Edmonton Replicating City in Second Life
The City of Edmonton, Alberta, is using the Second Life virtual world (explanation here) to extend the city and interact virtually with citizens.
Federal agencies such as NASA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have a presence in Second Life, but most cities haven’t gone there for various reasons.
Edmonton is not the first to get into Second Life, but it’s believed to be the first city to officially recreate itself (geography, terrain and major landmarks). Moore believes the interactive platform can encourage tourism and economic development. Virtual Edmonton is set to launch in August.
“I treat it as a platform from which we can understand and experiment,” Moore said. “Because it’s not behind our firewall, it lives in a place where we can easily interact with the community. Will it be the platform that we stay on forever? I don’t know. But it’s a really easy place to start.”
2010 Digital Counties Survey Award Winners Announced
The Center for Digital Government has announced the 2010 award winners in their Digital Counties Survey.
Projects that were motivated to bring transparency got high marks from the judges, and one such project put Montgomery County in first place in the 500, 000 or more population category. The county measured its IT functionality against benchmarks and published the data on its portal, unlike some other applicants, said Sander.
Another area of particular interest among judges was deployment of technologies that reduced energy usage in concrete ways. Chesterfield County had such a project with its automation of park lights. The upgrade eliminated the need for a worker to drive to various parks in order to turn off lights, which eliminated the possibility they would be on unnecessarily and saved money, Sander observed.
Social Networks for Public Safety Alerts
He says using social media to distribute crime and other such alerts will be the committee’s main goal. Once the alerts go live, residents will be able to sign up for, Twitter alerts, Facebook messaging or even text messaging and e-mail,” Burch said.
His group is getting input from officials at the sheriff’s office who said the committee will be groundbreaking in keeping residents alerted to crime.
“Especially if we have suspects, suspect vehicles, we can get that information out to the people, what to look for,” said Cabarrus County Sheriff’s Office Deputy Chief Paul Hunt.
But the social media alerts won’t just be useful for crime Hunt said. “In like a flooding situation, which we have had that out in that area,” he said.
via Town to use social media to communicate public safety alerts – News14.com.
Twitter Helping Respond to Gulf Oil Leak
RT @Twitter: Tweet with #BPspillmap to report an incident to the Louisiana Bucket Brigade or check out reports so far on this map: http://bit.ly/aeQb0Y
Twitter announced yesterday on it’s official Twitter account the integration of Twitter and the Louisiana Bucket Brigade. The Louisiana Bucket Brigade is a system created by students to allow everyday citizens to report oil in places they frequent, because of the Gulf Shore oil leak.
What is the Oil Spill Crisis Map?
This map visualizes reports of the effects of the BP oil spill submitted via text message, email, twitter and the web. Reports of oil sightings, affected animals, odors, health effects and human factor impacts made by the eyewitnesses and the media populate points on a this public, interactive, web based map. The information will be used to provide data about the impacts of the spill in real time as well as document the story of those that witness it.
Who made this?
The Oil Spill Crisis map is brought to you by the Louisiana Bucket Brigade and was developed in partnership with students of Professor Nathan Morrow of Tulane University. This technology, utilizes the Ushahidi (http://ushahidi.org) crisis mapping platform to map eyewitness accounts of the oil spill disaster. Ushahidi was first used and developed by Kenyan bloggers to display reports of post-election violence. Since then Ushahidi has been used in other emergencies like the Haiti Earthquake (http://haiti.ushahidi.com/) response, Washington DC’s winter blizzard (http://snowmageddoncleanup.com/) and in Atlanta (http://crime.mapatl.com/) to track crime. The Oil Spill Crisis map is first application of Ushahidi in a humanitarian response in the United States.
The White House New Media Team
About a month ago, PBS had a great interview with the new media team in the Obama White House:
Keeping Up with All the Social Networks
Edelman Digital, the digital and social marketing arm of Edelman PR, has a great post on their blog about keeping up with all of your social networks:
Managing all of these networks often presents two options: either set them all up to post to each other and get the same content and updates on every network, or spend an inordinate amount of time typing made-up words into your address bar.
If you’ve got the right tools in hand, though, your task becomes a little easier. There are a few great applications out there that will help you manage all (or at least some) of your social networks all in one place, making interacting and connecting much simpler and more efficient.
Some of the tools they suggest? TweetDeck, Brizzly, and Seesmic.
Interview on the Military’s Social Media Presence
O’Reilly Radar has a great interview with Price Floyd, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs and the person in charge of the military’s social media presence:
At the Defense Department, what we have done is embraced social media, and the technology behind it, to engage with all our audiences. That’s everything from veteran’s groups to foreign publics to people who follow me on Twitter. And it’s a two-way engagement.
O’Reilly poses interesting and important questions, including whether social media means losing control of the message.
You should read this great interview of someone who deals every day with social media and its interactions with government.
And while you’re at it, make sure to check out the Department of Defense Social Media Hub.
Local News and Issue Reporting
EveryBlock, a hyperlocal news aggregator (explanation), is expanding into the government 2.0 arena with the integration of SeeClickFix (Wikipedia). SeeClickFix allows citizens to report issue (non-emergency issues) to local governments and community activists. EveryBlock covers the new integration on their blog:
Our friends at SeeClickFix run a site where you can report non-emergency community issues, like potholes, graffiti or street light outages. They’ve shared their data with us so that EveryBlock users will get notified whenever an issue has been reported nearby.
See the great coverage in ReadWriteWeb:
Everyblock aggregates public records, blog posts and other content about very specific geographic locations, automatically. SeeClickFix acts on a similarly hyperlocal basis, giving its users the ability to report issues to their local government using their smartphone.
Power of Social Media in a Crisis
FP Wellman, a former Army public affairs officer, has an older post about the power of social media and new technology in a crisis. He explains how social tools can be very helpful to existing crisis response plans, specifically talking about a shooting and a blizzard:
Mr. Don Carr, Director of Public Affairs, tells me that “most of what we did is part of the PA (public affairs) annex to the installation’s adverse weather response plan. The SM sites are not specifically part of the annex; we just did it. Our update to the annex will roll ‘em in.”
Mr. Carr goes on to note what made the social media outlets especially powerful “was the ‘instant’ feedback we got on FB and Twitter. As residents or employees would post a comment about how things were, I was able to cut-n-paste them into emails to the IOC (Installation Operations Center), DPW (Department of Public Works) or the Housing folks, so that priorities for plows and other work could be adjusted accordingly.”
I think if you are a PIO or anyway involved in crisis response, this is a very valuable article.
Statistics to Judge Your Social Media Efforts
Business.gov (“the Official Business Link to the U.S. Government”) posted recently an article on quantifying your social media efforts. The article provides a list of social media benchmarks, which should be helpful for any organization.
- Are you using video to market your small business? Not sure it’s worthwhile? Well, consider this: 62% of adult American Internet users watch videos on video-sharing sites* such as YouTube.com.
- If your Facebook business Fan page has more than 100 fans, you are in the top 65%* of all users.
- If you post at least one Twitter update per day, you are among the top 15% most active Twitter users*.
- If you have 100 Twitter followers or more, you are among the top 7% of Twitter users as measured by number of followers.
If you need help hitting any of these benchmarks, govfresh recently had a good article on the subject, titled “Social media in government is like riding a bike.”
Why do I tell this story? Because I think government can greatly benefit from a “small glider bike” when first taking on social media. Too many agencies are reluctant to try not just because they’re afraid of falling, but because some mistakes lead to severe consequences.
Governor Elections on Twitter
OhMyGov! has a list of candidates for governor (all across the US) that are on Twitter. In 2008 we saw quite an expansion of tweeting and facebooking candidates, but I imagine we will see many more election accounts this time around. I wonder, though, if these candidates will ever break news on their social media accounts.
Study on the Impact of Government 2.0
SmartPlanet reports on a study by Grant Thornton and FreeBalance on the impact of government 2.0. The conclusions?
Government 2.0 — enabled through social networking tools — provides benefits such as reduced cost of engagement through more productive tools and processes, simplified knowledge creation and retention though usable applications, easier knowledge sharing, and enhanced information discovery through transparency and data mashups. It all sounds like good mom-and-apple-pie stuff, but is it actually being put to use?
The Grant Thornton report says yes.
And on better using social media and government 2.0?
To help government better take advantage of social networking technologies, Grant Thornton suggests that government organizations better incorporate “design thinking” (Government 2.0 mindset) as a supplement to “management thinking” (Government 1.0 mindset).
“Design thinking” uses a collaborative and iterative style of working that builds up ideas – the best ideas surfacing from a pool of many.” The consultancy also recommends that government managers embrace “viral” change, versus the more static, top-down command-and-control decrees. “Change Management in the Web 2.0 era is more peer-to-peer, viral – change is pulled by participating constituents, employees, customers.”
These are conclusions that many of us have already realized, but I think the study is a good reassurance of where government 2.0 is going.
Library of Congress to Archive Tweets
Yesterday, Twitter and the Library of Congress announced that the Library will digitally archive all public tweets made on the social network Twitter. The Library of Congress announced the plan on its blog, and Twitter did the same on its blog. Wired has a good overview of the news.
Something I didn’t know, but the Library of Congress archives lots of websites (from the LoC blog):
So if you think the Library of Congress is “just books,” think of this: The Library has been collecting materials from the web since it began harvesting congressional and presidential campaign websites in 2000. Today we hold more than 167 terabytes of web-based information, including legal blogs, websites of candidates for national office, and websites of Members of Congress.
We also operate the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program www.digitalpreservation.gov, which is pursuing a national strategy to collect, preserve and make available significant digital content, especially information that is created in digital form only, for current and future generations.
The Federal government, the White House, and the Library of Congress are taking Twitter seriously- are you? Let us know in the comments.
Chile Using Twitter More Than Many Others
Global Voices Online highlights how Chile and Chilean politicians are using social networks for the good of their citizens. Very neat to see governments in foreign countries that are more receptive to social networks and social media.
FEMA’s Social Media Site
The Federal Emergency Management Agency has a great site for it’s own social media accounts and explanation of what they do. Check it out here, and read FEMA’s factsheet on social media usage here.
About this page, FEMA writes:
FEMA has been engaging in Web 2.0 tools and on social media sites nationwide as part of its mission to prepare the nation for disasters. FEMA’s goals with social media are: to provide timely and accurate information related to disaster preparedness response and recovery; provide the public with another avenue for insight into the agency’s operations; and engage in what has already become a critical medium in today’s world of communications. FEMA’s social media ventures function as supplemental outreach, and as appropriate channels for unofficial input.
All FEMA social media accounts outside of the www.FEMA.gov domain carry the branded femainfocus look and feel. This provides consistency and accountability for content in that the public and our partners can rest assured it is the authorized FEMA account and that the information is accurate. Citizens can engage more easily with the emergency management community through social media sites, and increase their role in disaster preparedness, response and recovery.
FEMA has wholeheartedly engaged social media, how does your organization stack up?