Having just got off the phone with Jeremy Gould, I wonder what appetite there is for a Government Barcamp, likely in Ottawa in September or October?

All the details are up in the air, but I’m imaging a very flexible and co-operative event, where we can get together to discuss personal initiatives in social media and bang heads about how to move innovative technology and tactics further within the context of working for the Government of Canada.

If you can, respond in the comments, so others in town will get an idea of the demand for this sort of self-organized social media event, I would appreciate it.

Otherwise, email me at colin@canuckflack.com.

Hopefully, we can generate as much energy as the UK version.

and I’m jealous of all the other Brits, heading off to their facilitation get-togethers, their community building projects and their semi-secretive social media initiatives for government.

Look at this recent twitter from Simon:

@Canuckflack Wait til you see next week. We’re going mashup crazy.

Meanwhile, he’s also pointing to experiments like the twittering of the next diplomatic mission to Washington. This from the official statement from 10 Downing Street:

“…Gordon Brown will visit the US next week, his second trip to the country as Prime Minister.

The Downing Street website will run a live microsite including images, rolling updates and a Twitter feed throughout the PM’s stay from 16 - 19 April. Log on from Wednesday to follow the PM’s activities.

Mr Brown is expected to visit Boston, the United Nations in New York and meet President Bush at the White House in Washington. His meetings will focus on the global economy and other areas of mutual bilateral interest.

Gordon Brown’s first trip to the US as PM saw him travel to Camp David in July last year.

Seeing as I AM a social media nerd, or a real politics nerd, I would ask:

• does this mean there’s a communications assistant responsible for the twitter feed?
• what sort of vetting process is there for twitter messages? On the fly?
• is the content going to concentrate on policy announcements? Any chance of side remarks about the entrees at the state dinner? Snide remarks about the little kids handing over flowers at events?
• what sort of twitter app are they going to use? Is it on a BlackBerry, Treo or other PDA?

Technorati Tags: government communications, United Kingdom, Gordon Brown, twitter, public diplomacy

Had an interesting meeting with a fellow Director of Communications yesterday - but this guy was from the Government of New Zealand. It’s always useful to compare how the communications function is managed in sister parliamentary systems - and often somewhat startling that the function can evolve in very different ways.

Midway through our conversation, I noticed that his Moleskine notebook had an embossed insignia on the back. Turns out Air New Zealand gives out custom notebooks to frequent fliers of a sort.

Sniff.

Here’s the new strategy for communications undertaken by the European Union: a shared agenda and framework, but with an extremely local focus. The innovation? Looks like the EU may pony up the funds to underwrite some of this activity.

For too long we have blamed one another for the EU’s communication failures. It is time to work together on a shared agenda based on agreed priorities.
Cooperation and coherent communication is the way forward. Moreover, we need an agreed framework within which to cooperate. What we proposed in our recent paper is an inter-institutional agreement under which much of the communication work done by the commission, council and parliament would be based on a common annual work plan, reflecting a common set of communication priorities and linked to the annual policy strategy the three institutions have agreed on.
The commission has also proposed to establish management partnerships with individual member states. To put it simply, this means that individual governments – if they so wish – will implement specific communication plans that have been agreed with the commission and are financed by the commission. The action taken under these plans should be as decentralized as possible – with the emphasis on going local.

That’s an excerpt from an article penned by Margot Wallström, the EU Commissioner responsible for communications, in Parliament Magazine.

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.

“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

The U.S State Department has built an extensive wiki-like repository for articles and information for its diplomats, says Federal Computer Week. Over 1400 articles are available, and over 250 wiki authors have been identified, as part of the effort to make more information available to diplomats and workers across the department.

“We do not seek to replicate the information contained within Wikipedia, but rather to answer ‘What are the issues for Embassy Quito?’ or ‘What are the functions of the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor?’ A wiki for State is designed to harness the input of the organization to explain what it is and what it does. In an agency that can ill-afford reinvention, the wiki model, one of widely-available, electronically searchable textual information, may serve as a valuable tool is translating corridor knowledge generated slowly over time, to institutional knowledge available via computer.”(abstract of Chris Pronk’s presentation at Wikimania 2006)

The initiative has been underway since early 2006, and works over the unclassified OpenNet network available to State employees.

The project is certainly farther along in implementation than Intellipedia, a similar project aimed at U.S. intelligence analysts, which was described earlier this year as “in Model T stage.”

State’s Office of eDiplomacy seems to be advancing the application of several social media tools in a government environment, even to the point of encouraging internal blogging. The head of the Office told the Foreign Service Journal this spring that, in addition to diplopedia, they have put in place a

“simple blogging software as the basis for our highly successful Communities@State program, with almost 40 Communities of Practice already established or in process. (Foreign Service Journal)”

Little nuggets of information found across the internet indicate some of the elements necessary to implement social media projects in a hierarchical organization:

• hire senior employees with extensive technical experience as well as diplomatic experience
• tie the initiative closely to the information management network in the department
• hire young employees who are already tied into online networks like LinkedIn and others (just google “eDiplomacy and LinkedIn”)

Technorati Tags: eDiplomacy, Government Communications, wiki

How do you put into place a comprehensive and radically new communications program across an entire government? An interview over at PR Conversations provides details on how the Government of Tanzania has taken steps to implement a system-wide communications process - nuts and bolts, soup to nuts.

Tanzania’s previous government communications strategy was, how should be put it, prescriptive and parental? For example, take a look at the previous media relations policy (post-1970), detailed on page 105 and beyond of the MISA Media Advocacy Toolkit.

In the late 1990s, a fundamental change in political philosophy, government leaders and institutional approach to communications enabled Tanzania to begin restructuring the government’s communications function.

Gerhard Butschi and Mindi Kasiga made a presentation about the Tanzanian initiative at the recent World Public Relations Festival in Cape Town. Their powerpoint deck is available online.

Reviewing the interview and the deck, we can winnow down an extremely complicated process into some basic steps:

• Radical change in government ideology towards communicating with the public
• Strong direction from the Head of Government
• Empowered and centralized direction for change
• Third Party, NGO and international support for program
• Communications Audit by Burson-Marsteller
• Reinvigorated communications function in every Ministry
• Heads of Communication participation in management decisions
• Institutionalized best practices through common training and professional exchanges
• Common training across communication function, involving entire communications community

Granted, it is much easier to radically remake a communications community when you only have 50-odd communicators across the 26 ministries. Still, how many other governments have documents like the “Communications Strategy for the National Strategy for Growth and Reduction of Poverty” available online?

h/t to Judy Gombita

David Jones, the Head of Communications at the Serious Fraud Office in the United Kingdom, provides some commentary on the relationship between government officials and international media. (PDF)

“I don’t know if there is a stereotypical profile in [Eastern] Europe of media practice and habit between a journalist and a government press officer. No doubt it would be a mistake for me to assume that my experience with journalists in Bosnia on a corruption case there involving the electricity power industry would be a safe model or dealing with a Polish journalist on a similar case in Warsaw. “

This is one presentation at Transparency and Media Relations as a Means of Fighting Fraud, a training seminar put on by the OLAF Anti-Fraud Communicators’ Network.

A Summary of the Seminar has also been prepared, and a quick search reveals many of the prepared speeches that were presented.

A more light hearted aspect of Mr. Jones’ work for the SFO is presented in this letter to the Editor of the Observer.

by Colin McKay

How better to start a blog that will discuss how government organizations communicate and integrate social media than to make some general observations about the integration of new (and not so new) technologies at the government level?

The Network of Public Sector Communicators notes that, in the most recent version of the Gartner Hype Cycle for Government (released last July), instant messaging for public servants has still to find an audience among IT specialists and senior executives. In the meanwhile, public servants are busy implementing hacks, convincing friends in the IT department to open ports on firewalls, and IM’ing from their PDAs.

Just as important is the observation that state and federal governments are slow to implement customer relationship management software:

“…Local authorities are embracing CRM, but there is not yet an enterprise mind-set above the municipal level. National, state and regional governments have not yet engaged in CRM or citizen-centric government through CRM capabilities at the enterprise level. However, some governments at this level have embraced CRM as a form of case management for large human services agencies and programs.” (Gartner, 2006)

We can all recognize that a customized CRM or case management software package would help communicators set a much clearer course to negotiate the maze of relationships, messages and interactions among audiences, stakeholders, government agencies and, as we say in Ottawa, federal/provincial/territorial relationships.

As for other social media applications, I am sure every public sector communicator can cite at least one internal implementation of tools like wikis, podcasts and blogs, usually as pilot projects, that they have heard of.