Essentially, Wilson points out that these social sites are not built and maintained by the masses, rather they are the product of the dedicated minority.

In reality, a small number of people are running the show. According to researchers in Palo Alto, 1 percent of Wikipedia users are responsible for about half of the site’s edits. The site also deploys bots—supervised by a special caste of devoted users—that help standardize format, prevent vandalism, and root out folks who flood the site with obscenities. This is not the wisdom of the crowd. This is the wisdom of the chaperones.
Chris Wilson

Unlike Wilson, I have no problem with the flimsy veneer of democracy being peeled back from these sites, as I am not particularly interested in the ideology of social media; but the reality of maintaining Wikipedia does provide some salient lessons for public sector organizations seeking to implement these content management systems.

Resourcing

The first point that these findings suggest is that while the wiki will cost (virtually) nothing to set up, it does require dedicated resource to make it a success. This would be in the form of staff whose statements of accountability include curatorial responsibility for the content, and software that supports them in this role.

Some of the tasks that they might be entrusted with range from flagging redundancies, locking pages and migrating content into other wikis or the enterprise document management system, archiving superseded content, through to jointly managing the taxonomic structure of the site.

Without these sorts of controls, particularly over an extended period of time, you run the risk of, at best, the quality and discoverability of the content will inevitably degrade, and the worst case is that you breach the Public Records Act.

Documentation

Just because it is a social media project, doesn’t mean that you can avoid your due diligence. Terms of Reference spelling out the objectives, governance and – most importantly – your content management strategy. That’s right: what are you going to do down the track with this thing? Is it a case of just install and leave it for the next generation to deal with? Or assess after 18 months, migrate everything useful into another platform and archive the lot?

The other, perhaps equally important, benefit of documentation is that you can share it. If your agency does start experimenting with wikis, then it would helpful for your peers if as much of what you did, learned and, if necessary, bungled could be made available, so we avoid the costs of multiple agencies figuring this out for themselves.

One other point about the paperwork: in terms of selling the project to senior management, having robust documentation will get you a lot further than a Govt 2.0 elevator pitch. If that documentation includes another agency’s post-implementation review and/or final assessment of their project, you are making it as easy as practicable for them to agree.

Conclusion

Providing clarity for your organization about what the wiki will (and won’t) be used for, who will be responsible for managing it to success and how they will be supported in that role, should be a methodical and deliberate process.

If we expect to see these tools become part of the standard enterprise suite for public sector agencies in the immediate future, then we need to manage their initial implementations with particular care and attention to detail — and resist the temptation built into the utility of the product to just fire them up and hope for the best.

Instant Messaging

The first is that it picks Enterprise Instant Messaging as on the rise in government. This is something that I believe we should be pushing for really hard. As I posted last year, this should be in widespread use now, at least as an inter-agency tool, if not hooked into the PSI.

The report notes that there are two reasons for the slow take up in government: IT Managers concerns about it being a vector for malware, and cultural. The cultural reason is substantiated by a quote from an (unnamed) state’s deputy CIO:

Instant Messaging is the biggest waste of time ever created.

This guy obviously hasn’t spent enough time managing his emails…

The authors then go on to note that, in terms of business impact, IM is the communications tool of choice for next generation government workers. And this is, I think, something that cannot be overstated. Every bright, hopeful and shiny-eyed inductee into the public sector today will expect to be able to connnect with their peers using the tools they use in their personal lives. Imagine being shown to your desk/cubicle and there not being a phone: what would be your response?

Semantic Web

The authors also comment on sematic web markup, for both public and corporate content (by corporate, they appear to mean intra- and extranets) as an emerging trend. This is particularly encouraging, for a number of reasons. As the report notes:

…microformats represent a change in direction from a top-down model to define ontologies with RDF/OWL to a bottom-up model to annotate content.

Delivering information across the Web with machine-readable and interpretable semantics offers the potential for enhanced application/site interoperability, automation of information discovery, more contextually relevant searches and options that are difficult or impossible (for example, show doctors in Minneapolis, Minnesota that are open on Saturday morning).

The sematic web should be driven by the public sector. Making information accessible, discoverable and usable should be the minimum standard expected for the expenditure of taxpayer dollars. I have posted on microformats before, so it is encouraging to see that this message is being conveyed back to government business and IT managers through the Gartner briefs.

Social Media

Any excitement about the inclusion of microformats should, however, be tempered by the complete absence of any evaluation of social media. No blogs. No wikis. Nada.

Oddly, The Hype Cycle for Content Management, published a fortnight later (July, 2006), does touch on these tools. Does this mean that government aren’t using these tools, so they don’t rate a mention? I am not so sure. The CM paper notes that, in private enterprise at least, Wikis are “sliding into the trough” (their terminology), with a market penetration of 1-5% of the target audience. It gets weirder. The authors then talk about “RSS: Blogs,” as if RSS was exclusively tied to blogging or the terms were somehow synonymous.

Perhaps this is just a symptom of Gartner’s focus on the tools themselves, rather than the way people use all of these tools to communicate with each other and their publics. In any case, I find it a little disappointing for a firm that is selling analysis to conflate the two. Any other thoughts on the Gartner methodology?

Please note, I am only covering corporate projects here, if you are a public servant and you want to start your own blog, then these may apply, but the advice is intended for government public affairs staff working on their agency projects.

There are 10 principles to consider:

1. Sovereignty: do not use an (external) hosted solution, eg blogger. If this is an agency initiative, then you should host the site in the .govt.nz namespace. I would recommend WordPress, as a powerful, extensible and semantic publishing platform. It is also open source, so it is free and easy to deploy, meaning there is no significant cost to the taxpayer to set up.
2. Access: the site must be Government Web Standards compliant. If it is funded by the taxpayer, then it should be accessible to all New Zealanders. This is another good reason for choosing WordPress as your solution.
3. Transparency: make it very clear who is posting (do not claim that your CE is writing the posts if they are being ghostwritten by you and your team), and how to contact them, online and off. This is one instance where you are not an anonymous public servant. Similarly, (and I know I don’t need to tell you this) no flogs, astroturf or sockpuppets.
4. Trust: do not disclaim the content on the blog/wiki/podcast etc. If you are engaging your publics through these media they should be able to expect a straightforward exchange of ideas and information. If your Legal team intend on vetting every post, the venture is doomed.
5. Fairness: social media is about reciprocity, if you are going to engage and invite comment then accept the good with the bad. Post a very clear comments policy and stick to it. Don’t delete comments because they are critical of your agency or policies.
6. Timeliness: post regularly and be prepared to engage people when it suits them. This may mean checking comments or making edits after work hours and on weekends — be prepared to make that effort.
7. Openness: share content that is an honest reflection of your thinking and position. Don’t set up a social media channel to broadcast your risk-averse, legal-approved and comprehensively qa’ed copy. Remember, this is about engaging people, not boring them into apathy…
8. Ethics: respect what you can legitimately say about your agency/project in public. No matter how small you think your audience, once you hit the ‘publish’ button your content is in the public domain. Make sure you don’t surprise your Minister this way…
9. Participation: don’t just focus on your site and expect your publics to find, engage and maintain a conversation. Get out among similarly oriented communities and participate there. Post comments, email other bloggers and recognize that your site is only part of the solution.
10. Integrity: at all times measure your actions against the Code of Conduct. If you think that you are close to the line with a post, or a comment, check with someone who has some distance from the issue — or hold off posting for overnight. Once it is published, there is no taking it back.

Of course, none of this should come as a surprise. In most cases we are just talking about common sense and sound judgement. It is probably not an exhaustive list either, so if you have suggestions, please add them in the comments.

I don’t pretend to know anything about the governance arrangements of the swedish state broadcaster, so I can’t comment with any authority on that situation. However, I think it is useful to use this case as a lens to look at what is happening, or would happen here.

There are already a number of public servants blogging (see details of the seminar the Network ran last year), and we are only going to see that number increase in the coming months and years.

So, could a similar thing happen here? I don’t just think it could, I am sure that it will. As we move to adapt to any new technology, there will be inevitable behavioural impacts. The potential of social media to radically alter the status quo should not be lost on communicators. How does your organisation’s media policy deal with the fact that any employee can now publish comment about their employer? Does your organisation have a policy on blogging, or on commenting in public fora by employees?

In 2005, the State Services Commissioner said this:

A more recent online development is the rising number of weblogs (or “blogs”). Blogs range in scope from individual diaries to being part of political campaigns or a company’s business. They range in scale from the writings of one occasional author to the collaboration of numbers of writers. Many weblogs allow visitors to leave public comments.

I am concerned about the potential risks blogs can pose. The existing principles of the Public Service Code of Conduct still apply in this very modern medium and State servants should still be very careful that they do not bring the Public Service into disrepute through their private activities.

SSC 2005 Annual Report, my emphasis.

This guidance is pretty clear and straightforward, but it still relies heavily on the judgement of the individual — and there, dear reader, lies the rub. People will make mistakes. They will hit ‘Publish’ without clearly thinking through the implications of the post (god knows, I do…). They may even be completely unaware of their obligations to their employer and the code, particularly if there is no explicit policy about engaging in social media.

How do we manage this?

As public sector communicators, we need to be aware of these issues and we need to ensure that they are understood by the rest of the organisation’s management. If people within your organisation are blogging (and you really should know who they are), talk to them about their blogs, the scope of their involvement in other social media and try to get a feeling for how they see the boundaries to their self-expression.

Experiment in social media. Read and comment on blogs, get involved in communities and conversations so that you become familiar with the environment, the mores and the technology. In order to be able to advise senior management on this stuff, you have to know how it works.

Trial it. Set up a blog as part of an internal communications programme. Think about podcasts as a potential channel for your internal comms. Try using a wiki for your next collaborative initiative. If the channel is strictly internal it will give you (and management) the confidence to see how it works and to identify the benefits and the risks specific to your business.

Acknowledge that it is inevitable. Include social media in your comms strategies even if, at this stage, it is only a part of your environmental scanning. Think about it in terms of the benefits around engagement, and the risks associated with relinquishing control over some of your agency’s communications.

It is also worth thinking about in terms of how you attract and retain excellent state servants. What will the brightest graduates who enter your agency and are networked with their peers through these media think when they sit down in front of their dumb terminal, effectively cut-off from their social networks?

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.

As the name suggests, it is a wiki for quotes — well, sort of a wiki. That’s right, rather than pay someone to laboriously enter all those quotes into a database, they have decided to harness the power of collective intelligence. So, once you sign up, you can add quotes, tag them and add them to your favoutites.

You can also vote for quotes, which introduces the digg factor, an important element in any social media start-up’s business plan. And, to round out their Web 2.0™ credibility index, they also have a blog and a podcast.

I don’t want to sound too cynical, but do you think that this is really going to take off? To me, it seems a bit too much like a cash-in. Having said that, I have signed up anyway…