Minister Tanner says "The government wants to blog"

Minister Tanner has been making statements in conference speeches about having public servants use social media to engage the community for at least a year now.

Yesterday he took this a step further and wrote an article, published in the Sydney Morning Herald, entitled The government wants to blog.

Given that the Australian Government has not yet responded to the Gov 2.0 Taskforce report, this article signals to me that there is a strong appetite for appropriate online engagement by the Australian Public Service (APS) and that forward movement is occurring behind the scenes.

Speaking with colleagues this year there is a growing groundswell of interest in using online channels to engage, however there still appears to me to be a low level of awareness across the APS of some of the enabling measures already in place, such as the APSC Circular on Protocols for online media participation.

I hope those public servants who are aware of this Circular, the Gov 2.0 Taskforce Final Report, Minister Tanner's speeches and articles and other sources are making all this information known across their agencies.