Are Australian public servants prepared to engage online?

At the Gov 2.0 Conference in Canberra last Monday, Minister Tanner said,

“We do want to ensure that we have the capacity for public servants to feel able to engage, and engage in robust discussion online."

His comments were captured in a CEBIT article, Tanner: Gov 2.0 about culture change, not technology - and in the record of the Minister's speech.

Given that there is this level of support, are Australian public servants willing and ready to engage in robust online discussions?

I've seen a lot of individual willingness from public servants to engage online.

There's also a number of projects underway which support this engagement.

On the other side, departments are still deliberating on how to best manage and control online engagement by their staff. Many are still deciding when, how and who they should give permission to engage online, given the potential risks they foresee.

What's been your experience of the progress towards online engagement by public servants?

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Have you entered the Webbys?

The world's top internet award, the Webbys, is now accepting early bird entries for their 2010 awards.

Early bird entries are accepted until 30 October (US time).

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AGIMO launches Web Publishing Guide blog

The Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO) in the Department of Finance has launched its first externally facing blog, the Web Publishing Guide Review Project Blog.

As detailed in its About page, the blog is designed to serve two purposes, consultation and demonstration,

1. The team needs to consult with site visitors to ensure the Guide will meet their needs. This consultation will be done via traditional focus groups and through the use of a project blog. The blog will provide a valuable source of user feedback to inform the redevelopment of the Guide.

2. The Guide provides practical information and examples on a range of different topics relevant to website design and maintenance. The team will use the Guide in order to model practical examples of the guidance contained within the Guide. The blog is an extension of this principle. It will provide an example of both a redevelopment project and a blog, demonstrating the processes and governance of each.

AGIMO have chosen to use a Wordpress blogging platform - which minimises the cost and time required to get such a site up-and-running (as do several similar services such as Blogger and Typepad).

The blog is using a post-publication moderation approach (comments are moderated after appearing in the blog - except for those detected as spam or inappropriate which are pre-moderated), which stimulates active conversation. This also indicates that AGIMO is trusting public servants and other web professionals to engage appropriately, which I expect they will.

I hope that this step into the world of online engagement helps other government agencies feel more comfortable with the medium, get past the apparent 'newness' of blogging and focus on the value they can derive.

This value includes being able to connect with constituents and stakeholders and participate directly in conversations, as well as providing agencies with a direct and authentic voice online, ensuring that their views are heard - rather than reinterpreted, or ignored, by the media.

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Register now for the ABS's Web Analytics in Government forum

The ABS's Customer Insights Team, in conjunction with AGIMO, is holding a Web Analytics in Government forum on Tuesday 24 November in Belconnen.

To quote the ABS,

Our aim is that the forum will allow participants to learn from others and share practical knowledge and experience in:

• pitfalls of implementing web analytics in a government environment;
• understanding online behaviour and experience of users;
• developing performance indicators for websites; and
• knowing which reporting metrics to use and when.

An outline of the programme is available online.

There are only around 50 places available at the forum, so if you're interested in attending register now.

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Learning from the online missteps of the private sector

Web Strategist Jeremiah Owyang recently wrote about some of the latest social media 'reversals' experienced by companies, and has previously published a chronology of,

companies that were blind-sided by the internet, they didn’t understand the impacts of the power shift to the participants, or how fast information would spread, or were just plain ignorant.

• Damage Control: Social Media Reversals
• A Chronology of Brands that Got Punk’d by Social Media

There's no public sector organisations listed - however it's not much of a stretch to believe that many government departments are vulnerable to public damage in similar ways.

Note that in most cases the damage is caused by a lack of effective engagement, not from engaging - which some could conclude leads to a situation where not engaging online is significantly more risky than engaging.

A comment on Jeremiah's blog by Kersten Kloss sums it up for me (just replace 'company' with 'department':

Companies can no longer afford to avoid the social web as a communications medium. They need to become involved in it, to engage in the online world and mingle with their clients and peers. If you truly believe you are the best at what you do then you have nothing to fear by opening up to the social web. Allow yourself to be more transparent. Lead the rest by sharing yourself and offering assistance to others, even if that free assistance gives away some of your proprietary secrets.

If you can’t then you need to look deep inside your organization and fix a far more challenging issue, your stagnancy as an organization.

I often wonder how often non-engagement risk is considered in government programs alongside engagement risks.

Or how often a clever, inventive and funny response is considered as a way to soften and mitigate an already existing situation. For example, EA's reply to the 'Jesus shot' bug reported and widely discussed online in a Tiger Wood's golf game - in the video below.

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