Ooohhhh. Jim Lahey, “you had me at hello.”

This month, the Deputy Secretary to Cabinet at the Canadian Privy Council Office (org chart) wrote a short opinion column on the renewal of the communications functional community for Canadian Government Executive.

“… The relatively recent influx of new recruits has brought new ideas and vitality. The presence of more Generation X and Y communicators will facilitate the use of new technologies to engage the Canadian population. As we move to realizing some of the potential of Web 2.0 and the promise of more truly collaborative and open government, the need for technological virtuosity will only grow. At the same time, however, having a generally younger workforce has implications on institutional memory and continuity. This clearly speaks to a need within the community to develop effective knowledge transfer tools as well as robust development mechanisms such as mentoring …”

“… Of course, crossing professional boundaries needs to be broadly encouraged. Effective long-term renewal demands that greater effort be made to “ventilate” the public service and to break out of the bubble within which the institution occasionally functions. In many respects, the most important thing that communicators can bring to the table is a better understanding of, and connection with, Canadians.

At its heart, effective communications is about appreciating how ideas will play in the “real world.” Communicators need to be plugged into the interests and priorities of stakeholders, organizations and the public at large. There is a clear need for greater cross-pollination of ideas that can only be achieved through more effective engagement and mobility between sectors. Communicators must be at the forefront of driving change in this area …”

If you’re in the IS community in the Canadian Public Service, you should read this.

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.

 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.

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.

We don’t price our work - or our value as government communicators - properly. And this is why the vast majority of government communications follow a leaden and title-heavy format that bludgeons readers and reporters into a stupor.

As I’ve been driving back and forth on Ontario’s highways (100s of kilometres at a time), I’ve had the opportunity to notice the market established in highway service centres.

By market, I mean the exaggerated pricing imposed on most necessities and consumer goods by the operators of these highway service centres. Need diapers? 20% more than the drugstore. Bottle of Coke? Add 50 cents. Ran out of oil? 30% more than at Canadian Tire.

The only competitive pricing exists at the chain restaurants and donut shops found at the service centres - and I suspect only because these companies fear their brand would be damaged if they were revealed to be opportunistic market manipulators - like the gas station operator just in front.

Our work suffers for a very similar reason: as government communicators, our work benefits from something of a captive audience. Reporters, lobbyists and stakeholders have a vested interest in paying attention to and responding to many of our government’s pronouncements. These people are comparable to the vacationing family who don’t have time to drive off the highway in search of a WalMart or a Shoppers Drug Mart.

They won’t question the quality of the product - or the pricing - to your face, because they depend upon an effective relationship with government appartachiks.

So, in governments around the world, we continue to open our news releases with a litany of names, titles and affiliations. We bury the lede. We prepare backgrounders and FAQs that answer self-serving propositions and gloss over difficulties. And we set up news conferences that bear more resemblance to a Punch & Judy show than to an honest discussion with the media.

We aren’t challenged, as professionals and as organizations, to change this behaviour because our audience is stuck on that interminable highway.

And we don’t change our behaviour because we are used to driving fast, straight and along with the traffic. We don’t want to drive off the comfortable and beaten path for fear of getting lost, slowing down or simply remembering how to handle a hairpin turn.

So government communicators end up overvaluing our work and underestimating its relative worth - because it’s hard to directly compare government communications work with other segments of the profession.

Unless you’re in a newsroom, where the failures are evident.

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

This is a bit of a crossover post. I’ve taken an excerpt from a post from Advertising for Peanuts, and substituted the word “policy” for “ads.”

“The process of policy is about making great ideas and then watching them die. And then coming up with new ideas, making better policies, and watching those die and then doing it all over again.

If you’re in this game because you really love policy, the process will probably just make you one sad, bitter, pissed off dude. But if you’re in this business because you love the challenge of starting from scratch for the seventh time, even after you feel like the well has gone dry, and working late on something that will most likely die, then you’re probably going to end up making policies that a lot of other people really love.”

As a government communicator, you must always remember that you are toying with the life’s work (okay, maybe the week’s or month’s work) of a dedicated civil servant.

Your decisions about strategy, minimizing or maximizing the resources that you will put behind an announcement or marketing campaign, even how you handle media calls about an initiative, must always be informed by the passion and effort your clients have invested in it.

That is one of the principal challenges for a communicator in a knowledge organization: how to implement effective strategy without slighting the work of others - or negatively affecting morale.

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