Wow. Sucks to the press attache to the French Embassy in Washington.

Chris Anderson just outed Amaury Laporte, as well as dozens of other people, for spamming his inbox.

“All of them have sent me something inappropriate at some point in the past 30 days. Many of them sent press releases; others just added me to a distribution list without asking.”

As a result, he’s blocked their addresses.

The comments to the post are valuable for their discussion of how public relations pros (or amateurs) handle their mail lists.

Sorry folks - I’m going to interrupt with a little Ottawa civil servant code here.

If you’re an IS-04 or IS-05, bilingual, live in the National Capital Region and can answer the question “what is your favourite feed reader” - please send me an email at colin@canuckflack.com

Looks like Prime Minister Gordon Brown has laid down a marker for online government services for citizens - and smack dab in the middle of a lengthy discourse about liberty, privacy and information management.

“… This is the century of information. Our ability to compete in the global economy, to protect ourselves against crime and terrorist attack, depends not just on natural wealth or on walls or fences but on our ability to use information - in industry, in our schools and universities, at our borders, in our police forces and intelligence services. And it is clear that we can use DNA to help solve crimes and we can use new powers of access to information to deny terrorists and criminals financial freedom and the ability to move across borders.

At the same time, a great prize of the information age is that by sharing information across the public sector - responsibly, transparently but also swiftly - we can now deliver personalised services for millions of people, something not dreamt of in 1945 and not possible even ten years ago. So for a pensioner, for example, this might mean dealing with issues about their pension, meals on wheels and a handrail at home together in one phone call or visit, even though the data about those services is held by different bits of the public and voluntary sectors.

But if Governments do not insist on accountability where people’s data is concerned - and are not held independently to account - then we risk losing people’s trust which is fundamental to all these issues and more…”

Now, I know there’s a long history of online services in Great Britain, and an extensive data protection regime. I have to think, though, that this speech sends some specific messages to the people working on Web 2.0 apps for the British government - as well as a lot of other regulatory specialists.

Technorati Tags: privacy, liberty, data protection, egovernment, epolitics

Another international organization is hitting the beaches of Second Life. On October 26, the World Bank is releasing the latest report from the Doing Business group:

“…“Second Life, as a global community with residents from more than 100 countries, is an ideal venue to host a virtual launch of a report that compares how easy it is for people to start and operate a business in 178 economies,” Dahlia Khalifa said.

Second Life is on the frontier of collaboration and technology. It brings people from around the world together by removing boundaries,” she added. …(news release)

It’s a noble effort and an example that the World Bank and its’ partners are looking for new ways to communicate their ideas - but Second Life has not proven its worth as a communication tool.

Earlier this year, Eric Kintz at HP argued why he still needed convincing about Second Life. Bandwidth and computing power were among the factors he identified for his reluctance to jump on the bandwagon, so to speak.

Those are very big issues for most government departments. Even OECD members have to evaluate the capacity of their network to deliver content over a service like Second Life - but also their network’s capacity to deliver that content back to their own employees.

I suspect that many organizations with outposts in Second Life (like Sweden) have set up separate networks and better equipment for their in-world representatives.

More on the event:

“…The event will be an open forum where policy makers and the public from around the world, including Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East, can ask questions, challenge the findings, and contribute to a global business dialogue aimed at stimulating reforms that improve the business environment, and ultimately create more business startups, job opportunities, and economic growth.

Digital copies of the report’s overview, as well as World Bank–IFC virtual apparel and products, will be available to Second Life residents who attend the event.”

How are the clients of the World Bank - many of them living in remote corners of the internet - supposed to sign on for this report launch?

XP from Canuckflack

Technorati Tags: Second Life, World Bank, Doing Business, third world, international organizations, multilateral

Okay. I’ll let the cat out of the bag. Most documents signed by a Minister or Secretary were not actually written by that person.

Shocking, I know, but it’s the truth. In fact, if there’s an official crest at the top of the document, it was probably written by:

• a staffer in the political office
• the Deputy’s correspondence unit
• the Department’s public affairs unit
• or - god forbid - someone in the department with an intimate knowledge of the file in question.

Of course, the document was eventually reviewed and approved by the official - maybe with some small or even major changes. Let’s remember that the workload of most Ministers and Secretaries is so great, they rarely have the time to compose business correspondence.
The institutional default to ghost writing is so ubiquitous, I have to guess it played some part in the decision by a Swedish Minister’s press secretary to fake an online Q&A with a national newspaper.

Hans passes along that Lisa Wärn, the press secretary to the Swedish Minister for Enterprise and Energy, apparently double booked her boss for a live interview and online interview at the same time.

In an effort to keep both commitments, Wärn impersonated her boss in an online Q&A with Aftonbladet.se - and was caught out.

My Swedish isn’t up to scratch, so I can’t comment further on the actual details of the exchange or the repercussions,  but it does seem a pity that the organization was willing to participate in the medium, but failed to be completely forthcoming about who was participating.

Technorati Tags: epolitics, egovernment, online news

As I pushed through the final stages of preparing one of our annual reports this week, I was reminded that public sector organizations MUST communicate with ALL their stakeholders.

For social media evangelists, this means we must remember that the world cannot be migrated to online information, publications and connections - at least not yet.

For example - our annual report, while not a thick publication, makes for a relatively big .pdf file. Nowhere near the size of an .mp3 or a video, but large enough that quite a few Canadians would be unable to download it easily.

You have to remember, you see, that not all communities have broadband. Not all Canadians have computers, or even access to a computer.

And it’s not just a question whether our intended audiences have the right appliances to access our content.

Not all Canadians are literate at a university or college level.

As public servants, we have to serve all our citizens. And that is one of the brakes on the full implementation of web 2.0 apps and social media in the government setting.

“And that’s why birds do it, bees do it,
even educated fleas do it,
Let’s do it, let’s [start to blog]“

Wow. Even the International Monetary Fund is getting into blogging with their Public Financial Management Blog.

I’ll tell you the common factors amongst most of the public sector blogs:

• the authors work for an agency or international organization with little immediate political direction
• the subject matter leans toward complex subjects with many interpretations
• there is already considerable public debate about the subject matter
• the target groups for the blogs are not homogeneous: it’s not a case of academics speaking only to their colleagues, or civil servants speaking at the public

It’s contradictory, but it’s true. The departments, ministries, agencies and boards you would expect to experiment with social media - like health promotion, consumer safety, business development - have not. They have not translated their offline activities into online action, no matter how easy a process it may seem.

Instead, they’ve left all the heavy lifting to the wonks, the geeks and the closet cases.

h/t to the World Bank’s Private Sector Development Blog

I’m not saying this is my experience, or my world, but I thought I’d share it with you:

“… The Minister took speeches seriously. He saw them as occasions to demonstrate his erudition by impressing audiences with quotations, statistics and flowery language. He had no sense of occasion: every speech, no matter how informal or mundane the occasion, had to be written not for the moment but for posterity.

All this made Beth’s job a living nightmare. Not only did she have to co-ordinate the speechwriting process so that it met the Minister’s exacting standards, she had to do it in time for both translation into the second official language and for distribution to the breathless media, most of whom she knew would glance at the title and relegate the document to either the blue circular file or to the back pages of the Saturday edition…” (Ottawa Citizen)

That’s from this week’s entry in the the E.X. Files - a weekly column that putatively speaks from the voice of a jaded and frustrated executive in the Canadian public service.

This week, the column focuses on the art of preparing speeches for government ministers.

Here’s a new twist on the implications of social media for government organizations - as fodder for union disputes about the staffing of new graduates.

A couple of former Canada Border Services Agency employees - who don’t seem to have been hired for full-time work after several summers as part-timers - have been tracking the Facebook postings of summer students and new recruits for the Agency.

In these posts, comments and profiles, the recruits talk openly and maybe a little too frankly about their work. Oh - and have posted pictures of themselves drinking while in uniform.

There are certainly implications for an organization’s public image, but even greater are the obvious challenges for the internal communications and human resources teams.

Technorati Tags: Facebook. government communications, border guards

How does your budget account for blogger outreach? Is it couched within a larger media outreach or stakeholder relations program? Or is it simply a one-off contract with a public relations firm?

Many social media experts counsel organizations to build a relationship with bloggers, to maintain contact and ensure a steady flow of information and comments in both directions.

Many governments find relationships easier to build with bloggers of a like-minded political bent - even if their total blogger outreach program attempts to build links with bloggers across the political spectrum.

How transparent is this relationship? Are your contracts airtight and free of any hint of conflict of interest or self-dealing?

Even more importantly - how much of a “chinese wall” has been established between your blogger outreach program and your day-to-day communications work?

Unfortunately, bloggers are still viewed as possibly biased, poorly sourced and likely conflicted.

One Minister’s office in Ottawa is facing this problem. It appears they hired a consultant to produce some communications work - a consultant who happens to write a politically friendly blog.

No matter how this contract was developed, or the distance between the consultant’s personal blogging work and her professional communications work, there is an appearance of impropriety.

It’s never a good thing when your spokesperson has to say “We do not pay bloggers in our office.” (Ottawa Citizen)