From Jeremy, a hint of the backroom preparation in government communications units that anticipates a Cabinet shuffle. And the ensuing waiting game.

I have to think that the change-over in Parliamentary governments is a greater challenge for comms shops. In Federal systems, there is usually some process of appointment and confirmation. A process that institutionalizes a time lag and time for fevered work.

In our wonderful Parliamentary system, the Prime Minister can reshuffle half the Cabinet over lunch and expect fully revamped Departmental web sites by dinner time.

On another note - wow - I forgot how much I liked Swing Out Sister’s Waiting Game.

From a piece by Christopher Hayes in The Nation:

“… the sublime value of bureaucracy. Not only is governance of any kind impossible without it; so too are the checks and balances of a constitutional republic. Red tape is what binds those in power to the mast of the law, what stands in the way of government by whim. That’s why an Administration hostile to any checks and balances has sought to reconstitute the federal civil service as just another lever in its machine.

… Like teachers at a high school who watch classes of students come and go, the bureaucrats remain while the administrations change. When the current occupant of the White House leaves, his appointed hacks will leave with him, and whether or not someone actually committed to governing takes his place, the bureaucrats will be there, as always, to do their duty. (The Nation)”

There’s some comment on this piece over on Matthew Yglesias’ blog at The Atlantic.
h/t to the Fedblog

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

Applying new technology and social media principles to your work as a government communicator can be a very simple task. Take, for instance, the bio page. Every government department has one, and they all have several common elements:

• 3/4 head shot of the Minister or Secretary
• Four or five paragraph biography
• In the sidebar, links to photographs, video, speeches, and news releases.
• A generic email address that leads to the communications team

These pages are accessed for a variety of reasons:

• A quick career reference when someone’s being reassigned (useful for national and local reporters, as well as civil servants doing a recce on their new boss)
• An easy source for a headshot to accompany a news story (once again, national and local reporters)
• A simple printout for an organization sponsoring an event with your Minister or Secretary (any number of stakeholder groups or political associations)

The traditional bio page is designed with one goal in mind: to give the Minister or Secretary an anchor on your institutional website. A quick stop that says “look! we know you’re the boss!”

It doesn’t, however, present information in a form that is useful to potential readers. Looking for the Minister’s comments on a particular specialist topic? You’re going to have to search each speech individually. Want an action photo to accompany your story about the Secretary’s visit to your AGM? You’ll have to search for that as well.

And chances are, nothing on the site is tagged appropriately or topically.

Luckily, some people are experimenting with new approaches to presenting biographical information. Not only does Rohit Bhargava’s Social Media Bio serve up several different forms of his bio (one-liner, 100 word and full bio), but it provides serious and amusing portraits. Importantly, it links to the basic elements of his online identity:

• profiles on social networking sites like LinkedIn
• authority rankings on blog indexes and ratings sites
• white papers and other publications
• interviews on well-regarded podcasts and specialty sites

I’m not suggesting that all these components are suitable for a Minister or Secretary’s bio page. Still, there are elements that can be easily adopted:

• multiple formats of the official biography
• official portraits in a variety of poses and settings
• links to guest editorials, columns and private-life work in relevant fields
• well-designed video and photo banks - tagged, searchable and with clearly defined copyright terms

It almost goes without saying that the same principles could be easily applied to the more technical specialists in your organization. They suffer from the same dispersion of relevant and valuable information:

• academic papers isolated on proprietary Journal sites
• Data and research results distributed only at professional conferences
• past media coverage of theirs that provides a balanced view of issues
• professional associations

The biggest hurdle to implementing this new bio page is effort. It will take effort to collect the information; to verify it; to develop and apply a folksonomy relevant to organizational AND public audiences; and effort to maintain the bio page.

After all, a stale bio page is worse than a thin one.

h/t to Strategic Public Relations.

The Power of Information report is in. I’m slowly reading through it, but I’ll give you some highlights from the fifteen recommendations for action by the British Government:

• coordinate the development of experimental partnerships between major departments and user-generated sites in key policy areas, including parenting advice, services for young people, and healthcare.
• departments should be strongly advised to consult the operators and users of pre-existing user-generated sites before they build their own versions.
• research the scale and role of user-generated websites in their areas, with a view to either terminating government services that are no longer required, or modifying them to complement citizen-led endeavours.
• examine the introduction of non-commercial re-use licences.
• by autumn 2007 the Cabinet Office Propriety and Ethics and Government Communications teams should together clarify how civil servants should respond to citizens seeking government advice and guidance online.

The full document is available at the Cabinet Office site.

Technorati Tags: engagement, consultation, Civil Society

When faced with new technology and innovative communications strategies, senior government officials will naturally be cautious and risk-averse. I’ve discussed this before. The challenge for communications advisors is to slowly shift the mindset of these officials - to open their minds and adapt our strategies to account for risk … and for ridicule.

Most communicators are well prepared to deal with risk, and they know how to account for risk in their communications strategies, preparatory materials, and in their briefings for officials.

The greater challenge is ridicule and its companions, embarrassment, chagrin and schadenfreude. Officials can prepare for opposition, confrontation or happenstance, but they have a hard time dealing with open mockery or a casual disregard for their hard work.

This, naturally, makes officials more cautious to experiment in an environment they don’t understand, and with technologies and communities that have humbled large and small corporations before them.

Which makes the British Government’s E-Petition site an interesting pilot project in the application of concepts like transparency, community participation and stakeholder involvement. (More about the site at the bottom of this post)

It would be very easy for the British Government to weed through the petitions submitted online, removing the obviously sarcastic, the obviously unattainable, or the simply laughable.

Instead, E-Petition seems to be allowing petitions the time to build a following. Even those that are obviously written as a lark or with a jaundiced eye.

• Make Spandau Ballet’s Gold the National Anthem (Youtube)
• Enter ultimate frisbee as a sport in the 2012 Olympics. (an actual goal of the sport)
• Force the government to take these petitions seriously if they have enough support

Those three petitions have been accepted. Here are some that have been rejected:

• Make our MD buy an Aston Martin and make it available as a pool car
• Impose a maximum weight limit for women wearing stiletto heels as they pose a massive threat to other members of the public on dance floors and in crowded bars nationwide
• Declare that the Beatles are better than Metallica
• Officially recognise Pete’s mum an official public resource
• Insist that Mr. Mark Gary Banham of Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, wash more frequently than once a year
• Rid Our Streets of Chavs Once and for All

There is a longstanding tradition of delivering petitions to the Prime Minster, so the E-Petitions effort is building on precedent. That most likely made the decision to launch the site slightly easier.

We also have to take into account that there doesn’t seem to be a firm commitment to take action on petitions delivered to the Prime Minister - whether in print or online - and this allows officials some flexibility when reacting to submissions.

———-

“There is a long-established tradition of members of the public presenting petitions at the door of No 10 Downing Street. The e-Petitions [http://petitions.pm.gov.uk] service has been designed to offer a modern parallel, which is more convenient for the petitioner. Unlike paper-based petitions, this new service also provides an opportunity for No 10 to respond to petitioners via email.

Since its launch in November the ePetitions site has proved to be a highly popular innovation in the way that people communicate with government and with the Prime Minister’s Office in particular.

The service allows anyone (who is a UK citizen) to create a petition and to collect signatures via the website. Petitioners are asked to meet basic criteria, set out in an acceptance policy, but we aim to accept most petitions. The principal reasons for rejecting petitions so far have been obscenity, potential to cause offence, libel or duplication.” (E-Petitions - Facts, Figures and Progress)

Technorati Tags: Egovernment, Online Petition, Civil Society

The U.K. Government has commissioned a report on how social media and collaborative tools can be used to build stronger relationships and share information with community groups and civil society in general. The Power of Information Review is expected later this summer.

This work comes fresh on the heels of continuing policy work with government and NGO representatives on the implications of social media for community and stakeholder relations.

An online conversation about the review has already begun to develop, and one comment in particular hits directly to the heart of the problem in most government organizations:

“… Sophia - who is Producer at I’m a councillor, adds:

“I get the impression posting on forums is regarded with deep suspicion by older/more senior civil servants and the younger ones who get it aren’t in a position to challenge that idea.

This creates a very artificial barrier between citizens and government. It must also create a strange disjunct for the staff concerned - who would use sites in a personal capacity, but have to pretend they can’t see them at work.“

That quote comes from David Wilcox’ Designing for Civil Society, who links to more conversation about the project.

Some bumpf from the news release:

“Minister for the Cabinet Office Hilary Armstrong wants Government to harness the phenomenon of internet advice sharing sites and empower people with information that could help improve their lives.

… Websites like Rightsnet and NetMums are examples of how people are using the internet to share information, advice and help. Now, a review will look at the benefits such online communities are creating for their members, how they relate to major areas of government policy or focus, and whether there is a case for involvement at any level by Government.

…It will look at how non–personal public sector information can be re–used and reinvigorated outside of government to generate public and economic value.

The Review will explore new developments in the use and communication of citizen and state–generated public information in the UK. It will present an analysis and recommendations to Cabinet Office Ministers before summer.” (Cabinet Office news release)

via lgnewmedia and David Wilcox (who has links to more conversation on the report)

Technorati Tags: Power of Information Review, government communications, public information

Michael Sommermeyer over at wordy mouth posted about his experience with a social media release, Social Media Release Unwinds, and more specifically about the less than stellar reception that it received from some of the media.

As an example of an SMR, it looks pretty pretty much like the original template put forward by Todd Defren. So far, so good.

Unfortunately, as Michael says, one of the media he pitched it to didn’t necessarily appreciate it:

my implementation was too disjointed, didn’t help him understand the message, left him hunting for the story. In short, he didn’t like it.

As (public sector) communicators, we have to listen and, where necessary, adapt.

Michael’s experimental subject obviously has the tech skills, and is a journalist so pretty much constitutes the target demographic, but still found the SMR wanting. How can we fix this?

I posted here recently about the different requirements for government communicators and how the SMR, or more specifically hRelease, can support them.

Essentially, my argument is to focus on the (semantic) markup of the release, not the presentational format. The audience for government releases is not just tech-savvy media and bloggers, so it has to be discoverable and usable by all comers. For technical details, see this post on a NZ government SMR.

Michael’s release is actually a tremendous step forward in terms of its markup, and for that he should be applauded. It is not buried in nested tables, the elements are marked up semantically and it would be accessible to pretty much anyone, or anything. (A doctype and cleaning up some of the markup so that it validates would be my only quibble).

And as Michael notes in his post, there is no harm in using the more traditional format, at least as a transition strategy:

In any case, it may be more useful to sneak some of the elements of the SMNR into our usual inverted pyramid-styled press releases. A few links to relevant information mixed in with the text. A sidebar pointing to our Digg or del.icio.us tags…

That would make the release usable for the majority of the audience (including all non-media interested parties) and the improved markup would make it more discoverable, accessible and re-usable.

Technorati Tags: social media, SMR, hRelease, microformats, government, public servants.

It seems to me that we are at a crossroads with the social media release and the decisions and actions that we make now, especially in a government context, will have important consequences in the coming years. This is not unexpected in the early phases of the development of any emergent media, however, it does mean we should be paying attention to what transpires and engaging where we have either an obligation or believe that we can add some perspective to the issue.

Let me begin by saying that I think that the idea of a social media news release is a terrific one. Kudos to Tom Foremski for initiating the concept with his influential post and to Todd Defren for actually sitting down and producing the alpha version. Similarly, the work of Chris Heuer and co. in this space is exemplary.

Should we adopt it in government? My answer is an unequivocal yes. Who will it benefit? Are there tangible benefits? As a rough indication – and I assume my experience is fairly standard – in the period after a press release, I may typically get calls/emails from the following (in addition to journalists):

• Parliamentary staffers
• researchers, academics and students
• vendors and industry groups
• NGOs and non-profits
• other governments
• the general public

Anything that makes it easier for all of these people to discover, access and re-use the information that we publish has to be considered as beneficial. Our responsibility as communicators to improve the way we promulgate government information is both a key professional obligation and a fundamental support for the democratic process.

Government news is not ‘pitched’ to journalists (at least not in New Zealand). It is the definitive statement of a department/agencies position on a given topic at a specific time. It is of interest to more than just the media, and should be made available in a format that reflects this wide range of potentially interested parties. Importantly, this format should not exclude anyone.

This is the reason that I am so excited by the prospect of microfomatting the SMR. The semantic markup benefits all users, whether people or machines and makes the information more discoverable, more usable and more re-usable.

Unfortunately, hRelease (the proposed microformat) hasn’t made it to draft yet and the real world examples of the SMR have not delivered quality markup.

While I welcome all the effort to get this off the ground, it is both perplexing and frustrating to see much of this effort going into the style and not the substance of the format. Edelman’s StoryCrafter is a good example (and I pick them because, more than any other organization, they have the resources and the intelligence to deal to this): their SMRs are woefully inadequate in terms of the markup. Escher-like recursions of nested tables, font tags and other deprecated markup. Completely at odds with the first principle of the SMR: democratize the access.

Does this matter? If you are in government then you are probably required by law to publish your information in an accessible format. Most jurisdictions have some form of mandated web standards.

Additionally it seems to me that, as government communicators, we have an obligation to advise our agencies about the most effective way to take advantage of technological developments for communications. As public affairs practitioners, we represent the interests of all those people who want to know what their government is spending their tax dollars on. And as professionals we want to embrace new techniques and best practice to enhance the services we deliver. Understanding social media seems to be pretty important across all of these facets of our job.

Now, while the SMR is still in its infancy, is the time to engage and support the original principle. Get involved in the process, ensure that your peers are aware of these developments and of their implications for their agencies. Government communicators have something to add to this conversation: make sure your voice gets heard.

Technorati Tags: social media, SMR, hRelease, microformats, government, public servants.