John Monroe’s article on Federal Computer Week earlier this month collates advice from social media experts at May’s Government Leadership Summit in Williamsburg, Va. He outlines 7 key steps towards achieving social-media success within government. These steps quantify the risks associated with social media, and explain that only by embracing these can success be achieved. These 7 steps are key tenets of Web 2.0 and are expanded on below.

1. Take control by giving up control

This is about recognizing and accepting that a brand’s value is inherently based on, and reflected by, whatever people say it is. While perceptions can often be inaccurate, they reflect the view of a brand from the outside and cannot be said to be ‘wrong’. Rather, it’s better to accept that the marketing or communications department cannot control the message, but instead should engage with those discussing it. The growth and power of social media means brands are becoming more heavily reliant upon consumers/citizens for survival, and therefore reaching out to brand evangelists/government enthusiasts cannot be underestimated.

Charlene Li notes that while communication specialists do not like the idea of giving up control over their message, it’s important to realise that in a socially networked environment controlling messages is not feasible. Instead, it’s better to participate in, and become a part of, discussions relating to the message. This can be through social networking sites, blogs, twitter or other communications platforms upon which your message is being discussed. The State Department’s twitter account participates in conversations regarding their mission, and can be seen as a tool in rebuilding the US brand overseas.

2. Keep the finger off the policy panic button

Any social media policies should guide employees on how to use new technologies, rather than simply outline what they can and cannot do. The recent Dow Jones social media guidelines are an example of what not to do. Your employees are usually your best brand ambassadors and should be trusted to uphold the values and aspirations of their employer. Harnessing and embracing their passions and expertise is a much more suitable policy, than restricting exactly how they can represent themselves.

Nevertheless, there are many considerations that need to be taken into account when creating sustainable policies and guidelines. There are many legal and policy challenges, that need to be acknowledged in any set of guidelines. Many agencies have included aspects of these in their different social media policies.

It’s also important to appreciate that policies can and should be flexible to deal with unexpected scenarios. This is aluded to in one of Steve Radick’s twenty theses for Government 2.0:

Policies are not written in stone.  With justification, passion, and knowledge, policies and rules can and should be changed.  Sometimes it’s as easy as asking, but other times will require a knockdown, drag-out fight.  Both are important.

There is, however, a need to update existing practices to allow the use of new tools to break down barriers to communication and information. The Open Government brainstorming sessions outlined many policies which need to be looked at – and potentially updated – in order to effectively promote citizen participation. These include the Paperwork Reduction Act, Federal Cookie Policy and Records Management. Notwithstanding these existing policies, we’ve already seen many examples of successful social media initiatives. Therefore, there should not be any assumption that existing policies or legislation create barriers for any agency to engage with social media.

3. Brace for, and embrace, the unexpected

The example of NASA’s online contest to name a new module of the International Space Station is cited as an example of how online participation can produce unexpected results.

More than 230.000 people suggested the name Colbert as a result of comedian Stephen Colbert, who used his nightly talk-show to rally audience support for this name to be used. NASA did not expect this when they conceived the contest, but it was not necessarily a bad thing.

As a result of Colbert’s campaign, and the subsequent appearance of a NASA official on his show, NASA received a lot of great publicity. Jeanne Holm, chief knowledge architect at the space agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory said:

You just have to understand that there will be unexpected ‘opportunities’ that social media will give you

In the end NASA named the station Tranquility — in honor of the touchdown site of Apollo 11 — but gave Colbert’s name to an on-station exercise machine.

The story above highlights how engaging in social media, and soliciting public feedback can have unintended consequences. NASA’s ability to deal with this through a compromise highlights a fundamental trait which all social media initiatives must adhere i.e. if you seek public participation and feedback you must be prepared to recognize it even/especially when it’s not what was originally expected.

4. Relinquish your pride in your own expertise

Beth Noveck (Deputy CTO for Open Government) explains this when she says:

We [Government] do not have a monopoly on the best ideas. We do not have all the answers …to the tremendous challenges we confront today.

An acceptance that all the subject-matter experts – in relation to government data – do not work in government agencies, is the first step towards creating platforms upon which outside ideas are solicited. These platforms have been enthusiastically embraced by the Obama administration and many State agencies. Recent examples include:

• Virginia’s State Government’s Idea portal
• New York State’s Tech talk
• Regulations.gov exchange
• Apps for Democracy – District of Columbia’s Community edition
• Open Government brainstorm
• The National Dialogue on Recovery.gov

Vivek Kundra recently blogged about using different technology strategies to empower government officials and the public to work together. Federal officials should actively tap into the public’s expertise to help solve specific problems. Whether this is how to improve a website, or ideas on Healthcare reform, this form of citizen to government interaction is a central pillar of an open civic system, and should be utilized to enhance existing agency expertise.

5. Everything you know about productivity is wrong

The prevailing orthodoxy within many government agencies is that access to social networking sites should be restricted, or actively banned. The theory is that staff will be so busy updating their Facebook or Twitter accounts, that they will neglect their work.

Instead, agencies should evaluate the productivity risks in not allowing people to access these tools. RRW recently reported on a study by Australian scientists which found that allowing access to ‘websites of personal interest, including news sites and YouTube, provided workers a mental break that ultimately increased their ability to concentrate and was correlated with a 9% increase in total productivity.’

Social networks can be used to harness the knowledge of experts to find better answers and ideas to work related issues. Networks such as Twitter can provide feedback on all kinds of questions, and serve as real-time information repositories. The Army has recently ordered bases to stop blocking Twitter, Facebook and other social networking sites, in order to ‘facilitate the dissemination of strategic, unclassified information’ among troops.

The Federal Web managers council outlined this issue in a paper last year. They identified the reasons for blocking these sites as relating to security, time wasting and bandwidth. Nevertheless, their view was the ‘new Administration should require agencies to provide access to social media sites unless the agency head justifies blocking certain employees or certain sites’.

6. Same employees, new job descriptions

President Obama explained in his Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government:

Executive departments and agencies should use innovative tools, methods, and systems to cooperate among themselves, across all levels of Government, and with nonprofit organizations, businesses, and individuals in the private sector.

Collaboration within government and among citizens will become a much more important aspect of how agencies and their employees work. Whether this is through sharing best practices within networks such as Govloop, or contributing to blogs and twitter streams, online collaboration will become a matter-of-fact activity, in which everyone may be required to engage with.

The recent Open Government brainstorm session distilled ideas on collaboration into three main topics:

• Enhancing Intra- and Inter-Government Collaboration – to improve institutional collaboration
• Creating Incentives for Public-Private Partnerships – to ensure all government partners work together
• Innovating in Alternative Dispute Resolution – ideas on dispute resolution strategies

The ideas submitted around these topics highlight the public’s expectations of great collaboration within, and around government. The Enterprise 2.0 movement – primarily concerned with greater collaboration and networking possibilities – is fueling a reorganization and re-evaluation of roles within corporations. Successful social media and government 2.0 implementations, will necessitate similar changes in job descriptions to prioritize collaboration and sharing among government workers.

7. Fail early, fail often

One of the best measures of success might be failure. During Clay Shirky’s recent talk at TED@State, he repeated his oft stated mantra of how failing fast and quickly is sometimes of tremendous benefit. Failure can be informative and serve to create longer lasting success; it’s synonymous with risk taking and experimenting. Also, the public is often forgiving of failure if it’s in the execution of a worthy principle.

Charlene Li notes how managers should try to imagine five to 10 worst-case scenarios and create plans for mitigating or responding to these if they come to fruition. This enables the risk associated with failure to be actively managed and contained.

The steps highlighted above do not conform to traditional governance models of how to achieve project success. The tenets of social media i.e. transparency, human interaction, collaboration and conversation, represent a paradigm shift in how government institutions can dialogue with citizens. Understanding what makes social media different is a key ingredient towards achieving success in this area.

]]> http://www.rfahey.org/2009/06/20/7-steps-towards-social-media-success/feed/ 1 http://www.rfahey.org/2009/06/10/the-challenges-of-web-20-within-government/ http://www.rfahey.org/2009/06/10/the-challenges-of-web-20-within-government/#comments Wed, 10 Jun 2009 22:11:55 +0000 Richard Fahey http://www.rfahey.org/?p=721

The Center for American Progress (CAP) held a panel discussion in Washington last week on the use of Web 2.0 technology by the Obama administration. The panel was chaired by Peter Swire (Senior Fellow at CAP, and former counsel to the Change.gov New Media Team). He led an interesting discussion with Tim O’Reilly (Founder of O’Reilly media), Alec Ross (Senior Advisor at the State Department on Innovation), and Faiz Shakir (Research director at Center for American Progress), on Web 2.0 initiatives at the State Department and the issues in its future use throughout the Federal Government. 

At the outset Peter mentions three papers on the CAP website in relation to the Federal Government’s use of Web 2.0. These are:

1) It’s Not the Campaign Any More – This memo documents the different approaches to Web 2.0 by the White House, and the challenges they face. It discusses the contrast between the new and fun things that could be done on the Obama campaign, versus the limitations imposed within the Federal Government. The primary reasons that things are more difficult in the White House include:

• Scale: The Obama campaign had to cope with motivated groups of over 10 million individuals, while the White House has to cope with, and respond to the concerns of over 300 million Americans. This makes it difficult to respond to and manage individual comments. The White House Open for Questions initiative generated over 103,978 questions from 92,937 people in just a few days. This provides an idea of the scale of comments and questions the administration needs to deal with. Given the New Media team at the White House consists of just 8 – 10 people, it’s not feasible for them to interact or engage with so many individuals. Crowdsourcing initiatives such as the use of Google moderator (for Open for Questions) and IdeaScale (for Open Government brainstorming) suggest the administration is attempting to use the wisdom of crowds to filter comments and suggestions. Other organisations e.g. OMBWatch, are also providing analysis of comments, potentially helping the administration to deal with large quantities of feedback. 
• The Clearance process:  Responses to questions need to be “cleared” with all of the relevant agencies, before they can be posted on blogs, twitter or social networking sites. Peter describes an analogy of where an incorrect response to an North Korea question, could result in missiles being launched. While it’s a rather extreme example, the comments and answers posted from the White House could be construed as official government policy or opinion. In terms of foreign relations even seemingly inconsequential comments could have major diplomatic ramifications, and so everything needs to be vetted and analysed before posting. 
• Limits on Government authorizing actions: The White House needs to be careful not to endorse or authorize others to act on its behalf. While the campaign may have been able to take a lackadaisical approach to endorsing individuals or events, things are more nuanced and difficult in the White House. There could be charges of favoritism or politicization if the White House endorses individuals or organisations. The White House has to project an appearance of fairness and objectivity when discussing outside entities e.g. websites or platforms, and as such often says very little in response to it’s use of different technologies. 

2) Six New Media Challenges: Legal and Policy Considerations for Federal Use of Web 2.0 Technology

3) How to Buy Free Software: Procuring Web 2.0 Technology for the Federal Government

Panel discussion

The first part of the discussion focuses on Diplomacy 2.0 and the State Department’s efforts to engage and interact with an online audience to further its mission. Such initiatives include twitter, blogs, youtube and facebook.  An interactive travel map is available to track Secretary Clinton’s travels, while initiatives such as Ask the Secretary have  allowed the public to submit questions directly to the Secretary of State. The initiatives outlined by Alec Ross (including the SWAT campaign), provide a good indication of how social media is being utilized within the department. 

The second part of the discussion focused on the issues facing the adoption of Web 2.0 within government. These include privacy concerns, access for those with disabilities, commercial endorsement and advertising, terms of service agreements, regulations and security concerns. These are highlighted in Peter Swire’s paper on New Media Challenges, and overlap with many of the barriers to social media adoption outlined by the federal Web Managers council last year.

While the issues won’t all be solved overnight, it’s enlightening to see departments and agencies within the federal government taking risks in this area. The rollout of Web 2.0 across government requires risk and the acceptance that while mistakes maybe made, the greater risk is to not embrace these new forms of social software.

Tim O’Reilly talked about Government as a platform, in which users can easily access and mash-up government services to allow for a more transparent, open and participatory form of public interaction. Recent initiatives such as Data.gov, Open Government Initiative, The National Dialogue etc. all serve to highlight how far the administration is embracing the tenets behind Open government. While this movement is only at the beginning, the prevalence of discussions like this, recent barcamps and the upcoming Gov2.0 summit, serve to ensure the lexicon of Web 2.0 increases throughout the federal government.

If the video above is a bit too long there’s a 5-minute Youtube video in which Peter surmises Web 2.0 specific issues in relation to the federal government. There’s also a 23-minute audio interview with Swire available at Science Progress.

The video above was recently released on the GSA’s new Youtube channel. It outlines a wide selection of social media activities throughout the US government. A full list is included at the Whitehouse.gov newmedia page, and more extensive case studies are available at the National Academy of Public Administration’s wiki. Some of the most interesting examples of new media outlined in the video include:

• Library of Congress Flickr photo stream http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/

• National Park Service Facebook App to share stories and photos http://apps.facebook.com/mynationalparks/

• Peer-to-Patent project http://www.uspto.gov/web/patents/peerpriorartpilot/

• Recovery.gov http://www.recovery.gov

• Serve.gov http://www.serve.gov

• State Department’s DipNote blog on Twitter http://twitter.com/dipnote

• State Department on Facebook http://www.facebook.com/pages/Washington-DC/US-Department-of-State/15877306073?v=wall&viewas=0

• Troop Tube http://www.trooptube.tv/

• TSA blog http://www.tsa.gov/blog and other federal blogs http://www.usa.gov/Topics/Reference_Shelf/News/blog.shtml

• U.S. Government channel on YouTube http://www.youtube.com/usgovernment

• USA.gov http://www.usa.gov

• USA.gov’s government FAQs, email and online chat http://answers.usa.gov

• USA.gov on Twitter http://twitter.com/usagov

Ideas and policy

Govloop has details about the different range of social media policies for different federal agencies, and details of the GSA agreements with social media sites are outlined in a good post at Socialgovernment.com.

Some recent new media examples from the US government which I’ve been particularly interested in relate to the crowdsourcing of ideas. These include:

• National Dialog on Recovery.gov
• Open Government Dialog

Whatever the critics say about these initiatives, they represent a sea change in attitude towards public consultation. Beth Noveck, Vivek Kunda and others recognize that Government does not have a monopoly on the best ideas, and thus should solicit public participation and ideas in appropriate areas. While the ideas and votes submitted for these initiatives are not necessarily large (say in comparison to Open For Questions), they do represent a not insignificant level of engagement with those parties particularly interested in these areas. That cannot be a bad thing.

To keep up-to-date with many of these sites check out govfresh.com, or the new news.usa.gov site (a government-wide news feed service).

A new site was launched last week allowing the public to post their experiences of using UK public services. The project is currently in the pilot stage, but has already received dozens of comments. It is funded by the Ministry of Justice through their Innovation Fund, and hosted by the non-profit advocacy group mySociety.

William Heath explained the idea of the project as being about basic ethnography, and capturing the ‘dispassionate raw description’ of services provided by the ‘Whitehall tribe’. He notes, however, that it is not suitable for all kinds of feedback and healthcare views should be directed towards PatientOpinion, while sites such as FixmyStreet are more appropriate for many services delivered by local councils.

The site explains that “Once experiences are submitted, we put them together with others, and pass them to our partners in Government, who will then look into them further.” While this is admirable, my view is that the success of this site will be based on the user generated comments created as responses to given experiences. To expect civil servants to investigate individual – or even groupwide experiences – is probably raising the bar for what can reasonably be achieved given the anonymous nature of the site. Nevertheless, it looks like an interesting project which will contribute to creating a more flexible and engaged dialog with those in Government. Ultimately, however, its success will depend on citizen participation and ensuring a lively and engaged community is established that is willing to provide suggestions and help to others based on their documented experiences.

Suggested additions

There are some nice features to the site e.g. RSS for new experiences, the Would it be better if functionality and the ability to rate comments. However, there are some more features which could be instigated to create a more community type feel to the site, and encourage repeat visitors:

• Co-ordinate experiences based on topic headings e.g. Education, Small business, Jobs. Alternatively, allow users to tag their comments so a structure can emerge from the base of all experiences.

• Try to encourage people to provide ideas on what they were expecting from their documented experience. Did they expect certain processes to be more efficient or transparent, and if so what would be their solutions. If we want to crowdsource public experiences, we should at the same time try to harness the collective knowledge of those same people. Those that experience the problems and inadequacies of services usually have a pretty good perspective on how things could be improved.

• Provide links and tools for people to seek further help or guidance on their experience. Something simple like providing details of Directgov, public consultations or how to make a formal complaint to a specific council would be useful. A nice feature might be the ability to enter a postcode which would automatically allow me to create a complaint/express gratitude to my local council or department office e.g. similar to TheyWorkForYou.
  

• Create a more community feel to the site by allowing people to create a profile if they wish. While the IntenseDebate extends the commenting functionality, some participants may want to provide details of their profile with their experience. This would provide greater gravitas and trust for individual experiences. The Getsatisfaction site allows for profiles to be easily created based on existing social platforms. These profiles could allow those with similar experiences to connect with one another, thus creating a more socially cohesive site.

This site could be a very useful and cathartic platform upon which people can document their first hand experiences with Government; a kind of tripadvisor for public services. It should, however, also be used as a mechanism upon which solutions can be formulated and discussed. Extra functionality or the addition of wiki type capabilities could enable a knowledge base to be developed. The experience of the public should be leveraged to generate ideas and suggestions to improve and build on the experiences of others. The site’s success will rest on whether the public can help themselves through collective action, rather than expecting assistance from ‘partners in Government’.

INCA 09 – Innovative and Creative Applications

Belgium is the latest country to announce an Open Innovation competition. The initiative was launched in March, and was inspired by other similar competitions including:

• Showusabetterway – This was an initiative from the UK Power of Information Taskforce to solicit ideas on how to “represent, mashup or combine the information the government holds to make it useful”. The competition was a great success, and generated dozens of suggestions for various applications and services to improve civic life and government/citizen interaction. The Taskforce cited the competition as an example of how government can “Stay at the leading edge of customer driven service improvement.”
• Appsfordemocracy – Was a competition to create new services based on mashups of public data from the District of Columbia’s Data Catalog. This resource provides a wealth of data relating to the operations of the District, including crime incidents, purchase orders and building permits. The competition resulted in 47 Applications being built in 30 days, and an estimated 4,000% return on investment.
• Apps for America – a competition organised by the Sunlight Foundation (a non-profit dedicated to using the Internet to catalyze greater government openness and transparency). The aim was for developers to create mashups based on public data made available through their APIs and datasets. Dozens of applications were submitted, providing interesting mashups of government related data. These ranged from transparency related applications e.g. discovering connections between people and organisations; to sites promoting accountability e.g. crowdsourcing the analysis of political soundbytes.
• Rewiredstate – while not a competition, this “National Hack The Government Day” operated with a similar mission to the initiatives described above i.e. to reuse and mashup public sector information for the public good. 80 developers convened at the Guardian offices in London to created working projects based public sector data. Over 30 hacks were created, displaying an astonishing breath of creativity and innovation.

INCA (INnovative & Creative Applications) Competition

The Belgian competition is being organised by the IBBT (Interdisciplinary Institute for Broadband Technology) – a research institute founded by the Flemish government to stimulate ICT innovation. Permissible entries include websites and mashups that:

contribute to solve collective and social problems…for example facilitate transport, promote health, protect the environment, ensure government accountability.

All entries have to be available and usable by Flemish citizens, but can be created and developed by anyone. There is a total prize of €20,000 available which will be divided between an over-all winner and 9 runner-ups.

Current competition submissions include:

• Eidcontact – a effective way to use your Belgian identity card
• Wantz – an easy way to create an online wish list
• Frietfindr – is a way to find chip shops in your neighbourhood

The competition blog emphasises the kind of submissions it would like to see e.g. services such as publicmarkup.org. It also raises an interesting question though as to why the crowdsourced examples of public services 2.0, and transparency initiatives, are mainly from the US and UK. Indeed, the examples given as inspiration for the competition are all US and UK based. This is not to say there are not a variety of other international government 2.0 initiatives, but the use of competitions to stimulate open innovation appears to be limited to these countries.

Open Innovation in Europe

While the INCA competition seeks to encourage Flemish developers to do suff that matters, it also wants to promote and potentially stimulate the development of organisations such as the UK’s mySociety in continental Europe. The use of the Internet to create applications and services to improve civic life – whether through the promotion of a more participatory democracy, or simply improving how citizens access public information – should not be left to the sole responsibility of government institutions. Rather, government should engage citizens, and other interested parties, to facilitate and collaborate on open innovation projects that benefit the public good.

The subject of open innovation in public services was discussed at a recent workshop facilitated by the European Commission (EC). The focus of the workshop was to bring together open government enthusiasts from all over Europe, to share experiences, and raise awareness of the potential for web 2.0 tools to improve public services. There were presentations on various initiatives from patientopinion.org to farmsubsidy.org, but all focused on themes of open government and public services 2.0. Those at the workshop reported how interested and enthused EC officials were with the event, and how it succeeded in raising awareness of what can, and what has already been done, in this area throughout Europe.

The next step is to capatalise on this enthusiasm and develop concrete initiatives. For example, it would be interesting to see the EC sponsor a pan-European competition to foster and promote innovative mashups based on government data. It could be run in the same vein as Apps for America i.e. use existing APIs or datasets available from EU institutions to develop innovative solutions to benefit civic life.

EU institutions contain vast amounts of information through different portals and databases, however, it is often not easily accessible or searchable. The first European Open Data summit will take place next month, and will seek to assess ways in which this information can be made more transparent and accessible. Using competitions as a means of stimulating and encouraging transparency in this area has proved successful in other countries, and should be investigated. Heres looking forward to Apps for Europe sometime soon.