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Posts Tagged ‘community’

Ottawa Government Barcamp and Unofficial Government Bloggers

Posted in blogosphere, bureaucracy, tagged , , , , , , on 8 September 2008 | 2 Comments »

Many thanks to Colin “Canuckflack” McKay for organizing the Ottawa Government barcamp get-together last Friday. I really enjoyed getting to meet other Web 2.0 keeners from around town. Nice to be able to chat about some of the issues around social media and web comms for government types in an informal setting.

Important now is to keep momentum going!

One of the key venues to help with that will be the barcampOttawaGov mailing list. So as I checked in this morning, I noticed that a discussion is getting underway on public servants and their “unofficial” blogs. Specifically, to what extent should the unofficial government blogger make their management aware of what they are doing?

My take (hardly unique): discretion is the better part of valour. I’ve disclosed what I was doing from the very start of this blog. I don’t want to put management on the defensive by letting them find out about my little posts by accident or only if someone complains. I try make sure that my management won’t feel blindsided if someone has a problem with what I am doing.

And while I feel that it is key to keep the bosses in the loop, there’s something even more important: the tone and content of the blog itself. In my case, I try not to use the blog as a platform to vent or complain. I don’t get into specifics about situations or issues that I am confronting in my daily work. However, I will use those situations as a springboard to explore larger issues on my blog though – that is, when I’m not geeking out about the latest gadget or toy that I’ve discovered…

And I’m open about who I am and that this blog is not an official thing also. Given the terrain I want to cover here, anonymity doesn’t work for me.

By the way, here’s a great post from Neil Williams, a UK civil servant blogger, that gives some great pointers on personal blogging for government types. Sure it’s the UK, but the issues are largely the same – and they’re ahead of us over there, so we can (and should) learn from their experience.

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Government Participation Online: Layers of Engagement

Posted in community, social media, strategy, tactics, Web 2.0, tagged , , , , , , , on 3 July 2008 |

Fascinating discussions around the office last week about incorporating social media in communications strategies.

Got me thinking about different tactics that government could adopt in terms of layers of engagement with the participatory web.

Each layer builds on the previous, or to put it another way, governments can’t engage at deeper layers without doing preceding ones also. Risk – and reward – is magnified as you pass from one layer to the next.

Here’s a quick, high-level sketch of how I’m starting to think of this:

1. Passive monitoring. Activities like following RSS feeds and using alerts to see what the world is saying about you online, to find out where (or if) the conversations about you are taking place. Passive because you are not participating in the online conversation about you, but merely watching as it unfolds. This layer of engagement is the lowest risk and requires the lightest workload, but is the base for all that follows. ROI: it’s market research, which is pretty valuable in its own right.

2. Reactive engagement. At this layer, you are commenting around the web – on others’ blog posts, news items, in forums. You are going to where the conversations are and engaging people there (thinking here of examples like Dell and how they used this approach to get past the Dell Hell thing). Big jump in workload here, requires sustained efforts. Needs agility to respond quickly, good judgement about what’s worth responding to and how to respond appropriately. ROI: helps build credibility and reputation over time. Shows that you are listening. Shows a government that is working at staying relevant to its citizenry. Risks: if done wrong or abandoned, will actually further weaken credibility.

3. Proactive community leadership: This layer entails hosting some form of community site, whether a blog or forum or (gasp!) social network. This entails bringing the conversation to you, allowing your critics onto your turf so to speak (thinking here of the US Transportation Security Administration blog as an example, and Dell is doing this also with it’s blogging efforts and its IdeaStorm community site). More importantly, the idea here is that you are beginning to lead in the creation of a community around your program or initiative. Highest workload at this point, as you need consistently good stream of fresh content on top of all the monitoring and reactive commenting that you are already doing. (And it all has to be translated if you are in the GoC. ) Not to mention time for moderating comments. ROI: allows you to be proactive in telling your story, can lead to enhanced reputation online (building as opposed to just protecting brand). & if you are successful in doing this, everybody will be in awe, since you are govt. :+) Risks: same as #2 but an order of magnitude higher due to increased visibility.

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