Tag Archives: web 2.0

Wikis in Government, and Other Social Gov Advice

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Governing‘s Better, Cheaper, Faster blog has a great post on using wikis in government. There is some great advice that everyone needs to see:

Mergel says that the best way for government managers to engage the public via technology is to use the tools themselves – officials must be seen as both engaged and engaging! As Mergel notes, public managers have to “create energy and vibrancy so that others start finding value in it.” One manager featured in the report puts it this way: “Create the party everyone wants to join.” That’s a wiki good idea.

This applies to all social tools, not just wikis. Get out there and use them!

A Better Social Media Manager

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Learn to be a better online community manager over at Mashable. This is a must read for any PIO or anyone in your organization involved in social media:

Every company has a list of projects and responsibilities they want their community manager to manage. But don’t just think about the tasks you want them to complete. Think about finding someone — with a personality and passion that reflects your brand — who can complete them in an independent manner.

NASA’s Neat Social Media Ventures

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This morning, NASA Astronaut Douglas H. Wheelock checked into the location-based social network, foursquare.  The surprising news?  He checked into the International Space Station.  And it’s getting a whole lot of press, from places like the AFP, PC Mag, and TechCrunch.

NASA is making a full-court press with the use of social networks.  Check out their Connect and Collaborate with NASA website.  There they link to organizational and personal accounts on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, foursquare, Gowalla, ustreamTV, and Myspace.

NASA has quite a collection of social network profiles.  I wouldn’t expect any local government to rival this, but look at NASA’s profiles, and see if you can learn something from how they use Twitter, Facebook, and the like.

Emerging Technologies Go Local

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O’Reilly Radar has a great article on Government 2.0 in local government:

The primary benefits of Gov 2.0 that IT professionals cite include improved e-services to the public, resident participation in government, and collaboration between agencies. That snapshot of Gov 2.0 evolution offers ample perspective on the challenges for Gov 2.0 at the federal level.

Cities like New York, Boston, San Francisco, Portland, Ore. and the District of Columbia, have all been hailed in the media for innovative use of open data, new urban mechanics, adoption of Open311, and improved e-services. Promoting government transparency through technology is a leading topic of interest for local government officials, though implementation still lags that interest in many counties. Abroad, the growth of government 2.0 in Australia and development of open government in Britain are key case studies to watch, particularly data.gov.uk. Last weekend’s CityCamp in London drew hundreds of citizens, technologists and government workers together to talk about the next steps.

The article even connects government (and web) 2.0 to the foundations of democracy:

“The most powerful force in American democracy is the connection between and among citizens,” said David B. Smith, NCoC’s executive director in a prepared statement. Civic life in America now includes a digital component that allows people to share news and co-create in unprecedented ways. What citizens and local government do with that force is the next great question.

Edmonton Replicating City in Second Life

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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.”

via Edmonton, Alberta, Replicating City in Second Life.

2010 Digital Counties Survey Award Winners Announced

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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.

2010 Digital Counties Survey Award Winners Announced.

Social Networks for Public Safety Alerts

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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

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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.

Keeping Up with All the Social Networks

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.