Would you like some insight into how the general public perceives government efforts to jump on the Web 2.0 bandwagon? Thanks to regulations requiring the release of public opinion research reports no more than 6 months after their commissioning, we all have access to New Technologies and Government of Canada Communications, an analysis of focus groups conducted across Canada in September 2007.

This research, sponsored by a number of Government of Canada departments, asked three separate strata of Canadian society (Web 2.0 users, occasional internet users, and non-users) a series of questions about their impressions of government activities online and what they would think of government efforts to launch “Web 2.0″ technologies.

The results were blunt, if only qualitative.

“… the [Government of Canada] should not adopt Web 2.0 applications simply to look ‘cool’ or modern, but rather should adopt specific applications to address specific communications or service requirements, where such applications can more effectively address the objectives than pre-existing methods.”

… At present, Web 2.0 users have no expectations regarding the adoption of such applications by the Government of Canada (in other words, most have never thought about this).

Despite this lack of expectations, there was a near consensus among Web 2.0 users (as well as among members of the other two audiences) that the government should use these new applications to communicate with and provide service to Canadians …

When participants were shown specific examples of how these applications are being used by different governments, … many said they were impressed by the range of applications available. Positive reactions also typically included impressions that these applications make government less remote, allow for greater citizens influence over government, and allow government to reach different cross-sections of the population …”

The public opinion research specialists concluded, from these comments, that Canadians could see their government using Web 2.0 tools to seek out opinion and feedback on evolving policy and emerging issues.

That means we’re back to the old dilemma about consultations: how much capacity exists to really listen to a large number of concerned citizens? How can their contributions be reflected equitably in the final product? Can we handle a truly participatory process when it is accelerated by Web 2.0 technology? (’cause we can’t really handle it now!)

This natural skepticism emerges in the analysis:

“… Feedback tended to be general and focused on a range of issues, including: allowing citizens to choose or help choose topics of discussion, ensuring that consultations are well advertised and easy to locate, providing advance information on topics, ensuring that participation is easy, ensuring that high-level public servants or politicians are involved, providing information on next steps/follow-up to consultations, and ensuring that the consultations are meaningful and will result in concrete outcomes.

In addition to being in favour of using these applications for consultations, most Internet users said they themselves would participate if it was on a topic that interested them.

Doubt expressed about the GC’s use of the applications for public consultations focused squarely on perceptions that they would not result in meaningful outcomes …”

Participants also made it clear that their government would have to continue to work through more traditional channels of communication - a decision I would consider assumed by most government communicators, but often lost in the enthusiasm to demonstrate that we, the stodgy bureaucrats, are on to the new new thing.

There were other interesting/startling observations in the research (all government blogs, no matter what their subject, should be found on one common site? Citizens don’t hold much confidence in blogs, which can be seen as platforms for opinion, not fact?), and the document provides a detailed analysis of the research.

Here in Canada, we’re undergoing a routine review of all our major government-wide administrative policies - and that includes the Government Communications Policy.

Earlier this week, the Auditor General of Canada was appearing before a Standing Committee of Parliament, speaking to MPs about her department’s spending plans for the upcoming year.

An opposition Member of Parliament, David Christopherson, asked the Auditor General about the rumoured revisions to the Communications Policy. As one news report characterized their exchange:

“… [The Auditor General] … revealed this week that the government is drafting a new policy that could require departments to vet their communications plans through the Privy Council Office, the bureaucratic wing of the Prime Minister’s Office.

“There’s a draft communication policy going around that would have all communication strategies, all communications, everything, go through Privy Council Office,” Fraser told a Commons committee on Tuesday. “Well, I can tell you there is no way that my press releases about my report are going to go to Privy Council Office or our communications strategies are going to be vetted by Privy Council Office.”…” (Toronto Star)

You see, the Auditor General is an Officer of Parliament - her and five other Officers* are considered independent of the Government of the day.

The exchange got a little news coverage.

All thanks to the liveblogging of Macleans journalist Kady O’Malley.

I mean, who liveblogs parliamentary committee meetings? A lot of them?

Despite the attention paid to the exchange, it’s important to note a separate paragraph from the Toronto Star piece cited above:

“… Treasury Board President Vic Toews wrote the six officers of Parliament in March saying he wants to “preserve and strengthen” their independence. “I fully accept that due to the unique statutory mandates of agents of Parliament, not all Treasury Board instruments can be applied to these offices in exactly the same manner as they would to other government institutions,” he wrote…”

*and I happen to work at one of those Offices, in the interest of full disclosure. At the moment, our communications materials do not go to PCO for review or approval. And we don’t expect that to change in the future.

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?”

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.

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.

British researchers, working in conjunction with an Ottawa government lab, discovered a rock with the composition sodium lithium boron silicate hydroxide - which is the imaginary chemical formula for kryptonite. That’s right - the rock that could defeat Superman.

It was, as one Ottawa communicator called it, “a science writer’s dream.” The Citizen tells us why the trans-Atlantic partnership failed in its attempts to cross-promote the discovery. It’s all in an article called Even with kryptonite, scientists can’t smite red tape.