Gov 2.0 Heroes Day - 15 June

GovFresh celebrates Gov 2.0 Heroes Day every year on 15 June.

Gov 2.0 Heroes Day celebrates, in the words of GovFresh,

...citizens inside and outside government who go above and beyond the call of duty and creatively leverage technology to build a more open, transparent and collaborative democracy.

The 'usual suspects' of social media are being used to share information and support communications, including a Facebook page, Twitter account and YouTube - which already features a range of video interviews.

There's also an interview with Luke Fretwell, founder of GovFresh, about the day.

Who would you consider a Gov 2.0 hero?

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Reinventing website perfection

Traditionally, in my experience both in the private and public sector, the way to build a 'perfect' website has been considered to be;
invest a large quantity of resources, personnel and time at the start of the development process,
use this investment to build all the functionality that the developers can dream up, write all the content the communicators can think of and test it with audiences,
launch the 'perfect' website and hope it works, and then
replace the website (fixing most of the bits that failed) after 3-5 years by repeating the process again.

Personally I've never liked this approach. It places a lot of reliance on using past knowledge to guess future (organisational and audience) needs, involves investing a lot of resources upfront with limited ability to terminate or redirect projects until after they have failed and it also results in websites that degrade in effectiveness over time which can lead to progressively greater reputation and legal risks.

I'd like to see the process for developing a 'perfect' website reinvented. The new process must involve a low upfront cost, the ability to be flexible and agile to meet changing needs quickly and be capable of making a website more and more effective over time, improving reputation and reducing legal risks.

But how is it possible to achieve all these goals at once?

The answer is actually quite simple and well understood by successful entrepreneurs.

Rather than aiming for a perfect site on release day after an extended development period, the goal is to quickly build and launch a site that meets at least one critical audience need.

Once the site has been launched, ensure there are tools for monitoring how it is used and identifying user needs. Then progressively build extra functionality and write more content, guided primarily by the needs of your audience.

This approach ensures the site has enough value at launch to be successful, albeit in a more limited fashion than a 'kitchen sink' website (with more functionality at launch). It also ensures that the website grows progressively more useful and relevant to the audience you aim to serve.

In this way the site becomes increasingly perfect in a more realistic way - perfect for the audience who use it, rather than 'perfect' for the stakeholders who think they know what different audiences want.

We see this approach taken with all kinds of websites and products - from Apple's iPhones through to online services such as Gmail.

It's time to see more of this approach used with government websites as well.

After all - don't we want to create the 'perfect' website for our audiences' needs?

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The next generation of government

Living in Australia we are fortunate to be able to often look overseas to view the trends that will shape our lives and our workplaces already beginning to unfold.

While Australians often consider our country an innovative leader in many areas, my fifteen years in the online sector have suggested that, for the most part, we lag on average 18-24 months behind the United States in our thinking and activities in this industry.

That's why I found the article Watch out...Here Comes the Next Generation of Government by Steve Ressler (founder of Govloop) so interesting.

I recommend you read Steve's article. It provides some insights into how public organisations must reinvent themselves to attract the best young staff, and how they much reinvent their relationship with their communities to remain relevant.

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The difference between Gov 1.0 and Gov 2.0 - as demonstrated by the Queensland and Victorian State Governments

I see a lot of examples of Gov 1.0 and Gov 2.0 these days, but one I saw recently struck me an an object example of the differences between these approaches - how far Australian government has come, and how far there is left to go.

In May the Victorian government quietly launched its ICT Plan Blog to consult online on issues related to the production and use of ICT.

As the blog's About us page states,

This ICT Plan Blog exists for people interested in contributing to the Victorian Government’s consideration of issues relating to the production and use of information and communication technology (ICT). Interested users are encouraged to share their ideas and thoughts. This discussion will assist in shaping the Victorian Government’s future policy and actions.

In the same month the Queensland government launched the quarterly ICT in Focus online newsletter, which was billed as,

your quarterly newsletter to keep you updated on the activities of Queensland Government ICT, the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Division of the Queensland Government Department of Public Works. The department is Queensland's lead agency in the application of whole-of-Government information management and ICT. The aim of this newsletter is to provide you with progress on our initiatives.

The difference between the two speaks volumes about the internal struggles in understanding and culture that are going on within governments in Australia and around the world.

Victoria's ICT PLan Blog is designed to consult and engage the public in an active debate about the state government's ICT plans and policies. It recognises that the community and commercial sector are involved and active participants in government with significant stakes in what government does and how it does it.

Queensland's ICT in Focus newsletter is designed to tell the public what the government has decided to do. Its approach suggests that the government knows best and, while acknowledging that the community have a right to know about the government's actions, it could be perceived as communicating that the public is simply a passive recipient of government's decisions.

Inherently there's nothing wrong with Queensland's approach, it is how many governments, of all persuasions, have engaged the public over many years.

However today, with Gov 2.0 progressively increasing its impact on jurisdictions around the world, Gov 1.0 approaches to inform communities may be beginning to appear more and more out of place.

Soon governments who seek to only inform and not engage may be perceived to be out-of-step with their peers (less competitive) and out-of-touch with their citizens (less democratic).

Or perhaps Governments still focused on informing and limiting engagement are already perceived as out-of-touch. What do you think?

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The art of leveraging small announcements to drive Government social media engagement

Governments love big announcements. Billions of dollars in spending, bold new projects and initiatives, launches and major events.

These types of announcements are believed to be the best way to cut through the media storm, attract journalist interest and public attention.

These big announcements appear to work well for traditional media channels, that are always chasing the next big story. However the approach does not work as well in social media channels.

The first difference to consider is that when launching a new initiative a government department can reach out to existing traditional media channels with existing audiences. However in many cases a government department may not yet have aggregated their audience online, making it much less effective.

The big launch tweeted to a dozen followers, or posted on a Facebook page that has only been liked by the families and friends of departmental staff, won't create the type of stir intended and may even send an incorrect signal that it isn't worth engaging via social media channels.

Secondly big announcements tend to require much preparation, approval and timing. This makes them annoyingly difficult to release online at precisely the same time as a Minister steps up to a podium to deliver his speech. Even if you release the online announcement at precisely the right moment, it may take minutes, hours or even days (for web domains or searchable information) to become available to the audience.

Thirdly, big announcements are usually rare and there's large gaps between them. While in traditional media the news will be filled up by all kinds of other announcements and events, on a department's social media channels there is no other news to release, leaving them looking sporadic and disinclining audiences to follow them closely.


What I advocate governments departments do is to by all means make the big announcements, particularly via traditional media to create interest and drive people to an online channel, but also use social media channels to make series of regular small announcements through the life of a campaign or program to sustain and grow online interest.

Laurel Papworth demonstrated how this can work in her recent blog post, #1: Mistakes Companies Make on Twitter TIMELINES VELOCITY, where she illustrated the difference between social media and traditional media in several charts, which I have embedded.

If you're managing an information campaign then you have a range of information available and approved for release. Whether you're releasing videos, publications, factsheets and FAQs or rolling out and completing many small projects within a bigger one, break up your information into 'bite sized' (usually single themed) chunks and distribute them, a few at a time, through your social media channels.

Some people say they have nothing to say, or get concerned that their information may be 'old' because it is already in their website. However it is important to realise that while they might be very familiar with their web content as they visit and think about the website all the time, their audience does not. Every useful, practical, challenging and interesting snippet of information can form the basis for a tweet, a blog post or a Facebook announcement. In some mediums each snippet of information can be published several times through a month - such as on Twitter, where people are not watching your every tweet.

By feeding your social media channel with these small and regular snippets of information (but not too often - no more than a few tweets or one or two posts or Facebook announcements each day) you give your audience a reason to sign-up, to revisit, to share your messages with their friends and to engage with you.

These small announcements can lead into important conversations, giving you even more opportunities to engage in meaningful dialogue and to listen to the views of your audience as they reflect on the information you have provided.

Even more important, when you do have a big announcement, you'll have a pre-prepared, engaged and interested social media audience ready to listen, reflect, share and engage, improving your reach and cut-through and demonstrating how effective social media can be to reach audiences directly without relying on journalists to cover your big announcement.

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