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)

A hopeful, but pragmatic, hope for increased experimentation in outreach and consultation by government institutions in the recent Democracy Journal:

“…By being explicitly experimental with new forms of digital institution-building, we have an opportunity to increase the legitimacy of governmental decisions. The tools–increasingly cheap, sometimes free–will not replace the professionals. Technology will not, by itself, make complex regulatory problems any more tractable, or eliminate partisan disputes about values. What this next generation of civic software can do, however, is introduce better information by enabling the expert public to contribute targeted information. In doing so, it can make possible practices of governance that are, at once, more expert and more democratic…”

I’ve a wholly uninformed opinion about the consultation process here in Ottawa - which frequently depends upon publication in the Canada Gazette and distribution to a specialized but limited group of experts and interested parties.

How do you widen the participation in a consultative process while ensuring a level of informed debate and positive contribution?

After all, the real hurdle to comprehensive and open consultation is the effort it demands from the responsible parties in government: a policy analyst has to open, read, and render a judgment on all the contributions.

Over the Christmas holiday, an online movement developed that is attempting to significantly affect copyright policy development in Canada. And it is blazing a new trail for how the public seeks to influence policy development in the federal government.

Michael Geist, the lightning rod for the latest opposition to a copyright regime with significant similarities to the U.S DMCA regime, has long argued for copyright and patent reform on his highly popular blog. Lately, he has been gaining a lot of traction for his Fair Copyright for Canada Principles. And by traction, I mean 38,000 members for his Fair Copyright Facebook group - in a month.

The Copyright Act has long been a bugbear of a handful of academic and legal specialists, with some interest from that part of the general public. Attempts to amend the Act have come and gone over the past four years, with proposed legislation dying on the order paper, or suddenly pulled back before actually being tabled in the House of Commons.

This latest effort by Professor Geist appears to have broken through the staid and static process that has dominated the discussion of copyright legislation in Canada. (Static, but for the histrionics and outrageous claims of the recording industry, and the posturing of a DMCA-obsessed United States)

We haven’t seen or heard of a change in direction on copyright policy, but the bare fact that 38,000 people signed their name to an effort to force change in the system must prompt policy makers (and politicians) to question whether their traditional tools for consultation are actually working.

After all, we’re talking about 38,000 USERS, not stakeholders.

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.

And here I thought the federal governments of Canada and Belgium had problems. What about government communicators that have to reach out to distinct minority communities? From the World Bank’s Private Sector Development blog:

“It is well known that out of the 6,000 languages spoken on the planet, only a tiny percentage is represented on the web. Perhaps less intuitive are the factors that preclude multilingual digitization of content.  They range from the problems of recognition of minority languages, the lack of local language computing capacity, through the plethora of internet governing bodies involved in encryption projects, to the lack of interface between linguistic and IT expertise …

As the president of the African Academy of Languages noted, isn’t it ironic that Africa, home to an incredible linguistic diversity, is still conventionally categorized into English, Spanish, French or Portuguese speaking - the languages of the colonizers?”

Sometimes, there are advantages to being an independent authority. Take, for example, how the London Underground handled the firing of their popular announcer, Emma Clarke. (She’s the one who recorded the announcements for the stops):

“London Underground is sorry to have to announce that further contracts for Ms. Clarke are experiencing severe delays,” a spokesman said.

There seem to be several different reasons for her firing - one of which was the mock in-train announcements available on her personal site:

“Passengers filling in answers on their Sudokus, please accept they are just crosswords for the unimaginative and are not in any way more impressive just because they contain numbers.”

Of course, the interview she gave to This is London may not have helped:

“The thought of being stuck in the Tube with strangers for minutes on end and having to listen to endless repeated messages of my own voice fills me with horror.”

Remember the faux news conference put on by FEMA last month to brief about the response to the California wildfires? The “internal investigation” is complete, and some people have fallen under the bus.

Apparently, some poor decisions were taken in deciding to hold a news conference at short notice, then, when reporters could not make it in time, have agency communications staff substitute for reporters by lobbing questions at the Deputy Administrator.

“Much like in an airline crash or automobile accident that was reconstructed, there were several different points leading up to the press conference where, had a single decision been made differently, the event itself could have been averted,” [DHS spokesperson Russ] Knocke said Thursday (AP, via TPM)

FEMA’s press secretary at the time now works for a public relations agency in Utah (For those of you keeping track at home, that Washington to Utah in two weeks). The Director of Communications had been scheduled to take up a new job with Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Needless to say, that job fell through.

There’s a couple of hints in the AP story that the FEMA staffers fell victim, in part, to a predetermined PR strategy and poor communications between the press shops at FEMA and DHS:

• DHS had asked the agency to hold a press conference before the DHS Secretary and the FEMA Administrator landed in California that day; and
• FEMA’s press secretary had sent an email to his boss and the DHS official responsible for communications, asking for more time - but only 43 minutes before the scheduled start of the news conference.

There’s a swipe at the civil servants involved in the Washington Post coverage:

“[FEMA Administrator] Paulison said he did not expect additional disciplinary action but would reorganize and retrain the agency’s 90-member external affairs staff.

“Those are career people. They should have stepped up and said something, they really should have. But their bosses said ‘Do this,’ and they did it — some reluctantly, but there’s no excuses for that,” Paulison said. He called the impact on FEMA’s credibility “devastating.”

Really? Is that sort of independent action possible when the upper ranks of the administration are staffed by partisan appointees?

I’d be really interested to know.

Technorati Tags: FEMA, puppet theatre, DHS

Okay. I’ll let the cat out of the bag. Most documents signed by a Minister or Secretary were not actually written by that person.

Shocking, I know, but it’s the truth. In fact, if there’s an official crest at the top of the document, it was probably written by:

• a staffer in the political office
• the Deputy’s correspondence unit
• the Department’s public affairs unit
• or - god forbid - someone in the department with an intimate knowledge of the file in question.

Of course, the document was eventually reviewed and approved by the official - maybe with some small or even major changes. Let’s remember that the workload of most Ministers and Secretaries is so great, they rarely have the time to compose business correspondence.
The institutional default to ghost writing is so ubiquitous, I have to guess it played some part in the decision by a Swedish Minister’s press secretary to fake an online Q&A with a national newspaper.

Hans passes along that Lisa Wärn, the press secretary to the Swedish Minister for Enterprise and Energy, apparently double booked her boss for a live interview and online interview at the same time.

In an effort to keep both commitments, Wärn impersonated her boss in an online Q&A with Aftonbladet.se - and was caught out.

My Swedish isn’t up to scratch, so I can’t comment further on the actual details of the exchange or the repercussions,  but it does seem a pity that the organization was willing to participate in the medium, but failed to be completely forthcoming about who was participating.

Technorati Tags: epolitics, egovernment, online news

I’m not saying this is my experience, or my world, but I thought I’d share it with you:

“… The Minister took speeches seriously. He saw them as occasions to demonstrate his erudition by impressing audiences with quotations, statistics and flowery language. He had no sense of occasion: every speech, no matter how informal or mundane the occasion, had to be written not for the moment but for posterity.

All this made Beth’s job a living nightmare. Not only did she have to co-ordinate the speechwriting process so that it met the Minister’s exacting standards, she had to do it in time for both translation into the second official language and for distribution to the breathless media, most of whom she knew would glance at the title and relegate the document to either the blue circular file or to the back pages of the Saturday edition…” (Ottawa Citizen)

That’s from this week’s entry in the the E.X. Files - a weekly column that putatively speaks from the voice of a jaded and frustrated executive in the Canadian public service.

This week, the column focuses on the art of preparing speeches for government ministers.

It’s at an international conference that your skills as a high master of government communications are tested.

Your policy and program colleagues have spent months developing a comprehensive agenda. They have convinced experts from around the country and around the world to attend - and to speak.

And they look to you for the entire gamut of communications skills:

Oh, and some communications plan that will tie everything together and wrap it with a pretty bow.

If you’re lucky, your organization has hired some very experienced conference planners to drive the process and make sure every detail of the event proceeds smoothly and as planned.

It’s still up to you and your communications staff to hit the bricks, so to speak. Pick apart the conference agenda, find the topics, the nuggets and the speakers who are at all interesting to the general public. And sell the bejesus out of them.

It’s an exercise in identifying your spheres of influence:

• people who normally cover your organization and your topic
• people who have covered your topic in the past
• people who have written about subjects related to your topic
• people who have interviewed the speakers invited to your conference
• people who have reported on the topics covered by your speakers
• reporters in the town where you’re hosting your conference
• assignment editors in other towns who will make reporters in the town where you’re hosting your conference actually come to your conference.

In our case, we managed to have an issue to lead into our conference. And it was an issue that drew attention.

Luckily, we brought most of our communications team to town in preparation. And I needed help from each and every one of them. Still, I’ve spent the entire day on the phone with reporters. As have four other, expert, spokespersons.

It shakes the bones of a staid government communicator, I’ll tell you. Sometimes we get used to events and schedules unfolding as expected - and as routinely and quietly as possible. It suits a government employee.

But all it takes is one day - just one day - where your skills as manager, strategist and media relations expert are challenged to remind you how most government communicators leave a lot on the table every day.

Really. We all arrive at work vowing to produce our best work and provide our clients with the best counsel possible. But how often do we arrive at work thinking “I want this file to explode - but in a good way.”

And the conference doesn’t really start until tomorrow. Stay tuned.