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

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.

Finally, some direction for government communicators trying to sell and implement social media solutions in their organization.

Josh Bernoff has explained Forrester’s P.O.S.T method to creating a social strategy. A simple approach that begins with organizational objectives and goals, and reinforces that approach with solid research from a reputable firm.

Just the tools you need to convince a reluctant management team.

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

This week, in Ottawa’s Hill Times, we can find a discussion of the centralized message control for Cabinet Ministers, Parliamentary Secretaries and Members of Parliament in Ottawa.

“Reporters who work hard and want to find a minister? Hang out by their car for an afternoon. You’ll get an interview,” the reporter said, adding that he has a database in his BlackBerry that identifies ministers by their licence plates. “It’s my secret sauce.”  (PMO Clears Media Requests, Hill Times)

Another observation, confirmed by a number of off-the-record quotes and not-for-attribution comments, is that the strategy is not media-phobic, but simply centred on media outside Ottawa.

Looks like Prime Minister Gordon Brown has laid down a marker for online government services for citizens - and smack dab in the middle of a lengthy discourse about liberty, privacy and information management.

“… This is the century of information. Our ability to compete in the global economy, to protect ourselves against crime and terrorist attack, depends not just on natural wealth or on walls or fences but on our ability to use information - in industry, in our schools and universities, at our borders, in our police forces and intelligence services. And it is clear that we can use DNA to help solve crimes and we can use new powers of access to information to deny terrorists and criminals financial freedom and the ability to move across borders.

At the same time, a great prize of the information age is that by sharing information across the public sector - responsibly, transparently but also swiftly - we can now deliver personalised services for millions of people, something not dreamt of in 1945 and not possible even ten years ago. So for a pensioner, for example, this might mean dealing with issues about their pension, meals on wheels and a handrail at home together in one phone call or visit, even though the data about those services is held by different bits of the public and voluntary sectors.

But if Governments do not insist on accountability where people’s data is concerned - and are not held independently to account - then we risk losing people’s trust which is fundamental to all these issues and more…”

Now, I know there’s a long history of online services in Great Britain, and an extensive data protection regime. I have to think, though, that this speech sends some specific messages to the people working on Web 2.0 apps for the British government - as well as a lot of other regulatory specialists.

Technorati Tags: privacy, liberty, data protection, egovernment, epolitics