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.

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.

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.

Technorati Tags: BarcampUKGov

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.

Technorati Tags: Second Life, bureaucrat, federal government, RFP

John Bell has some th0ughts on the components to use in developing a business case for social media.  Unfortunately, it speaks more to marketing and communications audiences than hard-nosed corporate types, but it is very useful.

Jeremiah offers some advice on speaking to senior execs, in their own language.

Kate and  Dave Fleet (among others) were pushing me to develop something online to build out the idea of a business case that doesn’t just focus on communications and marketing fundamentals. It’s something I’m thinking about over the holidays.

Do you want an informative hour long discussion on the details of launching a government blog? Joe Thornley of ProPr and ThornleyFallis was kind enough to record the Third Tuesday session last month, where I was the A in a lengthy Q &A session on the steps and strategy needed to launch a social media campaign for a government organization. Ian Ketcheson was the moderator that led me down the garden path.

I find you always sound more important if someone else filters your words and extracts the soundbites, as Joe did:

“I’d been spending four years slamming my head against a wall bringing up social media and building some sort of conversation within a much larger department. And I think everyone who’s worked in a bureaucracy realizes at some point or another that there are institutional barriers to social media - fairly strong ones. But what I realized coming into a smaller organization like the Privacy Commissioner … if you enter an organization that has at least one or two people who recognize the benefits of social media, if you build a strong business case … something that drives along a business case model that identifies risk and how you will mitigate risk, you can convince … people to try something new…”

If you every had an urge to hear my voice, Joe has also posted an mp3  of a substantial part of the discussion.