Craig Thomler's professional blog - AI and digital government thoughts and speculations from an Australian perspective
Craig Thomler
I've worked in the online sector since 1995 in roles including founder, publisher, journalist, webmaster, marketer, channel manager, CIO, COO and visionary. I left the public sector in early 2012 to lead Delib Australia as Managing Director Australia and New Zealand. More...
The Department of Finance has announced the ten finalists for the 2009 Excellence on e-Government Award (e-Award).
Having followed this award for three years, I believe that this is the best set of finalists I've seen to-date and represents the gradual maturing of Australian Government online initiatives.
I've linked to more information on each of the finalists below to make it easier to locate and review the various initiatives.
Per the post, How Do You Get To Carnegie Hall? Upload Upload Upload, the orchestra included over 90 musicians located in over 30 countries and while auditioned by professional musicians, the final players were selected by crowdsourcing.
If it is possible to bring together a symphony orchestra, and have it play a mash-up symphony online (and then together in Carnegie Hall), think of the music government agencies could make by collaborating online with each other, with other organisations and with the public.
And read about how new media is changing the entire media mix, from the perspective of the music industry in this ebook, Orchestras and New Media (PDF).
I have been having a few conversations over the last two days with a variety of web managers regarding the level of commitment by their organisations to their online channel.
The response has been mixed. Some have a great deal of support and resourcing, others have interest but no resourcing and others have neither interest nor support.
One of the differentiators appears to be the level and range of online activity by the web managers themselves. Those that model the behaviour that they want their organisation to exhibit appear to be more effective at achieving their goals, obtaining the resources and support they need.
In other words, they are walking the talk.
This is not a new or radical approach. When teaching children it is important to model the behaviours you wish them to emulate. Equally in workplaces executives are expected to model the conduct and attitudes that staff are expected to follow.
When executives model poor behaviours it is more likely that staff will similarly behave inappropriately as, by example, the executives have given them a license to do so.
My questions to you are: Do you use the tools and mediums you wish your organisation to adopt? And have you worked to encourage senior executives and your Minister's office to model use of the online channel that you wish staff to emulate?
A rising trend in overseas governments is to appoint people specifically into a role such as New Media Director with a responsibility for developing guiding an agency or department's online participation initiatives.
In the US Federal Government this type of role is becoming so important that it is becoming a political appointment (as are the various Secretaries, CTO and CIO positions) rather than simply a bureaucratic hire.
To my knowledge there are few if any Online Media, New Media or Social Media Director or SES role across the Australian Public Service and a search of APSjobs resulted in zero results for all three terms.
I am interested in your views;
Do Australian government agencies need to begin formalising their commitment to new media channels by hiring appropriately qualified individuals as their New Media or Social Media Directors?
Is the talent pool in Australia deep enough to support this?
Should we keep the role buried in another area, such as the Online Services or Online Communications Team or within a Media or other Customer Communications group?
Should the Australian government engage with new media channels at all?
The US Air Force is one of the most proactive users of new media amongst government organisations globally, seeing the internet as another channel for engaging potential recruits, the public and for conducting military operations.
The approach being taken by the US Air Force, and increasingly by other US government agencies, is that all of their staff are public relations spokespeople and if properly equipped will support their agencies in engaging the public online.
The US Air Force regard this spokesperson role as so important to their future operations that they've produced a video and book emphasising to their staff how critical is it for airmen to participate online in blogs and forums, and setting out the guidelines for how they may do so in an appropriate manner.
truly an inspiring example of how we could use new/social media when we start using these tools with our head and heart rather than using policies or rules and regulations as our starting point. For me, new/social media can only be successful when it has or creates and invigorates meaning in our lives and to the lives of people who use them. And most important of all, the value of social media lies in the people, not the technology. Then the connections made and communities created will then generate greater services and value than we could ever think of.
The video below was originally developed for Air Force personnel to encourage them to use new media to 'win the information war' by providing positive messages about the Air Force to counter negative messages distributed online by enemies of the United States.
Given the political sensitivity and national security implications of defense forces, if the US Air Force's acting director of public affairs, Colonel Michael G. Caldwell (also a blogger at From an Air Force Colonel), is prepared to state publicly that "We want 330,000 people to be in Public Affairs," (reported in the WebInkNow post The U.S. Air Force and social media: A discussion with Colonel Michael Caldwell), what is stopping any government agency with less political or secrecy sensitivities from engaging at least as actively as the US Air Force?
Posts
