Monday, December 13, 2010

Which Commonwealth agencies use which social media tools?

Based on information I've collected over the last year, and using the data collected via the Vic Government, I have prepared a Google Spreadsheet designed to identify who in the Commonwealth Government is using which social media channels in their activities.

It is fairly basic at this stage;
  • it is only Commonwealth for now (sorry to the state and local government guys - I will be building the same system for you soon);
  • it doesn't look at how many of each channel your agency runs;
  • it doesn't link to the channels;
  • it doesn't link to agency websites;
  • it may miss some smaller offices and agencies (I sourced the data from Australia.gov.au, so it should be fairly accurate, but it is hard to be sure, given the frequent changes and that not everyone might inform AGIMO of them).
  • there are no contact details for the teams managing the channels.
The sheet also looks at engagement via third-party channels and at whether or not staff are allowed to access social media channels from within.

I need your help filling it out and expanding it into a useful tool for helping agencies identify which of their colleagues are actively using these channels on an official basis.

All contributions are anonymous - please circulate it to your peers. The more data we have, the more useful it becomes.

To give a taste of the spreadsheet - the stats are below.

Click on the link below, choose edit and then 'External social media' to add your data.

You can go to the full spreadsheet at: https://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=0Ap1exl80wB8OdENTTHE1VkJmZURzaGRPUHV4ZW1teGc&output=html

5 comments:

  1. Great initiative Craig - I hope that agency insiders can help to fill out the data more fully to paint a more comprehensive picture.

    Another related issue, is the use of open source software within agencies. It would be a useful exercise to find out which enlightened agencies used open source as opposed to proprietary software.

    Whilst not directly relevant to your aims of this data collection effort, I think the results would show clear links between agencies that allow access to - or utilise social networks with those that utilise open source software.

    And to me that would clearly show the most innovative and progressive agencies - and likely those that operated more efficiently, effectively and more cost effectively.

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  2. I agree - a great idea Craig.

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  3. Nice compilation, Craig.

    At the Asia Pacific Civil-Military Centre of Excellence (which I note you included - thanks!), while it is early days, we have done a number of things that break new ground, especially for a Defence-related establishment:

    - we have a social media policy that has been published on the web at http://civmilcoe.gov.au/2010/11/the-centre-and-open-government/
    - staff have open access to any and all social tools and may use them to discuss their work in accordance with the published policy
    - we're using several tools for the dissemination of our content (all licensed CC-BY) including our blog, Flickr, YouTube (first content will be live before Christmas), SlideShare, Twitter (and are looking at Facebook from an official perspective)
    - we are in the process of evaluating options for a social extranet (our staff are often overseas) and are introducing staff to Yammer

    I am more than happy to discuss what we're doing in an official capacity.

    Steve Collins
    APCMCOE Online Comms Manager

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  4. While the data listed does show agency activity what it doesn't show is the level of general access. Many agencies still only permit a select few to have full access to engage online and many do not even permit view access to read.

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  5. Hi Cris,

    I included a column for level of online access to social media - however it isn't as granular as you've provided.

    Some recent APSC stats suggest that 31% of the APS has access to social media tools - not a great number admittedly, but it is still a substantially greater percentage than had access to telephones five years after they were first adopted by the APS.

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