Posts tagged with 'Government2'

How does a Conservative Government Change it's Spots & Adopt Social Media

  • Posted on July 1, 2009 at 6:25 pm

I attended the very first Government 2.0 lunch today in Canberra which included the head of the newly formed Government 2.0 Taskforce, Dr Nicholas Gruen (link to twitter profile). The topic being discussed was how do we as engaged citizens working within and outside Government, assist the taskforce in it’s mission of putting in place a pathway for Government to transform to Government 2.0.  The taskforce at this point has a lifespan of 6 months, I do not think this is long enough.

Whilst the conversation was lively and animated, it was not structured and there were multiple coversations going on at once.  The people involved are all very passionate about assisting with change in Government and nearly all have very strong personalities and views.  There was much discussion and examples of what is currently not working in Government or is oudated and needs to be addressed.  End result was that only a few people really got to speak their mind and I am not sure how much of what was being said was truly useful to the taskforce at this point in time.  It was a great lunch and there was much enlightening and useful information.

My advice to the taskforce regarding Social Media would be to create a list and priortise, of course at the top of the list would be a Whole of Government Framework for Social Media Engagement.  All the agencies and different levels of Government are mostly very new to this, even on an indiviual personal level (individual employees), they need a high level set of “Rules of Engagement” as a starting point.  As part of the taskforces project based funding they should perhaps look at running an internal staff based Social Media program in one of the Agencies, uses could be polling staff for opinions, internal interest groups (Agency soccer team) and organising social events.  At the same time they could perhaps run an external Social Media program with another Agency which engages with citizens through applications such as Facebook and Twitter.

This is a massive task, policy needs to be rewritten as does some exisiting and nonexisting legislation.

Each Agency will need existing staff either trained, and trained well in Social Media or engage an existing Social Media resource, with individual agencies adopting the Whole of Government Framework and adapting to their Agencies needs.

Possible uses and benefits to Government in engaging in Social Media are enormous, the Victorian Bushfires are a prime example of disaster monitoring, engaging with citizens for opinions on policy changes, changes in legislation etc, the feedback is in realtime and immediate, hugely powerful.

Another truth which Government needs to realise is that even though they are blocking Social Networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook, some of their employees are still using these tools through wireless and mobile devices.  Social Media Policy has now become an urgent issue for Government as it is already happening and in this situation firewalls are useless.

The Public Sphere, Gov 2 – The Twitter Stream

  • Posted on June 23, 2009 at 4:54 pm

Yesterday I attended Public Sphere 2 which was run by Senator Kate Lundy in the main committee room at Parliament House.  The topic of this Public Sphere was Open Government: Policy & Practice, all Public Spheres run by Kate Lundy have the over arching topic of Government 2.0.  My role in yesterdays event was to monitor the twitter stream for questions put to individual speakers and to retweet outstanding relevant tweets as well as intermittently tweeting the latest stats on the #publicsphere hash tag.

One thing which astounded me was that there were virtually no questions directed at speakers from the twitter stream after an initial burst of 10 questions during the first morning session.  There was only one single question directed at a speaker during the rest of the day.  To give some perspective on this there were 31 presentations and during the first session there were 4 speakers, why were there no questions from the twitter stream for the other 26 presentations.  This was a stark contrast to how the twitter stream behaved during the first Public Sphere, there were way too many questions from the twitter stream during Public Sphere 1, we had to choose only 2 questions per speaker.

I thought about it today and I believe the reason for this is the subject matter of Public Sphere 2.  Public sphere 1 was about the National Broadband Network and how high speed broadband would change the way we use the Internet.  This is a very hot topic for all Australians and is not just a topic for people who have a strong interest in Government, therefore the audience were more informed and more passionate about the broadband topic and already had a very strongly formed opinion on the topic.  Hence way more questions were put to speakers.  The broad topic of Government policy regarding Government 2 had not already been a hot topic on twitter hence the majority of twitter users who participated were less prepared.

The lack of questions from the twitter stream did not particularly worry me yesterday as the twitter stream was going ballistic, it was extremely hard to keep up with it and remain focused.  My eyes never left the screen except for a period when the wifi went awry.   Over 2600 tweets flew past my eyes yesterday, from over 300 participants.  The topic is still doing well today and the tweets are up to over 2700 tweets with 322 participants.  I have left my hash tag search in place from yesterday and have again been monitoring the stream today and answering questions where I can.

In fact the conversation in the stream has turned to an effort to expand Public Sphere and take it to the NSW Government with many contributors very eager to see this happen.  I see this as a natural stepping stone to expanding the Public Sphere model we have developed across all levels of Government, this will give all levels of Government easy access to public opinion on Government making it incredibly open and collaborative.

I would like to see the new Gov 2.0 Taskforce announced by Minister Lindsay Tanner yesterday implement the Public Sphere model as a whole of Government framework collaborating with the public.

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