A slide from Heather Champ, highlighted by Beth Kanter on the fantastic We Are Media project, the Social Media Starter Kit for Non Profits.

Shh. I didn’t tell you about this, put there’s a preprint of an article destined for a U.S. law journal this fall, arguing that the U.S. government needs to break open its datasets - and perhaps open itself up to comment and crticisim on how that data can be better collected, analysed and distributed.

I emailed the author and suggested he incorporate some of the U.K experience and leadership on the very same topic.

Let’s assume you work for a government body that is deeply involved in highly contentious issues - issues that are very interesting (and frustrating) to communities both online and offline. Let’s also assume that your organization has very little chance of changing the fundamental policies and procedures that frame these issues in the public’s eyes.

In other words, you’re largely a punching bag, buffeted by public opinion, proposals and criticism from activists and civil society groups, and general incredulity from the public.

Is it worth developing a proactive social media program?

It’s always worthwhile to put passive social media measures into place - extensive monitoring of the conversations and debates taking place online, the measurement of shifting opinion and perception among your various communities, perhaps some element of limited participation in comment fields and on discussion boards.

But is it worth the effort to launch a blog or similar long term initiative if your comment fields will get filled with criticism, claims that your social media work is simply parroting or reinforcing your traditional media work, or growing references to critical reports, video clips and commentary that undermines the very point you were trying to make (see this post from the Transportation Safety Administration blog post where they try to explain the relatively small numbers of people actually stopped by no-fly lists)?

What if your efforts to keep comment fields relevant and abuse-free means you effectively build in discontinuity into your so-called “conversation”? Take, for example, the purgatory established for non-serious comments on the UK Identity and Passport Service consultation blog, mylifemyid.org? Or the cutting criticism found at the foot of the launch posting for the same site?

What’s the real question when considering your options? Is your organization ready to take a beating in the name of consultation, openness and conversation? After all, if your daily business is to argue the benefits of an unpopular policy or program, do you have the tools, the staff or even the operational flexibility to reflect and absorb any of the criticism or constructive commentary you are sure to receive as part of a social media campaign?

Or should your approach to social media be more self serving? Forget all those promises of access, change, conversation, progress and participative government touted by aspirational and inspirational social media consultants - why not just create a blog and accompanying campaign as part of an effort to engage your critics on as many battlefields as possible?

After all, you can’t rebut the argument if you don’t even have a ticket to the debate.

In some cases, it may be useful for a government organization to create a blog and implement other social media tactics to argue their side - even if the readers and commenters will have no hope of effecting any change AT ALL.

The key, as always, is use the tool effectively and understand the terrain upon which you have chosen to engage your enemy. It’s go big or go home. It’s time to break out of your institutional language, your ingrained reticence to confront opposition and your dependence upon senior administrators to speak on behalf of the organization.

That’s probably why the TSA blog recently called out all its lurkers - the large majority of the 4000 unique readers per week* that the TSA blog receives - to submit questions to be answered in coming weeks.

It’s almost the Rocky School of Social Media (trademark pending) - when faced with overwhelming odds, continue to engage your opponent, seek out their weak spots, and hope that the more supportive members of the general public help push you through to the end. Paint the benefits of your issue in the most positive light possible, and simply be seen engaging your detractors.

After all, if they’re going to criticize you anyway, why not draw them to a site where you control the colour scheme and the blogroll?

*there’s a metric for you - compare your uniques and comment traffic to that of the TSA blog, which is undoubtedly a lightning rod for criticism on public policy issues.

Technorati Tags: govt 2.0, egovernment, corporate blog, government blog

• Alexandra Rampy has compiled a list of the civil service and political representatives in the United States who are fooling around on twitter - including a number of NASA missions. Now that’s a logical use of this kind of messaging system - give your fans a way to track what is happening with a specific mission. That way, the Hubble fanatics don’t have to mix with the Mars obsessives!
• Brian Giesen, from Ogilvy PR, has a similar list of US government bloggers. He also attempt to classify the various types of bloggers, dividing them into:

1. THE “OFFICIAL” BLOG
2. GROUP BLOGS
3. PUBLIC CAMPAIGN BLOGS
4. PERIODIC BLOGS
5. THIRD PARTY BLOGS

• The numbers are growing for the Ottawa Government barcamp idea. Quite literally, people are jumping out of the woodwork. More info at barcampOttawaGov.

An intuitive and nuanced take on the new civil service guidelines from Paul Caplan at the Internationale.

The much larger and more explicatory document can be found on his flickr account.

“Some of these jokes are minor masterpieces,” said Doina Doru, a Romanian proofreader who spent ten years checking that Ceausescu’s name was spelt correctly in the daily newspaper. (Prospect Magazine, speaking to the influence of jokes designed to criticize Communist regimes)

It seems that a Welsh civil servant, who blogged, was dismissed from his position after running reportedly neutral commentaries about negotiations to form a coalition government in the Welsh National Assembly.

This all took place much earlier this year, but the civil servant has been appealing the decision and was due to appear before an Employment Tribunal last week.

The past history and contemporary reaction to the firing has been reported in the Western Mail and commented upon by Miss Wagstaff, Paul Canning, Matt Wardman and Dave Briggs.

It’s important to note why he was dismissed: for contravening the Welsh Civil Service Code, particularly:

” … sections headed “integrity” and “rights and responsibilities”.

Under integrity, the relevant clauses read: “You must always act in a way that is professional and that deserves and retains the confidence of all those with whom you have dealings,” and: “You must not misuse your official position, for example by using information acquired in the course of your official duties to further your private interests or those of others.”

Under rights and responsibilities, the clause considered to have been broken states: “This Code is part of the contractual relationship between you and your employer. It sets out the high standards of behaviour expected of you which follow from your position in public and national life as a civil servant. You can take pride in living up to these values.” (Western Mail)

The decision to punish a civil servant for blogging appears to lie in stark contrast to the environment in London, where the Principles for Online Participation by Civil Servants were released (which, we must remember, also link to the Civil Service Code).

Matt Wardman appears to have identified the essential point: there seem to be very different administrative cultures in London and Cardiff Bay:

In dealing with this issue the English Civil Service is living in 2008 (thank-you, Tom Watson), while the Welsh Assembly Government seems to have travelled in the TARDIS back to 1953 or so, and is hunkered down in the Torchwood Bunker.

Important Point: just because citizens constantly refer to “government,” no matter if speaking about their local, county, state, provincial or national legislature, it does not mean all governments are homogeneous. A properly working government will naturally reflect local social mores, prejudices, preferences and impulses.

It’s naive and unreasonable to expect that all governments will adapt to technological change at the same pace, or that their administrative cultures will evolve in a similar pattern when faced with pressures to change and adapt.

(Insert joke about policy science, administrative science and Intelligent Design here)

Another Important Point: many civil servants may find that their activities online are, in fact, constrained by the codes, oaths and policies they signed on to when joining the public service.

There are very good historical reasons for the barriers between policy advice, administrative influence and political behaviour: these barriers can be lowered under certain circumstances - but it is always perceived poorly if the barriers appear to have been breached.

That is why information and case studies on social media activities must be shared among civil servants world-wide: to provide them with the debating points and practical responses that will help move administrators and politicians.

Here’s the information you need, and the questions you need to answer, all on a wiki.

Small, intense and really cheap.

Sometime in late August, early September or early October

Go to the wiki and make your preferences known.

That is all. Go sign up.

Or so says Simon Dickson. He makes a valid point that the tweeting from Hazel Blears, the Minister for Communities, felt a little too eager. The continuing use of the third person was slightly unsettling as well.

Still, it’s only her first day.

Dave notes that her consultative process is limited to a week, and her online activity may be as well. I didn’t get a sense that the tweets had been pre-programmed (after all, as Simon points out, we already have a fairly large sample size to review)

Still, are our British colleagues missing the forest for the trees? They have a PM and two Ministers tweeting, soliciting comment and petitions online, running blogs and pulling back the curtain - at least somewhat.

That’s infinitely more than any other government in the world.

Technorati Tags: egov, Gov 2.0, Hazel Blears

Just last month, a team of researchers at Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy argued that governments should make their vast datasets available through open interfaces, certain in the conviction that individuals, community groups and self-organizing interest groups would be able to develop flexible and far more useful applications than any bureaucracy.

“Rather than struggling, as it currently does, to design sites that meet each end-user need, we argue that the executive branch should focus on creating a simple, reliable and publicly accessible infrastructure that exposes the underlying data. Private actors, either nonprofit or commercial, are better suited to deliver government information to citizens and can constantly create and reshape the tools individuals use to find and leverage public data.”

This is not a new argument - people have been creating mashups from public data for several years now, as Tara Hunt and Factory Joe point out in the slideshow below.

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You know, intuitively, that this is a fantastic idea that can only have positive effects for the general public. As a bureaucrat, however, you also know that institutional roadblocks litter the road ahead:

• government-wide open source software standards? (until recently, the Canadian government had departments that mandated the use of WordPerfect)
• data collection programs that are required to be self-sustaining
• long term contracts for certain types of data (like weather data, shipping statistics)
• statistical agencies that jealously guard their data like a mystical elixir that is the source of all their power
• knee jerk concerns for the integrity of the data (and the agencies that originally collected it)

There’s a subtle irony: I suspect the some of the same people who now argue for open and transparent government were vocal proponents for responsible and efficient government in the 1990s. The intrinsic spirit is the same - opening up government and forcing it to recognize the real needs of the citizenry.

As we all now know, throughout the ’90s governments learned to measure activity, to track performance and to set up fee for service regimes as a result.

We’re now faced with a situation where business processes, network specifications, technological limits and institutional reticence are preventing true innovation in how governments serve their citizens.

I just have to wonder how long it will take public sector IT specialists to be fundamentally and professionally embarrassed that they are being handed their asses on a platter by weekend code warriors?