Dave Briggs has pulled together an excellent Pageflakes page that will let you dip into some of the material prepared for and presented during the recent BarcampUKGov - including videos!

For example, Dave points to Jenny Bee, who discusses why she loves twitter - and gives some examples of how government can use it.

[edit] And David Wilcox has some observations about the event.

[edit, again] Tim Davies made six points, of which I present two:

• “We need to talk (and commission technology?) in terms of narratives and stories of user experience: What do we want to do for people? Unless I can describe in technology neutral terms what it is I want to do, and unless I can explain a) exactly how technology will help me do that, and b) why a technological solution is preferable over any other form of solution - I’m probably not going to end up with the technology that fits my needs. Stories are powerful. And we should be using them more.
• We need to be thinking about content strategies, not web strategies. Citizens want information. Government wants to get content to citizens. Websites are only one platform. And platforms are just a small part of the process.”

Jeremy has some post-event observations, including the point that bureaucrats just need to behave more innovatively and courageously, dammit - and get together more often.

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A hopeful, but pragmatic, hope for increased experimentation in outreach and consultation by government institutions in the recent Democracy Journal:

“…By being explicitly experimental with new forms of digital institution-building, we have an opportunity to increase the legitimacy of governmental decisions. The tools–increasingly cheap, sometimes free–will not replace the professionals. Technology will not, by itself, make complex regulatory problems any more tractable, or eliminate partisan disputes about values. What this next generation of civic software can do, however, is introduce better information by enabling the expert public to contribute targeted information. In doing so, it can make possible practices of governance that are, at once, more expert and more democratic…”

I’ve a wholly uninformed opinion about the consultation process here in Ottawa - which frequently depends upon publication in the Canada Gazette and distribution to a specialized but limited group of experts and interested parties.

How do you widen the participation in a consultative process while ensuring a level of informed debate and positive contribution?

After all, the real hurdle to comprehensive and open consultation is the effort it demands from the responsible parties in government: a policy analyst has to open, read, and render a judgment on all the contributions.

This is a bit of a crossover post. I’ve taken an excerpt from a post from Advertising for Peanuts, and substituted the word “policy” for “ads.”

“The process of policy is about making great ideas and then watching them die. And then coming up with new ideas, making better policies, and watching those die and then doing it all over again.

If you’re in this game because you really love policy, the process will probably just make you one sad, bitter, pissed off dude. But if you’re in this business because you love the challenge of starting from scratch for the seventh time, even after you feel like the well has gone dry, and working late on something that will most likely die, then you’re probably going to end up making policies that a lot of other people really love.”

As a government communicator, you must always remember that you are toying with the life’s work (okay, maybe the week’s or month’s work) of a dedicated civil servant.

Your decisions about strategy, minimizing or maximizing the resources that you will put behind an announcement or marketing campaign, even how you handle media calls about an initiative, must always be informed by the passion and effort your clients have invested in it.

That is one of the principal challenges for a communicator in a knowledge organization: how to implement effective strategy without slighting the work of others - or negatively affecting morale.

Over the Christmas holiday, an online movement developed that is attempting to significantly affect copyright policy development in Canada. And it is blazing a new trail for how the public seeks to influence policy development in the federal government.

Michael Geist, the lightning rod for the latest opposition to a copyright regime with significant similarities to the U.S DMCA regime, has long argued for copyright and patent reform on his highly popular blog. Lately, he has been gaining a lot of traction for his Fair Copyright for Canada Principles. And by traction, I mean 38,000 members for his Fair Copyright Facebook group - in a month.

The Copyright Act has long been a bugbear of a handful of academic and legal specialists, with some interest from that part of the general public. Attempts to amend the Act have come and gone over the past four years, with proposed legislation dying on the order paper, or suddenly pulled back before actually being tabled in the House of Commons.

This latest effort by Professor Geist appears to have broken through the staid and static process that has dominated the discussion of copyright legislation in Canada. (Static, but for the histrionics and outrageous claims of the recording industry, and the posturing of a DMCA-obsessed United States)

We haven’t seen or heard of a change in direction on copyright policy, but the bare fact that 38,000 people signed their name to an effort to force change in the system must prompt policy makers (and politicians) to question whether their traditional tools for consultation are actually working.

After all, we’re talking about 38,000 USERS, not stakeholders.

If you remember the faux news conference held by FEMA on October 23, then you’ll be interested in the interview posted by Kami Huyse. She’s interviewed Pat Philbin, the former Director of External Relations for the agency.

Kami makes the point that Philbin, although villified for the Agency’s decision to fill their media theatre with staffers wielding questions, was not in Washington at the time.

The interview is also available as a For Immediate Release one-off.

Dave Weinberger just spent 90 minutes energizing a room full of Canadian civil servants, going on a tear about the possibilities and challenges inherent in the web.

I learned two things:

• if you really, really know your subject, Flickr is the only tool you need to make an effective Powerpoint deck. That and a variety of transitions between slides;
• old uncreative civil servants may just have to die off or retire before space is created for the innovative thinkers to really make change.

A fantastic presentation sponsored by the forward-thinking Canada School of Public Service, who webcast it to 70 other civil servants around the country.

Too bad about his twitter today, then:

“Just had to sign a waiver to use the wifi in a Canadian gov’t building. I pledge I am not plotting violence or looking at naughty pictures.”

David Weinberger points out that an AssistantDean at the National Defense University “has a formed a multi-agency consortium to establish a sizeable federal presence inthe Second Life virtual world run by Linden Labs.”

GovExec reported on this development earlier in the fall, noting that nearly 20 agencies, including NACA, NOAA, NIH, Air Force, Navy, State and Transportation are participating. Bureaucrats will find the following excerpt from the GovExec piece funny - because we’re pathetic that way.

It Takes a Real RFP to Build a Federal Virtual Infrastructure

The IRM College bought its own Second Life island at the start of the summer and Robinson said it now has a real-world request for proposals on the street to build its infrastructure.

This will include conference rooms and a virtual replica of the college’s Crisis Management Center set up this summer in NDU’s Marshall Building at Fort McNair in Washington. Robinson expects to have the virual IRM College running early next year.

I think GSA should quickly join the federal consortium so it can issue virtual RFPs, which of course will be governed by a virtual Federal Acquisition Regulation.

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