In Government 2.0 I discussed blogging as a tool for communication between government and interested citizens. I truly believe that once governments have accepted the inevitability of communication, government blogs will proliferate - they will become the new “I am not sure why, but I know I have to have one” must-have. I worked within the Australian government during the 80s and 90s, and saw this phenomenon happen several times, with ERP systems, external websites, and intranets.
It is up to us, as the blog-literate, to decide what we are going to do about this. Those of us who blog about blogging will no doubt have a field day discussing it - some topics I can see coming are:
- whether a given government blog has a format and platform appropriate to the medium: it is possible that many a non-blogging-yet-technically-literate corporate webmaster will be given the job of creating the organisational blog. They may do a good job, then again, they may not. Because the resulting efforts are going to be highly public, whether they work as a blog or not will be a subject of much discussion.
- whether their editorial policy is too strict: this discussion has started already over at Anecdote - see the comments about the VPSCIN policy of not nominating authors - and if the content is boilerplate or brochure text, some may question the usefulness of the effort. If all postings need to be sent through Corporate Communications and approved by the appropriate branch head, will they be in plain language? Will they be believable? Will they be seen as timely? And on this same vein, who will be allowed to post? Most government websites now have a “Latest News” section, but these are traditionally very one-way - out of the organisation, not back in.
- what their comment policy is and where they draw the line: if the purpose of the blog is a free and open discussion of government policy, where will the line be drawn on strongly worded responses? Will there be a “all comments are moderated” policy? Will this maintain the appearance of transparency?
Lots to think about - lots to watch into the future. And for those of us who work in the web space in government, perhaps an astounding opportunity to make a difference.
Totally agree. Next you know, rather than having to convince governemnt to blog and use other social computing tools, we’ll be beating them off with a stick and trying to slow them down.
See my post on this and other matters at Government 2.0 and the growing need for social computing.
(Andrew note: I’ve put the URL into a hyperlink to preserve but shorten it - it is well worth a read)
Thanks Steve,
this whole concept grew out of conversations that I’ve had with yourself and Matthew Hodgson - after that, it was just observation.
Best regards, Andrew
Don’t read anything too sinister into the author not being named and the tag “coordinator” being used instead. This is actually the job title of the author(me)who does not have sufficient ego to need to see his own name on every post. All CIN members know who the coordinator is so there is no hiding behind anominity here.
In addition to this we like to encourage a whole of network ownership of the blog via the comments function and opportunity to submit posts, so it does not pay to have the same name appearing day in day out on most posts.
Finally, comments good, bad and indifferent are posted. To date we have not received any content sufficiently inappropriate not to publish (apart from the never ending spam of course.)
Frank,
Thanks for your comment. My reference to the strictness of non-attribution of VPSCIN posts was to the comments on Anecdote by a third party rather than my own personal views - it is something that every corporate (including government) blog has to have a policy on - you are either reaching out to your audience on a first name basis or not. In your case, because the audience (CIN members) knows you, you are doing this. Where it will get tricky into the future is a situation like Centrelink where some employees are subject to verbal and physical abuse - if they are writing a public-facing blog, will they give their name as author? What about agencies that have a strict anonymity principle?
I applaud the efforts of VPSCIN and yourself in taking this first step into a wider better world - I believe that you are pioneers in what is set to become accepted practice in the near future.
Best regards, Andrew