The United Kingdom Civil Service has come out with its Guidance on Participation Online, and the document is a beauty to behold. Short, simple, and, best of all, a document that encourages action and risk-taking.

Running the text through Wordle reveals that the writers have put the emphasis on the right concepts: representative, disclose, being aware, online participation - all enabling terms.

Peter Spaghetti, Dave and Emma (and Jeremy)have all commented on the guidelines ahead of me, but I don’t hold that against them.

Technorati Tags: Civil Servant Guidelines for Online Participation, United Kingdom, Govt 2.0

This is still sketchy, but fascinating. At what point must a government department (or political staffers sharing the government network) be aboveboard about the editing they perform on Wikipedia and other open online resources?

After all, a department will edit documents on its own network without leaving editing tracks.

But if a department feels it is making legitimate and independent changes to an erroneous Wikipedia entry, should it make the changes under an official identity?

This is perhaps the must succinct guide to working with digitally enabled employees: whether a Generation “Y”, a millenial, or a particularly adept Generation Xer.

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.

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

Another international organization is hitting the beaches of Second Life. On October 26, the World Bank is releasing the latest report from the Doing Business group:

“…“Second Life, as a global community with residents from more than 100 countries, is an ideal venue to host a virtual launch of a report that compares how easy it is for people to start and operate a business in 178 economies,” Dahlia Khalifa said.

Second Life is on the frontier of collaboration and technology. It brings people from around the world together by removing boundaries,” she added. …(news release)

It’s a noble effort and an example that the World Bank and its’ partners are looking for new ways to communicate their ideas - but Second Life has not proven its worth as a communication tool.

Earlier this year, Eric Kintz at HP argued why he still needed convincing about Second Life. Bandwidth and computing power were among the factors he identified for his reluctance to jump on the bandwagon, so to speak.

Those are very big issues for most government departments. Even OECD members have to evaluate the capacity of their network to deliver content over a service like Second Life - but also their network’s capacity to deliver that content back to their own employees.

I suspect that many organizations with outposts in Second Life (like Sweden) have set up separate networks and better equipment for their in-world representatives.

More on the event:

“…The event will be an open forum where policy makers and the public from around the world, including Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East, can ask questions, challenge the findings, and contribute to a global business dialogue aimed at stimulating reforms that improve the business environment, and ultimately create more business startups, job opportunities, and economic growth.

Digital copies of the report’s overview, as well as World Bank–IFC virtual apparel and products, will be available to Second Life residents who attend the event.”

How are the clients of the World Bank - many of them living in remote corners of the internet - supposed to sign on for this report launch?

XP from Canuckflack

Technorati Tags: Second Life, World Bank, Doing Business, third world, international organizations, multilateral

Beta vs. Pilot Project

Which one is sexier? And which one is preferred by bureaucrats, politicians and heads of the civil service?

We’re back to our old discussion about risk.

When you’re in beta, there’s a tacit acknowledgment that the whole experiment could go sideways. You’ve hit upon a good idea, your idea is based on solid analysis and an understanding of the market … but you’ve got crazy eyes.

In beta, people are willing to bet that your crazy eyes are a strategic advantage. Your funders, your mentors, your underpaid employees - they all believe that the end result will outweigh the risk.

In a pilot project, the entire process is built around eliminating risk. That initial spark of insight and creativity may have found a backer and some money, but let’s not get out of hand here folks!

The fundamental weakness is right there in the name: pilot project. The expectations have already been raised: colleagues and bosses are expecting big things.

A beta is allowed to wander. A beta is allowed to make a mis-step or two. A pilot project has already been enrolled in engineering school.

For the older members of my readership, a beta is Tweety Bird. A pilot project is that nerdy chick, the one Foghorn Leghorn used to push around.

It’s a fundamental problem: how does a government bureaucracy, built on ensuring stability and rational order, accomodate risk?

Unfortunately, many government organizations shy away from any risk that cannot be modelled and quantified.

If it cannot be quantified, it must be controlled. It must be boxed in. It must be measured, evaluated and reported on.

Talk about setting up ol’ crazy eyes for failure. It’s a real poke in the eye.

In the world of social media, you really do have to pause sometimes. Innovation after innovation, mashable upon widget. They all threaten to re-interpret our world, and question exactly how old-line organizations (and communicators) have been able to get by doling out information by the tablespoon and digesting it by the teaspoon.

Like the twitter channel that updates on the activities on the floor of the House of Representatives. It draws on the information posted to this page by the Office of the Clerk of the House. (Here’s how it’s done.)

Sounds like a great idea. But consider the target market, largely political aides, bureaucrats and lobbyists in and around Washington. That’s an audience of thousands. This twitter is being followed by 18.

More interesting, but also more like drinking water from a firehose, is an application of Yahoo Pipes that attempts to filter legislative tracking feeds and Congressional Record speeches.

There are people, deeply interested in public policy, who are dissecting our work in ways barely imagined by those inside the bureaucracy.

And, despite all the hand wringing about the death of PR in the private sector, the explosion in social media and networking technology offers a real opportunity for a PR or comms person to build experience, value and credibility with their clients - if they’re capable of interpreting the trends online, forecasting their effects on their organization, and applying relevant innovations to their own work.

Click To Play

From the Lefevers, a simple explanation of a wiki and how it benefits collaborative work. This is a tool that could really help you break down barriers to new technologies and social media in an organization.