste to arrive at a series of principles that would serve as a discussion guide for public sector communicators, I overlooked those instances where government agencies would be well advised to use hosted services.

The most glaringly obvious example is video sharing. It would be a waste of taxpayers’ money to try and replicate a service like YouTube in the government namespace.

The important point to note here is that the content you post to these types of sites is not beyond the control of the Crown. You are only uploading a copy that can be accessed and shared by others. In each case the content that you are ’socializing’ could, and should, remain part of the public record.

Much the same argument could be made for social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us or, somewhat less strongly, photo sharing sites like Flickr.

This isn’t intended as (additional) encouragement to start creating agency YouTube channels and Flickr streams. There are still some considerations before you go into an uploading frenzy…

As an example, let’s look at a case where your agency has produced a video. You would like a wider audience than public servants, so you just create a YouTube account and away you go? Alas, no. The Government Web Standards still apply. So, once you have posted the video to YouTube, you link to a full transcript on your agency site.

In terms of sovereignty, government agency channels on hosted sites could be thought of as a little like diplomatic posts; they may be ‘offshore,’ but the same standards still apply.

The review proposes a simple vision:

that citizens, consumers and government can create, reuse and distribute information in ways that add maximum value.
p.20

The authors then go on to propose a three point strategy to enable government to make the most of the opportunities afforded by unlocking its information. They suggest government:

• welcomes and engages with users and operators of user-generated sites in pursuit of common social and economic objectives;
• supplies potential re-users with the public sector information they, when they need it, in a way that maximizes the long-term benefits for all citizens; and
• protects the public interest by preparing citizens for a world of plentiful (and sometimes unreliable) information, and helps excluded groups take advantage.

In the post on the principles of Govt 2.0, I discussed the importance of this practice, ‘open sourcing government.’ But before we (here in New Zealand, or any other jurisdictions for that matter) are in a position to transform the .govt.nz namespace into one that actively encourages this sort of value transfer, we need to look at how we are making the information available in the first place.

Data web

The use and re-use of government information is predicated on the ability to find the right information at the right time, and for it to be made available in a way that enables people and/or machines to access and, where necessary, manipulate it. The review has an interesting counter example of this:

‘I got in touch with the Stern report team, because I wanted to republish it in a format that people could easily read and discuss on the internet. I couldn’t make the person at the other end of the phone line understand why I didn’t want the report in 600 page PDF format. So I said I wanted to be able to read it on my phone. He told me to get a better phone.’
p. 19

The irony of this review only being available as a PDF aside, this anecdote illustrates a classic public sector myopia around the publishing process: “We’ve put it on the web, we’re done.” When what is really called for is a vision of the publishing process as a value chain that begins when agency information is being marked up for publication.

However, this requires a revolution in the thinking that we bring to the management of government information. Everything that we publish becomes viewed as a potential resource for the public and private sectors to consume, syndicate, mashup and reinvent for social and economic benefit.

A local example is Statistics New Zealand, who have just launched a programme to make their data available to businesses.

The Cabinet Office review cites 2006 figures from the Office of Fair Trading that estimate that improved availability of information to re-users could double the direct market value of public sector information to £1.1 billion per year (another pdf).

Unlocking some of this value is the challenge before us. Microformats and semantic markup in general are a good first step, and another compelling reason why public sector communicators should be familiar with HTML. It is our job to describe and champion this value chain within our agencies.

Conclusion

Mor Naaman, in his post The Emerging-Semantics Web (”The Semantic Web is Dead”), points out that most people will be unwilling to mark their pages up semantically therefore what we will see emerge is a ‘bottom-up’ semantic web built from lightweight solutions like microformats and Flickr machine tags. This is probably the case, and a good reminder that web standards are not an end in themselves.

It should also remind us that as public servants we have an additional responsibility to ensure that the information that we publish – in addition to being accessible by all – can be re-used by people and businesses to generate social and economic value.

Photo: dltq

The first thing that occurred to me as I began writing the post was that there isn’t much point trying to optimize your pages for search engine spiders unless they are also optimized for all the other User agents, ie., web browsers, handheld devices, screen readers, content aggregators and syndicators etc. In short, SEO is a subset of a wider field of optimization, and an understanding of web standards, particularly HTML, should precede that conversation.

This got me thinking about the level of understanding of HTML among public relations/affairs professionals. After all, it is our job to advise our employers or clients on how to best communicate using the various channels that use the Internet, so surely we should have at least a basic understanding of these media?

Maybe not. Two things happened this week that left me thinking that perhaps this is a naive or overly simplistic view…

First, I was in an agency presentation where a web development company were pitching to redevelop one of our websites. At one point, they showed us a slide where all the acronyms on the page were highlighted (this being a government site, they reasoned, you would want people to be able to understand the acronyms: fair point). However, when I asked how they intended to do this, they said with some javascript. I asked why they wouldn’t just use the acronym element? And, honestly, they just stared blankly at me. They had no idea what I was talking about.

Here is a hint. If you are presenting yourself as a subject matter expert, at least cover the basics.

Then a couple of days later, I saw that another social media release had been put out, and judging by the case study, it was a success. Which is great. However, if you view the source of the release, you will see that the quality of the HTML is, well, quite poor. Invalid, no doctype, full of deprecated markup and meaningless classes.

Why does this matter? The release looks fine in most browsers and none of the other bloggers of media seem to be complaining about the quality (or lack thereof) of the HTML.

It matters because if you are a practitioner of public affairs/relations and you are working in the online space, how can you claim to be a professional if you don’t understand the basic language of the medium? Would you employ a builder that couldn’t read the architect’s drawings?

It matters because valid, semantic markup is accessible to both people and machines. It is optimised for search engines, for browsers and for people, irrespective of how they choose to access or repurpose that information. That is presumably what the author of the case study was aiming for when he said:

So we opted to make the announcement as an SMR, optimizing it’s format for maximum success.
Geoff Livingstone

I don’t want to be overly critical, because I think that it is terrific that people are experimenting with the social media release. Indeed, compared to some of the earlier SMRs that I have looked at, this one is a marked improvement. What I do find amazing is that so much of what communicators are trying to achieve on the Internet is done without consideration of the standards that support this medium.

So, if we are going to have a microformatted social media release, hRelease, then we can start by issuing releases that are valid (x)HTML. Validation is not an end in itself, but it is a pretty good indicator of a disciplined approach, and if we want to be considered professionals, isn’t that something we should all aim for?

Conclusion

If you are going to specialize in online communications or public relations (in the public or private sectors), then you owe it to yourself, you agency and your clients to – as a minimum – be familiar with the HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0 specifications. The HTML 4.01 spec was published eight years ago: have you read it? Do you think you should?

I’m afraid I can’t really share my overall impressions of the conference, much as I would like to, because the organizers scheduled this years conference (it runs every 18 months) the week before an annual event in government that tends to focus the attention of a lot of people, the Budget. Consequently I was only able to attend three sessions.

Fortunately, all of the sessions were recorded and are available as a rich media stream, so – provided you install the requisite proprietary software – you can knock yourself out watching some impressive presentations by the likes of Jon Udell, Tara Hunt, and Hans Rosling.

I was privileged to sit on a panel that discussed ‘Blogging in the State Services’ with Che Tibby, Hadyn Green and Matt Lane. We covered a bit of ground and, as people began to ask questions, moved into areas like OIAs and knowledge management (not stuff any of us are really qualified to talk about, but I don’t think any of us were game to disappoint an attentive audience).

I also spoke on the last day on Govt 2.0. The presentation is available on the Network site (it’s an s5 show you access via your browser), but it was under prepared and is pretty much just a ramble through some of the ideas I posted a couple of weeks ago.

One final observation: I am thrilled that all of these presentations are recorded, because it means they will be available to people who couldn’t make it, but the format is not exactly friendly. There are no URLs, so I can’t link to the individual presentations – you just have to find your way through the hideously inaccessible and not very usable list of all the presentations. Nice try, just not that innovative.

[Media release for the Standards, again microformatted]

Fortunately – unless you have a burning desire – you don’t have to read the whole document. You can just use the audience page to read the sections that are relevant to your role type.

I would, however, recommend that you do read as much of the material as possible. The Internet is increasingly important as a delivery tool for content both in terms of government strategic direction and communications/public affairs practice. Understanding how the web works (and why standards are so important) is no different to understanding the printing process, or the media cycle. It is just part of our job.

If the whole web standards thing just leaves you cold, ask yourself this question: would it be considered acceptable to build a government office that had no wheelchair access? Or that was constructed from materials that were known to be of inferior quality? Or only allowed access to the wealthiest and those with the newest technologies?

Websites are no different. Taxpayers are paying for us to build them, so every New Zealander who wants to access the information or services on those sites should be able to do so. Irrespective of their physical location (and available bandwidth) and the technology they are using (assistive or otherwise).

This fundamental right to access is non-negotiable.

A very interesting fact that is obvious when you read it, but very interesting at the same time, is that there are up to 4 times more mobile devices in use around the world that have web access, than there are computer and laptops with web access.
Read/Write Web: the Future of Web Apps, Day2

Of course, that is not the same as saying that there are 4 times as many people accessing the web using mobile devices, but it does give you a feel for the incredible potential that is either latent, or in some cases ignored, in this channel.

Ignored? How many of you have tried to access your agency sites via a mobile device, like your phone? Does it render:

1. properly
2. poorly
3. not at all
4. don’t know…

To satisfy my curiosity, I did a quick survey of government sites (7 public service corporate sites, 3 Crown entities and 1 from the non-public service departments), to see how they fared. I was running Opera mini on a Nokia 6255.

The results? Much like the RSS survey I did, pretty discouraging. Despite the fact that there are 3.9 million mobile phones in New Zealand (apparently 74% of us own one), based on this small random sample, government websites are not built to serve content to these devices.

What did I find?

• only 2 sites had skip links
• 7 sites loaded (irrelevant) images
• 0 sites serve a handheld stylesheet
• only 5 of the 11 homepages validate

Of course, well structured HTML and CSS should render in any user agent, be it browser, text reader or phone, so a handheld stylesheet is really only an indication of an agency approaching this space strategically. The fact that 6 of the homepages don’t validate (albeit some fail for fairly trivial reasons, like dropped alt tags) speaks for itself.

While this is not a comprehensive look (if you have tried to download any of these sites to a phone, you will know why I stopped at 11), it raises the question of how we are positioning the government webspace for mobile users. Is it because it is (prohibitively) expensive to surf the web on phones here? Or are we missing just an opportunity to really utilise this channel?

Well, the obvious point to make is that they both look remarkably similar. Both have gone for CSS based layouts (which, in terms of a web standards based approach, is commendable) that use the same background and three column spread. It is not surprising that the Stuff site looks like its Australian stablemates, the Sydney Morning Herald and the Melbourne Age, but the NZ Herald’s similarity is odd. I put it down not to industrial espionage – which would make a terrific story, but to a (more prosaic) failure of imagination…

Technical detail

Both sites homepages are on the hefty side, Stuff weighing in at 219KB and NZH a bloated 381KB. The Herald page load, at least this morning, is a shocker. You could finish your breakfast and the hard copy of the paper before this thing loaded…

Neither homepage validates, but the Stuff website fails really badly. Why would you build a site using CSS and then still include <font> tags? It is just shoddy web development. Period. Both sites are missing some <alt> tags but, given newspaper sites reliance on posting images, it comes as no shock.

Overall

The improvements to the Stuff website are both the most welcome –only because the old site was such a disgrace– and the most disappointing. Sure, not everyone cares about the quality of the markup (except those people using assistive technologies), but you would think the developers would have taken a little more professional pride in their work. What they really screwed up, however, was missing the opportunity to implement RSS feeds for the site. The Herald site offers an array of feeds and, for that reason alone is – from a user perspective, a far superior site.

Fairfax don’t offer RSS feeds on their Australian sites, so I guess it is part of their business strategy to force their readers to the site to ingest the advertising there. Smart move. Why would you want to cater for your audience when it is the advertisers that are clearly your cherished relationship? Fairfax execs have obviously yet to be won over by the whole Web 2.0 thing.

So, what do you think about the new sites?

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.