Michael Bryant, Ontario’s Minister of Aboriginal Affairs, has posted a series of 5 videos on a new YouTube channel, all dealing with a contentious aboriginal land claim in Caledonia, Ontario.

Over the past twenty years (or so), there have been several dramatic and sometimes violent confrontations over aboriginal land claims in Quebec and Ontario.

These videos seem to be an attempt to demonstrate the Government of Ontario’s continuing engagement in the dispute in Caledonia - which has been ongoing for two years.

While the medium encourages unrehearsed and somewhat rough production values, these videos may just be too informal for such a serious subject.

They are shot in a casual and unscripted style, with WAY TOO MANY references to the Tim Horton’s donut chain. In fact, it has become trite for politicians to use the local Tim Horton’s as the universal “man on the street” interview booth.

That said, the opposition parties’ criticism of the tactic seems blind to the opportunities presented by new media channels like YouTube and other video sharing sites.

“… “It shows complete lack of leadership on the part of [Ontario’s] McGuinty government,” said [New Democratic Party leader] Mr. Hampton, adding Mr. Bryant’s video campaign just makes a joke out of a serious situation.

“YouTube is not the place to communicate either policy or to communicate government messages. But this seems to be the kind of three-ring circus that Dalton McGuinty is running now.” (Canadian Press)

Over at our Department of Defense, they’ve been flipping around a powerpoint called “Killing with Keyboards” - which makes a very strong point that employees in defense areas can undermine national security simply by being too careless with their work documents and divulging too much about themselves in online communities - even communities ostensibly dedicated to professional development.

The powerpoint was prepared by a private sector contractor, and has been distributed to other groups as well.

The message, driven home with blunt force, is that your frequent but minor indiscretions online can accumulate into quite a database about your personal preferences (food, team - simple stuff like that), which can then be exploited by enemy agents and put your fellow citizens at risk.

Which is why it’s slightly disturbing that the powerpoint’s metadata itself provides enough information that, with a few Google searches, we can pinpoint the author, a gentleman who works here.

At what appears to be the Boeing Electronic Systems and Missile Defense Research and Technology Center.

 E-government gets a broad strokes treatment from the Economist in a special report:  The road to e-democracy. This from the  leader:

“… But shame and beauty contests are still weak forces in the public sector. Failure in bureaucracy means not bankruptcy but writing self-justifying memos, and at worst a transfer elsewhere. Bureaucrats plead that just a bit more time and money will fix the clunky monsters they have created …

That reflects another problem. In the private sector, tight budgets for information technology spark innovation. But bureaucrats are suckers for overpriced, overpromised and overengineered systems. The contrast is all the sharper given some of the successes shown by those using open-source software: the District of Columbia, for example, has junked its servers and proprietary software in favour of the standard package of applications offered and hosted by Google …”

Well, there are plenty of reasons why a government shouldn’t simply transfer all of its IT needs to one supplier - especially one as demonized as Google - but at least D.C. is trying.

Politics is retail, so they say. That’s politics at the municipal, state, provincial and federal levels, and it means paying attention to the details that occupy the everyday life of your citizens.

So why are private sector companies and web 2.0 firms doing such a better job at informing citizens about the nuts and bolts of their civic government and their neighbourhood lives?

Initiatives like EveryBlock, which accumulates government data, news sources, local blogs, flickr feeds and other sources to develop a ground-level view of your life, are not comprehensive but they are extraordinarily useful.

Most importantly, they take many data points and relate them to you and your location - instead of initiatives like DirectGov, which assume that everyone filters their information and their requests through an intricate knowledge of government hierarchy and bureaucracy.

Filmoculous has an interview with Adrian Holovaty, one of the developers behind EveryBlock, and he discusses the problems he’s had getting data from government agencies:

“… On a completely different note, it’s been a challenge to acquire data from governments. We (namely Dan, our People Person) have been working since July to request formal data feeds from various agencies, and we’ve run into many roadblocks there, from the political to the technical. We expected that, of course, but the expectation doesn’t make it any less of a challenge …”

“… I’d estimate we only have about 10% of the data we’d like in the long term, for Chicago, New York and San Francisco. As we expected, some government agencies haven’t been able to provide us their public data, and the reasons vary. A common reason is a lack of resources. In other cases, we’ve simply been stymied by bureaucracy. But we’re keeping at it …”

Part of the problem seems to be consistency of data collection, classification and distribution. Every city naturally has a separately developed civic infrastructure and information management system. Local politicians have also made different choices when it comes to making information publicly available. For example:

“… We publish building permits in San Francisco and New York, but not in Chicago. We publish filming locations in Chicago, but not in New York or San Francisco. We publish zoning agenda items in San Francisco, but not in the other two cities ..”

I don’t know if, as governments, we will ever find away around political considerations and historic quirks in how we collect, process and make available data. But we can start by thinking of responding to the individual need, rather than framing all our efforts by first identifying our institutional preferences and historic practices - and then deciding what we would like to provide.

You could knock me over with a sheaf of briefing notes. The Communications Community Office (CCO) has released a promotional video on YouTube.

The CCO is a small shop within the Government of Canada charged with encouraging the development of professional communicators across the government. They arrange summer work programs, hold pre-qualifying job competitions, and promote the sharing of knowledge and experience among communicators.

One of their tools is the Student Networking Cafe*, where students currently working in a government department or agency can get a chance to speak to more experienced government communicators in a number of areas, like e-communications, marketing, media relations and strategic communications.

The video is little more than a repurposed promotional video for the Student Networking Cafe, but at least it’s a start.

*I doubt that link will work for you - it’s probably behind the Government of Canada firewall.

We don’t price our work - or our value as government communicators - properly. And this is why the vast majority of government communications follow a leaden and title-heavy format that bludgeons readers and reporters into a stupor.

As I’ve been driving back and forth on Ontario’s highways (100s of kilometres at a time), I’ve had the opportunity to notice the market established in highway service centres.

By market, I mean the exaggerated pricing imposed on most necessities and consumer goods by the operators of these highway service centres. Need diapers? 20% more than the drugstore. Bottle of Coke? Add 50 cents. Ran out of oil? 30% more than at Canadian Tire.

The only competitive pricing exists at the chain restaurants and donut shops found at the service centres - and I suspect only because these companies fear their brand would be damaged if they were revealed to be opportunistic market manipulators - like the gas station operator just in front.

Our work suffers for a very similar reason: as government communicators, our work benefits from something of a captive audience. Reporters, lobbyists and stakeholders have a vested interest in paying attention to and responding to many of our government’s pronouncements. These people are comparable to the vacationing family who don’t have time to drive off the highway in search of a WalMart or a Shoppers Drug Mart.

They won’t question the quality of the product - or the pricing - to your face, because they depend upon an effective relationship with government appartachiks.

So, in governments around the world, we continue to open our news releases with a litany of names, titles and affiliations. We bury the lede. We prepare backgrounders and FAQs that answer self-serving propositions and gloss over difficulties. And we set up news conferences that bear more resemblance to a Punch & Judy show than to an honest discussion with the media.

We aren’t challenged, as professionals and as organizations, to change this behaviour because our audience is stuck on that interminable highway.

And we don’t change our behaviour because we are used to driving fast, straight and along with the traffic. We don’t want to drive off the comfortable and beaten path for fear of getting lost, slowing down or simply remembering how to handle a hairpin turn.

So government communicators end up overvaluing our work and underestimating its relative worth - because it’s hard to directly compare government communications work with other segments of the profession.

Unless you’re in a newsroom, where the failures are evident.

From Dana Milbank, a short guide to the language of Washington politicians. An excerpt:

It’s time to stop playing politics.
The other party has a winning political issue.

As I said in my Wall Street Journal op-ed last week …
I am so important that I can quote myself.

The Ottawa Citizen runs a weekly column purporting to shed some insight into the lives of senior civil servants and their staff. Problem is, their EX feature is often self-indulgent and takes 700 words to work through a 20 word problem. (Boss doesn’t know how to use computers. Boss doesn’t recognize work of underlings. Boss would be lost without executive assistant)

Which is why Civil Serf, a relatively new blog from an anonymous British civil servant, is so appealing.

Unfortunately, that anonymous civil servant seems to be dealing with frustration, irritation and maybe anger issues. This is a normal state for most civil servants nowadays, but does not bode well for the longevity of the blog.

Civil servants bring an unappreciated skill to blogging: they are well used to writing briefing notes and explanatory material that couch difficult ideas and conflicting opinions in mealy-mouthed words and conditional clauses.

It’s an unusual power usually left underutilized.

The U.S. Transportation Security Administration has launched a blog*, but Jake McKee has wondered whether the TSA has picked the right tool for the job:

“… The first round of posts and the hundreds (1308 comments submitted on six entries as I write this) are largely focused on questions from confused travelers. The first entry jumps straight into answering the inevitable travel policy questions. Is the blog the right tool here? I’d argue that a social tool that allows questions to be submitted and voted up by site visitors is a far more interesting idea over a blog..”

Click through for other incisive observations about the blog - and how organizations should program for a blog.

*the blog is called “evolution of security” - which may be something of an overpromise in terms of depth and breadth of topic.

How do you balance the need to have a common set of messages and priorities across government - with the urge that frequently overwhelms scientists and researchers to speak frankly about their work and its implications?

From a manager’s point of view, you could lean towards imposing discipline in messaging and some limited form of central review and approval.

But then you’d be getting the same reactions facing managers in a Canadian government department:

“…Until now, Environment Canada has been one of the most open and accessible departments in the federal government, which the executive committee says is a problem that needs to be remedied.

…  The reality, say insiders, is the policy is blocking communication and infuriating scientists. Researchers have been told to refer all media queries to the government. The media office then asks reporters to submit their questions in writing. Sources say researchers are then asked to respond in writing to the media office, which then sends the answers to senior management for approval. If a researcher is eventually cleared to do an interview, he or she is instructed to stick to the ‘approved lines.’

…”They can’t even now comment on why a storm hit the area without going through head office,” says {University of Victoria climatologist] Mr. Weaver, whose been fielding calls from frustrated media organizations who can no longer get through to federal expert scientists who once spoke freely about their fields of work, be it atmospheric winds affecting airliners or disease outbreaks at bird colonies.” (Ottawa Citizen)