Do you monitor your Wikipedia entry?

I keep an eye on my agency's Wikipedia entry to make sure the information it contains is timely, factual, apolitical and objective.

Where possible I try to edit it as little as possible, allowing the community of Wikipedia to determine what is relevant in the entry - we have our own website for detailed information.

So why bother with Wikipedia?
I see managing our Wikipedia presence as a plank in our agency's overall communications strategy. If someone searches for us online I want to ensure that the same factual message is being communicated from any websites we can influence.

Wikipedia is particularly important as it is the most popular website we have the capacity to influence.

It's one of the top ten websites in the world and also a top ten site for Australia users.

While universities may not regard it as a primary reference source, it is in widespread use by Australian children for research purposes. In fact my children were taught at school how to research online using Wikipedia. Which site will they continue to use in ten years?

Below is a comparison from Alexa on the ranking of Wikipedia, Encyclopedia Britannica and Australia.gov.au based on overall internet traffic. Australia.gov.au doesn't perform this badly if only looking at Australian traffic, but Wikipedia performs just as well.

There's an overall list for Commonwealth government here, the text in red represents government bodies without a Wikipedia entry at all.

Interestingly the list is open to anyone to edit - and it does not have an importance ranking (which defines how much attention is paid to the accuracy of the content).

I've had a quick look around at the Wikipedia entries for other departments and agencies and there's enormous variation in the quality and comprehensiveness of their entries - where they have entries.

How does your department or agency review and maintain its Wikipedia entries?

• AGIMO - Australian Government Information Management Office
• Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry
• Attorney-General's
• Australian Bureau of Statistics
• Australia Tax Office
• Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy
• Centrelink
• Child Support Agency
• Climate Change
• CSIRO - great entry!
• Defence
• Education, Employment and Workplace Relations
• Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts
• Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs
• Finance and Deregulation
• Foreign Affairs and Trade
• Health and Ageing
• Human Services
• Immigration and Citizenship
• Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government
• Innovation, Industry, Science and Research
• Medicare - great entry!
• Prime Minister and Cabinet
• Resources, Energy and Tourism
• Treasury
• Veterans' Affairs

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Open innovation - building engagement between governments, companies and citizens

The McKinsley Quarterly has published a very interesting piece on the future of innovation, The next step in open innovation.

This explores the concept that companies - and government departments - have traditionally been 'closed shops' for innovation. All their innovation has occurred internally with few linkages to the work underway at other organisations.

However this is changing as organisations realise that collaborative innovation, across organisations, reduces waste and stimulates new concepts.

Anyone who has ever sat down and written a report on their own has probably experienced this at a personal level. Bouncing ideas off others triggers new directions and leads to new insights.

With the internet, a global participatory environment, we're beginning to see organisations work more co-operatively with their supply chains, with players in other markets, with the public and even with competitors.

McKinsley gives examples such as:

• LEGO - invited customers to suggest new models interactively and then financially rewarded the people whose ideas proved marketable.
• The shirt retailer Threadless sells merchandise online—and now in a physical store, in Chicago—that is designed interactively with the company’s customer base.
• Open-source platforms developed through distributed cocreation, such as the “LAMP” stack (for Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python), have become standard components of the IT infrastructure at many corporations.
• Peugeot invited customers to submit car designs and built and exhibited the winning entry at a car show and integrated it into a PC game.
• The Missha cosmetics brand in South Korea has reached 40% market share on the basis of cocreated cosmetics products.
• Wikipedia has grown to over 9.25 million entries (2.44 million in english) in over 250 languages in under ten years (the English wikipedia alone has over 1 billion words - 25x the size of the next largest English encyclopedia).
  

Why would private organisations wish to co-operate? Because it gives them a competitive edge, as discussed by Harold Rhiengold in his fantastic TED presentation on collaboration.


This isn't purely a private sector development - it is also occurring in the public space. I can think of examples such as New Zealand's collaborative police wiki legislation, or the UK government's mashup competition.


Back to the McKinsley article, one of the points raised is that traditional media and organisational sites are growing in usage at a rate of 20-30% per year.

However sites focused on user-created content are growing at 100%.

The public has demonstrated that it is ready and able to engage organisations in productive discussions - co-developing concepts, products and policy - with suitable incentives.

The article's recommendation is that;

Even the most advanced businesses are just taking the first few steps on a long path toward distributed cocreation. Companies should experiment with this new approach to learn both how to use it successfully and more about its long-term significance. Pioneers may have ideas about opportunities to capture value from distributed cocreation, but fresh ones will appear. To benefit from them, companies should be flexible about all aspects of these experiments.

Where does your department stand?

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How would you start out sourcing social networking tools?

I've been looking around at some of the interesting social networking tools that are coming onto the market, such as Webjam, for some that could be rapidly implemented within our firewall.

I apply some fairly rigorous criteria. Any system must:

1. Meet W3C, Federal, Department and Agency web standards
2. Support at least AA accessibility (and preferably AAA)
   
3. Meet our ICT requirements for interoperability, stability, bandwidth use and technology platform
4. Integrate with our identification system
5. Be server lite
6. Track usage by user
   

For blog platforms, they must also:

1. Support both individual and team blogs
2. Allow us to centrally control who can set up a blog
3. Be template based
4. Support WYSYWG editing
5. Integrate with an image management tool
6. Support comment moderation (on or off)
7. Incorporate email as well as RSS/ATOM notifications

For wiki/collaborative group platforms, they must also:

1. Allow us to centrally control who can set up a wiki
   
2. Be template based
3. Support WYSYWG editing
4. Integrate an image management tool
5. Incorporate email as well as RSS/ATOM notifications

For forums, they must also:

1. Support multiple admin and moderation levels (discussion/forum/global)
2. Allow us to centrally control who can set up a forum or discussion group
   
3. Be template based
4. Support WYSYWG editing
5. Incorporate email as well as RSS/ATOM notifications
6. Support both threaded and unthreaded discussions

There's some other criteria as well, but I don't have them immediately in front of me.

Fortunately I've found Jeremiah Owyang's post on a List of “White Label” or “Private Label” (Applications you can Rebrand) Social Networking Platforms

The good news - it lists around 80 'white-label' social networking products available in the market.

The bad news - it's now 12 months old. More than half of the products on the list are likely to have disappeared or changed names, and there's likely to be double that number of new players (again like Webjam).

So I'm now thinking about my best course in finding a product that is stable, reliable, and will be in the market for at least a few years - at a low price point with great functionality.

Any pointers?

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Here comes the (egovernment) New Zealanders!

New Zealand is a beautiful place to visit and I have fond memories of my last trip there.

It also happens to be one of the most happening places in eGovernment, at least in this part of the world.

In fact I feel a little disappointed in Australia's progress at the national level compared to the achievements of our nearest neighbour.

For instance, in New Zealand public officials are regularly blogging to share information across the government sector, such as in the Thorndon bubble and Eye of the Fish.

The Network of Public Sector Communicators in NZ also has the Network of Public Sector Communicators Blog to support and aid the discussion.

The NZ State Department runs not one but two official blogs, In Development and Research e-Labs, demonstrating central commitment to the online medium.

The Department also conduct their review of government Web Standards using a wiki, as well as their Guide to Online Participation (Australia doesn't have one of these yet for public sector employees).

In Australia these types of collaborative developments could be easily facilitated via the existing Govdex service (though in my view Mediawiki - as used in NZ - is a lighter, faster and more flexible solution).

New Zealand also uses the online channel for government initiatives, such as their Police Act wiki, when the public was able to provide input into the review of the NZ Police Act through a wiki. This was passed as an act of NZ Parliament as the Wiki Policing Act 2008.

Worst of all, New Zealand beat Australia in the Fullcodepress competition last year in front of a global audience.

I wonder if they have any jobs going?


For more of our neighbour's online initiatives, see this list of eGovernment initiatives in progress in New Zealand.

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Social media initiatives at my agency - what is your agency doing?

Part of my interest in social media at the moment is related to how I'm encouraging its use within our agency.

I'm very interested in hearing about what other agencies are doing.


At work we have a team rolling out a community of practice using a wiki-based system, with an extranet to follow. I hope to replicate this for other areas of the business that could benefit from such a system.

We have a rating/comment system being implemented into our intranet to further help content authors and the intranet management team (part of my team) understand where our content requires significant improvement to meet staff needs. It's not quite social media, but it's a step towards it.

After our major 1 July deadline we will be documenting a strategy and approach for internal blogs and forums, with the support of our Internal Communications team - then hopefully introducing the enabling tools with ICT's assistance.

We are also preparing to engage more actively in public online discussions around our agency and its services, in a measured and structured manner. Around this I'm looking seriously at whether we should introduce online participation principles, as has occurred in the UK.

We have initial plans, with some buy-in from our Media group, to trial the enhancement of our media releases to make it easier to get them into Digg and Reddit, and potentially deliver them via Twitter or similar tools.

Finally I'm encouraging the members of my team (currently spread across several states) to make use of appropriate tools to aid contact and collaboration. Phone and email work reasonably well for us, however I want to explore how we can further improve engagement in a less interruptive way. Over time I'd love to extend this to other areas as appropriate - I'm already aware of more than 60 Facebook and Linkedin users in the agency, so the grassroots growth is already occurring.

If your agency has any social media initiatives underway that others could learn from, please let me know

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Useful introductory resources for social media

I'm on a bit of a social media kick this weekend due to all the fantastic resources I've found on the topic in the last several days.

I wanted to flag a couple of these in particular that I found useful, and may be useful for others.

My first great find was a CIO magazine article from May this year, Enterprise 2.0 - What is it good for? (A 12-step guide to getting the most out of Web 2.0 tools and making it safe-for-purpose).

This article provides a good step-by-step approach to getting your toes wet in the social media space, starting with creating a Web 2.0 strategy, getting buy-in from all Senior Management (as it's not simply a technology decision), establishing ownership, developing appropriate policies, monitoring and response times.


The seond resource was the Cook & Hopkins Social Media Report - 3rd edition.

As a free online resource this is an enormously valuable tool for establishing a basic understanding of some of the social media options out there. If you're new to the area, or need to provide information to someone who is, this resource can provide a good starting point.

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Why are government organisations slow at embracing social media?

This post was triggered by a question post over at Strange Attractor, asking Why isn't social software spreading like wildfire through business?

This is a question I have considered as well, in the last year from a government perspective.

It particularly puzzled me late last year when I made unsuccessful efforts to get a wiki in place for a very clear need within the organisation.

At the time it was clear that people in my agency wanted to collaborate more effectively, that they were committed to their jobs and highly able.

They were already making good use of the collaboration tools they had - meetings, documents, email and intranet.

At the time I believed the limiting factor was time. Everyone was overworked and stressed - people simply did not have the capacity to take on more meetings, read more documents or send more emails.

I also thought the solution was clear. To facilitate more collaboration what people needed was the tools to leverage their time for collaboration more effectively. I aimed to help them achieve this leverage using online social media tools.

ROI could be justified by travel savings, employee satisfaction and better quality outcomes.

However when attempting to introduce the wiki, I hit a brick wall and we went back to older approaches which, in my calculations, have cost the agency significantly more money and time and delivered an inferior outcome.

At the time I was quite disappointed and looked for an explanation of the cause within the agency's structure.

However after months of thought on this topic, I've arrived at the following conclusion as to why smart and able people resist the introduction of tools that would help them in their jobs.


It's command and control culture
The majority of organisations, both public and private, are structured as effective dictatorships. There is a CEO at the top, they allocate power out to trusted lieutenants, who transfer smaller amounts of power to underlings.

Each lieutenant has a particular area of power - be it Marketing, Sales, ICT, Operations, Finance or HR. They work together on the fringes where power must be shared to achieve the organisation's goals.

Now clearly this is an effective structure. It worked for hundreds, if not thousands, of years in medieval societies. Kings and Queens at top, ministers and advisers beneath them and fiefdoms owing allegiance to different groups.

However, by its nature this approach is divisive rather than integrative.

Each lieutenant competes over resources, recognition and money for their groups. There is only a small incentive to co-operate, and alliances do not always last very long.

Within each group underlings compete in a similar fashion, for power, prestige and position.

Again this isn't the most fertile soil for collaboration - except where there is direction from above or very clear and unequivocal win-win situations.


Now from my writing you may draw the conclusion that I am against this structural approach.

Actually I'm not. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with a command and control approach. What is important is to consider the goals of the organisation and whether the means achieve those goals with the available resources.

As the goals and environment change over time, the approach needs to be reassessed to ensure it continues to deliver on the outcomes cost-effectively.


The impact of technology
Today organisations attempt to achieve a great deal more with fewer resources. Technology has already facilitated this.

Phones replaced telegraphs that replaced runners, computers replaced typing pools that replaced scribes.

These changes didn't happen overnight, but once a certain proportion of organisations made the change others had no choice but to also change or die.

This has happened with the internet as well. Entirely new companies have formed and become very successful in the last ten years. The 'dinosaurs' didn't die out overnight but are being forced to adopt some of the traits of newer organisations to survive.

This evolutionary process occurs faster in the private sphere due to competition over profits. Government, being funded by the public purse is not subject to the same degree of competition and has less incentive to risk change.


The network effect
Online social networks are one of the next steps in this evolution.

In some ways these networks are even more of a challenge for organisations than the introduction of personal computers, which could be integrated into a existing organisational approaches.

Command and control structures by their nature seek to control and restrict information flows in order to better direct and focus their resources (staff). They silo areas by specific functions - putting all the programmers here, communications people there and finance people somewhere else.

This approach makes command and control management easier, as teams are homogeneous.

It also leads to the formation of different cultures and approaches in different areas of the organisation. These can reduce organisational efficiency by forming isolated silos, each with their own language and customs - a Tower of Babel situation.

Traditionally command and control organisations have dealt with this issue by employing translators to allow information to pass between areas in carefully managed ways. These include people in roles such as internal account managers, business analysts and project managers.

However with social networks the goal is complete transparency. Almost all the barriers between silos come down to allow free communication and collaboration. The focus becomes the outcome, rather than the process.


Change is hard
Even in cases where organisations want to support the free flow of ideas and collaboration, achieving this is hard as the command and control culture simply isn't aligned to support it.

Pockets of collaboration can and do spring up, but widespread adoption requires widespread change.

This change requires visible and strong leadership from those who gain the most from command and control structures and have the most to lose in a network organisation - the executives at the top of the pile.

If these people do not enthusiastically adopt, facilitate and support the change it will not occur.

This is very hard for senior management as they have the largest stake in the existing structure.

They need to willingly let go of their silo power in order to harness an even greater power - that of the organisation acting in unison.


The challenge is to give up control in order to retain it
So that's my view of why organisations are slow to adopt social media.

It's not skills, experience, power or even need. It's a side effect of the dominant command and control culture.

I'd appreciate your comments and views.


Bottom bar - change in motion
By the way for a practical example of how difficult this change can be and how long it takes, look at China and the political change it has been undergoing for the last twenty years.

The nation is struggling with how to give up centralised political power without losing control - a struggle reflected in miniature in many organisations around the world.

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eObama - the US Presidential election goes digital

I've been watching the campaign for the Democratic nomination for the US presidency with 'shock and awe'.

This has been the first election to see social media become a significant factor in the outcome - even (in many commentators' opinions) the deciding factor.

There has been very little coverage of this in Australia and I'm not sure how aware many Australians are at the high degree of impact the online channel has had on the outcome.

However in the US and in the UK the shift in election focus from presentation to participation has been widely discussed and dissected.

Leading commentators have compared it to the shift in the 1960s when television first became a factor in US politics and Kennedy demolished Nixon in a televised debate - not because he made better points, but because he presented better on camera.

...the Obama campaign has shattered the top-down, command-and-control, broadcast-TV model that has dominated American politics since the early 1960s.

"They have taken the bottom-up campaign and absolutely perfected it," says Joe Trippi, who masterminded [Democrat candidate Howard] Dean's Internet campaign in 2004. "It's light-years ahead of where we were four years ago. They'll have 100,000 people in a state who have signed up on their Web site and put in their zip code. Now, paid organizers can get in touch with people at the precinct level and help them build the organization bottom up. That's never happened before. It never was possible before."

The Machinery of Hope - Rolling Stone Magazine (20/03/2008)

How Barack Obama won the online market
Barack Obama's staff - led by one of the founders of Facebook - developed the my.barackobama.com website before he announced his nomination. This site combined all the elements of social media, election-style.

It allowed grass-root supporters to organise local precinct and state-based support chapters, create mailing lists, develop websites, blogs and online forums.

This led to the formation of hundreds of local groups, who were able to organise and mobilise rapidly and, while organised outside the campaign machine, could be co-ordinated with it when Obama's paid campaign workers arrived in an area ahead of a vote.

The site also spearheaded the donations machine for the campaign. It allowed the creation and division of phone lists, contained pre-developed scripts for supporters (to cold call people for donations) and naturally allows people to make donations directly from the home page.

As a result Obama raised a record sum of over US$270 million in donations at last count to support his campaign,. This is roughly US$50 million more than Clinton (whose campaign now owes about US$20 million) - see Open Secrets for the details of funds raised.

Remember that when Obama announced he would run Clinton was the clear front-runner. He has come from a long way behind to take the nomination, enabled by his powerful online organisation.

So how was this all kept a secret during the campaign?

It wasn't. Below are a selection of articles dissecting Obama's online machine and, in many cases, providing details of its inner workings.

• Politics 2.008 - American Journalism Review (June/July 2007)
• Obama Campaign Masters Digital Media While McCain Efforts are "Old and Clunky" - JackMyers.com (10/06/2008)
• The 21st Century Election - PoliticsOnline (04/06/2008)
• Barack Obama is master of the new Facebook politics - Times Online (25/05/2008)
• Internet key to Obama victories - BBC (22/05/2008)
• Will the US election be won on Facebook? - CNN (01/05/2008)
• Barack Obama is Rocking the Youth Vote - SearchEngineWatch (17/04/2008)
• The revolution will not be televised - Tokblog (April 2008)
• The Machinery of Hope - Rolling Stone Magazine (20/03/2008)
• How Barack Obama is Using Web and Enterprise 2.0 in the US Primary Campaign Through Central Desktop - Portals and KM (05/03/2008)
• Obama's Web Marketing triumph - Fortune Magazine (03/03/2008)
• Inside Obama's surging Net-roots campaign - Wired Magazine (03/03/08)
• Democrat Barack Obama: 2008 Presidential Candidates & Online Marketing Strategies - Search Marketing Gurus (08/01/2008)
• Barack Obama, Social Networking King - Washington Post (06/10/2007)

So if all of this was known - why didn't Clinton copy and improve on it?

The simple answer is that Obama's campaign was run by Digital Natives - people brought up using the internet or who understand and make use of it's amazing potential as a way to connect and empower individuals at the grassroots, organise and co-ordinate resources and create new paths to solve old problems.

Clinton's campaign staff were focused on traditional, tried-and-true command and control ways of running campaigns and simply did not have the capacity to change mindsets in time to stop the Obama juggernaut.

Traditional media is based on command and control. But the digital world is all about grassroots. Traditional media is about authority. Digital is about authenticity.

You can see it in the language they use. Obama uses the language of "we and you," which is inclusive and nods to the wisdom of the crowds. She [Clinton] uses "I and me." His stuff is about "yes, you can." Which is about the buyer. She talks about "experience from day one." That's about the seller. That doesn't resonate anymore.

Obama's Web Marketing triumph - Fortune Magazine (03/03/2008)

I wonder which politician or organisation will next be able to replicate Obama's success?

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Baby steps into extranets

When I joined the public service a few years back I was very pleased to discover that my agency was very proactive about engaging stakeholders when creating products and services for our customers.

The agency was still using 20th century methods to achieve these outcomes and was making no use of online collaborative groups or extranets.

This isn't a criticism of the people or the systems - the agency had developed the skills to manage this collaboration using the readily available technologies - email, mail, phones, faxes and face-to-face meetings. Since these were working well there had not been the need or money available to innovate new ways of engaging.

However over the last few years the tempo has accelerated.

The agency has placed a greater focus on stakeholder consultation, the level and complexity of engagement has increased and there has been the need to involve more players in approval processes. At the same time the agency has needed to manage its staffing levels carefully.

When most types of system double in size the effort required to manage and maintain them increases much more than double. This is because the connections between the different parts of the system increase exponentially.

For example, if you draw four dots on a piece of paper they can be connected in 6 possible ways (3+2+1), however 8 dots can be connected in 28 possible ways (7+6+5+4+3+2+1).

While it could be argued that as all these extra stakeholders deal with the agency as the central organiser the complexity doesn't increase that much - theoretically all these interactions can be fed into a central point at the agency, like spokes on a wheel.

However in reality the interactions between the stakeholders are an important factor and this is where all the additional potential connections come into play.

So with increasing need, increasing complexity and fixed or diminishing resources an important questions becomes;

How does the agency manage this on an ongoing basis - and do so cost-effectively?

This is where my Online Communications Team been able to add value to the process. We've worked with the stakeholder managers to introduce an approach that is both freely available and totally government approved - an online collaborative wiki.

We've established two collaborative communities for my agency using the Govdex platform provided by AGIMO. This wiki-based system is secure, readily configurable to agency needs, has support available and is free to use by government departments. Best of all it's easy for the relevant groups in the agency to manage themselves, with my team simply providing back up and account managing the Govdex relationship.

As we're in early days yet and learning as we go, the two communities we've established are internally focused. One is supporting the ongoing development of our intranet and helping the agency's online team understand the capabilities of such a system (so we can stay a few steps ahead of other users).

The other is a knowledgebase and discussion forum for the agency's stakeholder engagement officers across Australia. This is the prototype for a future system for engaging with our stakeholders across the country.

The experience of setting up these systems has been largely painless. Other than some issues with the access speed within our firewall, which appear to be due to government networks not playing nice with each other and are rapidly being resolved, our Govdex experience has begun as a positive one.

I'd particularly like to commend the customer service provided by Govdex - they have helped us get the sites up and running in record time.

I'm now in the process of beginning to promote Govdex as a business tool within my agency so that anyone who has the need to deal with a set of internal and external stakeholders can consider it as a potential solution to their communication and collaboration needs.

Note that Govdex and similar online collaboration systems aren't a replacement for face-to-face meetings, phone calls or emails, but they are another tool that can be used to facilitate and manage complex collaboration situations in a cost-effective manner.

By the way - here's a great presentation on GovDex from the Web Directions Government conference on May 19 2008 - Ralph Douglas - GovDex: Collaborating online in a secure environment

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