Appropriate use of LinkedIn in politics? Should there be a social media electioneering blackout prior to elections?

Yesterday I received the following message from a Linkedin contact:

Dear LinkedIn Friend

I hope you may be able to help me…

Over the coming weeks the Joondalup community will decide who will lead their City for the next four years when Local Government elections are held via postal vote. All electors residing within the City of Joondalup will receive their ballot paper from Wednesday 2 October and I am seeking support to be re-elected as Joondalup Mayor.

It has been an honour and privilege to serve the Joondalup community, working hard over the past seven years to build an effective Council team that has restored stability and credibility to the City of Joondalup.

Under my leadership as Joondalup Mayor, the City has matured into a vibrant, prosperous and liveable City with a connected and engaged community. This fact was recognised in 2011 when the City of Joondalup was named the World’s Most Liveable City at the UN-endorsed International Awards for Liveable Communities. 

If you are a resident of the City of Joondalup, I am seeking your personal support. If you don't live in the City of Joondalup but have family, friends and community networks in the City (suburbs listed below), I would be grateful if you were able to support me by forwarding this email and encourage them to vote for Troy Pickard as Joondalup Mayor.

I would appreciate your support to be re-elected as Joondalup Mayor so we can build on our successes and make the City of Joondalup an even better place to live.

Yours

Troy

PS – I apologise in advance if I have offended you by emailing this election material.


Troy Pickard
Mayoral Candidate
2013 City of Joondalup Election

I wondered whether people felt this was an appropriate use of LinkedIn - and what the consequences would be as more politicians began using LinkedIn in this fashion, and marshalling their network of supporters to make similar appeals to their networks.

I do recall receiving a similar message prior to the federal election campaign - however at federal level it would be a small and fairly targeted impost on people every three or so years.

Piling state and local elections on top of that, given the non-geographic nature of LinkedIn, could result in people receiving multiple copies of this type of appeal on a weekly basis.

So it raises a question for me - there's often an election advertising blackout period imposed on candidates in the week prior to an election, maybe this type of approach needs to be extended to social media as well.

Or perhaps we need a way to choose whether to opt-in to (or out of) political messaging on social channels, or even a total blackout on political campaigning via social networks.

Of course there's a position that people opt-in by friending or following certain accounts or people. If you follow a politician you can expect to receive political messages.

However what if you simply follow professional peers and friends - people who are not already politicians - who then take up politics, or become major supporters of a particular political cause?

You may have personal and professional reasons to remain connected, but simply not want to receive the political messages they start sending.

Can there be some way on social networks to temporarily screen out the unwanted material?

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Identifiable public service social media voices no longer required in Australian government

The new Twitter profile pic for former
DIAC/DIPD Twitter spokesperson Sandi Logan.

Officials from the Department of Immigration and Border Control (formerly the Department of Immigration and Citizenship) have confirmed that Sandi Logan is no longer required to be a spokesperson for the department on Twitter (using his @SandiHLogan account).

Reported in the Sydney Morning Herald, from comments at the IPAA ACT Social Media event yesterday, effective immediately the Minister is the only spokesperson on Twitter, with the rebadged @DIBPAustralia account focusing on policy and programmatic 'good news stories'.

Sandi has already changed his Twitter profile image and changed the tone of his tweets.

I conjecture that he may even be required to close down the account, based on it having been established as a departmental asset and it being difficult to hand this over to an individual when the following has been built on the account being an official one (see my post on this topic, Is it theft if you personalise & retain an official social media account when you leave an organisation?)

More importantly this step has emphasised a 'do what I do' shift in how public servants may engage via social media. It sends a strong message that public servants may no longer be acceptable as identifiable public spokespeople for their departments.

This has significant implications both for current spokespeople and high profile social media users in the public sector and a much broader impact on the willingness of individual public servants to use these channels for legitimate customer service, policy engagement and service delivery.

While the Department's official account (@DIBPAustralia) remains and has been reinforced as an official channel, individual public servant voices will be hidden behind a departmental name.

I suspect this will only increase the reluctance of public servants to engage in public debates, reducing public understanding of how policy and services are developed and correspondingly reducing the public's ability to participate.

It will also likely reduce the ability for the broader community to understand the value, importance and difficulty of public service roles - damaging employment intakes for the public sector and the reputation and standing of the APS.

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Can government policy, reports and consultation documents be communicated through animated infographics?

Government reports are often dry - really, really, really dry.

They are also often wordy, complex, long and, due to these properties, largely incomprehensible to the broader community.

Government policy and consultation documents can suffer from similar conditions. They are often quite complex, long and structured in ways that make sense to career bureaucrats but not necessarily to the general public.

Many agencies also dislike this and make all kinds of efforts to provide summaries, to simplify language, use images and charts and use other techniques to spice up these often long and complex government documents.

However at their core, they generally remain documents, words on paper that would be familiar to the scholars of Middle-Ages Europe, to the Ancient Greeks, Romans and Egyptians and to the many dynasties of the Chinese over the last six thousand years - although they may now be distributed by electronic as well as physical means.

Surely modern society can devise better ways to communicate complex information than relying on an approach that is now around six thousand years old.

And we have - by drawing from techniques that are much older and more resilient in human cultures. Pictures, dance and song.

Now I don't expect governments to communicate their reports, policies and consultation materials entirely through the use of the performing arts. Not all our politicians or public servants are as accomplished singers as, say Chris Emerson, who can be viewed below communicating about government budget reporting and the Charter of Budget Honesty in song with his band Emmo and the Wipeouts on an episode of The Hamster Decides.



However with multimedia and the use of infographics it is now possible to communicate government information in far more engaging and understandable ways than ever before.

This is being done by some agencies already. The Department of Planning and Community Development in Melbourne made a series of animated infographics to communicate material from their consultation, PlanMelbourne (which I've been privileged to work on through Delib Australia).



The use is not yet widespread, with most government reports, consultation documents, policies and other material still released as words on paper - however what if it was.

What if governments mandated that agencies were required to follow a visual first approach for all materials they released to the public, only using words on paper as a secondary technique?

Could agencies rise to the challenge, communicating their material far more succinctly in visual form - a five minute video rather than a 200 page single-spaced, small-type report?

Not possible? Material too complex and long? Too many statistics to cover?

Maybe the examples below might shift a few opinions.

The first example is from the creator of PHD Comics, Jorge Cham. As an internationally renown animator Jorge asked students to describe their thesis in two minutes.

Jorge chose the best descriptions and turned them into animated infographics, such as the one below from Adam Crymble on Big Data and Old History.



Second is an example from Peter Liddicoat, a materials scientist at the University of Sydney and the winner of the Chemistry category in the 'Dance your PHD' competition.

Peter's PHD was on the topic 'Evolution of nanostructural architecture in 700 series aluminium alloys during strengthening by age-hardening and severe plastic deformation' - a wonderfully complex and obscure topic that doesn't seem to naturally lend itself to dance, but somehow works.



What I think these example demonstrate is that there are alternatives ways for government to communicate complex material. They no longer must rely on words on paper.

Certainly bureaucrats can argue that word on paper are easy for them to produce, that they satisfy a substantial proportion of the community and they have a long track record - that 6,000 years of history I mentioned earlier.

They can also argue that there's no silver bullet for communication, no technique that will satisfy 100% of the audience, and that is perfectly true.

However while governments may consider words on paper the default position, the lowest common denominator way of making information available to the public, I think they are often used as an excuse to be lazy and unengaging.

Paper make the lives of public servants and politicians easier. Paper documents are relatively cheap and fast to write, review, approve and distribute - none of which is a benefit to the intended audience and community or improves the outcomes of a consultation.

Mark Twain once said, “I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”

For governments words on paper are their long letters - the approach easiest for them, rather than for the recipient, their community or audience.

Agencies can now do better - using images, animations and video to communicate relegating words on paper to a back-up role.

I challenge them to try.

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Opening up information and creating connections triggers ideas and innovation

I wanted to bring attention to a fantastic post in Wired today, which looks at how the explosion in writing is changing how humans think and learn, and how the connections being made by greater openness and improved communication are triggering ideas and innovation.

The post, Why even the worst bloggers are making us smarter, is worth sharing across your organisations and particularly with senior management as it provides an evidence-based view on why open is better than closed and provides insights into several of the transformations happening in modern society.

As the post points out, the internet has led to the greatest explosion in human expression (largely through writing) in human history - and people aren't simply writing for themselves, they are writing for an audience, no matter how small.

When writing becomes public, thinking becomes public and connections take over. Connections lead to innovation and innovation leads to improvements.

This encapsulates precisely why we need more public engagement from public servants, more explanations of policy decision-making approaches and more opportunities for wider audiences to consider, debate, refute and improve on the ideas developed in policy black boxes.

A broader and ongoing discussion is messier, but leads to more innovation and improvement. It can bust myths and debunk ideologically driven views which run contrary to evidence.

If governments are serious about improving themselves and supporting communities to improve lifestyles and dignity, they need to demonstrate this through greater openness and engagement, not more rules.

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DesignGov's public sector problem solving primer

DesignGov has just released the first iteration of their problem solving primer, a tool designed to share insights from the expertise and experience of decision makers and practitioners on what makes good problem solving.

Released on their blog as A problem solving primer, it's a great approach to start aggregating the combined wisdom of people who have to solve complex problems on a regular basis - particularly (but not exclusively) in the public sector.

DesignGov are seeking more viewpoints, so please consider making a contribution - your experience and insights may be valuable to others in ways you do not expect!

The entire work may be turned into a ePub (which I reckon would be a great idea and broaden its reach).


I was asked to contribute, and managed to write a piece that was far too long, so it has been shortened (with my approval) in the primer - however I thought I would include my full piece below.

It was in response to the question, 'What one thing would you recommend when dealing with limited resources and competing priorities?' and my answer was:

In every workplace it is necessary to manage situations where there’s limited resources and competing priorities.

While each situation may be different – a restrictive budget, changing environment or demanding boss – there’s an approach that has helped me work through many versions of this challenge.

I call it the Venn approach. It involves identifying synergies and similarities between priorities and designing solutions by reusing and repurposing work to meet different priorities.

The Venn approach involves the following steps:

1. Take a breath to understand the boundaries
   The first step is to put aside some time to understand the resourcing limits and priorities.
   
   Often we can get so caught up on delivering what we think clients and bosses require, we forget to confirm what they really need. We can also have a false understanding of the resource limits, thinking we have less resourcing than we can actually call on, not grasping the range of skills at our disposal, or mistakenly believing we have more resourcing than has been allocated.
   
   By taking some time upfront to truly understand what we have and what we need to deliver when it is often possible to identify opportunities to reduce priority conflicts, maximise how resources can be used and reduce the risk of being caught short on money or time before a priority is met.
   
   
2. Identify synergies and similarities
   While the priorities you have may be different, often there are opportunities to reuse some of your work to meet varied objectives.
   
   Whether it is reusing templates, processes, systems or outputs, there can be hidden synergies which allow you to more efficiently manage your resourcing to meet priorities with less strain and more cost-effectively.
   
   Whenever I have priorities which will recur, or have similarities with other duties, I look to create systems and processes that can be used to minimise the ongoing work to deliver outcomes – even where this involves slightly more resourcing upfront. This type of approach helps reduce future priority conflicts and frees more resourcing for new goals as they emerge.
   
   
3. Share the value
   Often others in your organisation would also benefit from systems, processes, tools and the outcomes you’re required to deliver. It is always worth networking within your organisation, identifying other areas who have similar needs and challenges to you and approaching them around resource sharing and support.
   
   Having worked in online teams across both government and the private sector, I’ve become used to having a range of teams from across organisations needing similar outcomes which, if they attempted to meet them individually, would not be cost-effective for any specific group. However by aggregating these needs and their resourcing a great deal more can be achieved and more organisational needs met.
   
   
4. Negotiate the timeframe and outputs
   It may be hard to believe, but sometimes managers instruct teams to work to unnecessary deadlines, or define the outputs they want when different (and easier to deliver) outputs may actually better match the outcomes needed.
   
   It is often worth checking with the person who issued the deadline whether it is really a fixed point in time, and under what conditions it could be shifted.
   
   It is also worth confirming the outcomes they need from a project, rather than simply delivering the outcomes instructed. Managers may not be aware of the range of ways an outcome may be met and you may find there’s an easier, cheaper, faster and even better way to meet their needs.

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