US Views on Government 2.0

I'm sure that Anthony was attempting to make some kind of point but "Canada" didn't ban Facebook for all govt employees...it was the Province of Ontario who claim they did so (along with YouTube) in order to create a sustainable Web2.0 strategy.  Other governments are also looking at ways in which they can create vibrant and enhanced internal communities using social networking tools, but like many endeavours that introduce new technology, prudence has become the watch word.  Like it or not, many public and private entities ban access to great swaths of social networking sites for any number of reasons; reasons that don't have anything to do with some bizarre desire to reduce their attractiveness to potential employees...

posted over 3 years ago

Agree with Terry that the reasons for these actions are always complex.  We need to spend more time focusing on the operational, cultural and governance obstacles to wider uptake by government of the Web 2.0 tools and less time on sweeping, and sometime superficial exhortations for them to do better. 

Part of the problem for the public sector is that it tends to work on the basis, when faced with something new like these new technologies, that it has to be tested, checked and studied in great detail first to work out the best way to respond.  Governments tend to like to check and review and test and worry up front, in the attempt to iron out as many of the potential glitches in the system as possible before it gets launched.  That approach is competely antithetical to the dynamic underlying many of these new tools, whose whole ethic is that the users will essentially be part of building the new tool or capability, including ironing out the glitches which will be fixed must faster if we learn about them quicker.  Fail quickly, learn more is the basic approach.  In government, that is a hard prescription to adopt, given the likelihood that, at the first 'mistake, the media and the community and the Auditor General will come down on you like a ton of very unforgiving bricks.  Part of this conversation has to engage the accountability models in the public sector, none of which are working with settings that match this new world into which we keep urging governments to head. 

posted over 3 years ago

Here's a rather pungent response to the same seminar from which David Weinberger's original blog emanated.  Captures one of the lingering concerns about this discussion inside government:

Much lip service was given to welcoming new technologies, openness, information sharing, transparency, and collaboration. But there was no talk of a strategy, a plan, or a roadmap. Frankly, there was no talk of anything concrete in the way of actual progress towards Government 2.0, as the title of the event would lead one to believe. And while I am certain that DOD Deputy CIO David Wennergren was genuine when he spoke about the future of command and control being a more agile system of “focus and converge,” I am also certain that people in my workplace have Dell laptops so old they have time for a power nap during boot up.

This is particularly embarrassing given that one of the speakers, Bruce Klein talked in detail about Cisco Connect, their “next-generation workforce environment” that includes an encyclopedia, feeds, blogs, chat, and virtual meetings. No one discussed why the Department of Defense didn’t have this capability, and no one asked. More embarrassing still, Cisco Connect is very similar in principle to something the government already has – the Intelligence Community-built INTELINK, that I have used and written about before; the word “INTELINK” was never uttered out loud.

As the event was winding down, I heard a line not unfamiliar to me at this point, about everyone in the room being an “agent of change” that had to help. I became a bit frustrated with this and Tweeted the following:

While it’s probably inappropriate to “benchmark our enemies” in a Mashable post, I think it’s safe to say that terrorist and criminal organizations don’t need pep talks in wood-paneled conference rooms to adopt new technologies and gain a competitive edge. In the battle of bloviating versus trial-and-error, who wins?

http://www.techaddress.com/2008/10/01/slide-to-distribute-content-from-cbs-hulu-and-others-on-facebook/

posted over 3 years ago