Digital etiquette - are government agencies adequately prepared to engage appropriately online?

Etiquette is important in every form of social engagement. When Australians meet others for the first time we exchange names, shake hands and make light conversation before getting down to the main topic of conversation.

Other cultures have different social etiquette. Many hug or kiss cheeks on first meeting, exchange business cards (sometimes with two hands), meet over a meal or at drinks and talk about families and personal interests, even exchanging small gifts, before discussing business.

Likewise for any individual or organisation engaging online it is important to understand the appropriate digital etiquette or netiquette for the online world - and for the specific medium in use.

I've learnt netiquette over the last 15 years by participating and running forums, blogs, twitter streams, newsgroups, email newsletters, IRC and social networks. However many other public servants, while they may have browsed the internet for years, may not have the same experience with human interactions online.

As government moves to use the internet for more conversations it worries me that one of the risks that may not be well understood or managed is the experience and capability of the public servants assigned to moderate or participate online to employ appropriate etiquette for the situation. They simply, through no fault of their own, may not have the level of understanding of netiquette they need to avoid an online misstep.

This was summed up for me in an article published by a group of teenagers as part of the Digiteens 2008 project on Digital Etiquette, expressing how they saw adults engaging with others online,

Let's face it. Most adults do not know how to use the internet correctly. Most of the adults that I observed do not know how to navigate through the internet without running into some sort of problem. In my opinion, adults that do not know how to use the internet are just as bad as children that do not know how to use the internet. Most of the time, when children and teenagers do not know how to use the internet, they tend to participate in very bad behavior on the internet. They post bad pictures, start gossip about other people, or get involved with relationships. I have noticed that some adults think that just because they are older, they are immune to that same bad behavior on the internet. The truth is they act just as bad. Whether adults realize it or not, they are just as bad as kids on the computer. The phrase, "You are acting like a two-year old" comes into play here. To all adults, lead by example. Help your kids know how to act on the internet by knowing how to act on the internet yourself.

So how can agencies minimise the risk of a netiquette gaff damaging their online reputation or creating an unwanted incident?

Firstly agencies can look for courses teaching netiquette for their key staff. However these are currently few and far between. In fact the topic may be a lucrative training market in coming years, similar to the importance placed on media training or teaching people how to write briefs and media releases.

Next there are books and websites on the topic of netiquette. However they may provide contradictory information or only cover one medium or country. Likewise it can be hard to establish which are authoritative or simply opinion.

Employing intermediaries to engage on government's behalf is also a possibility, though not always a good one. While an external organisation can provide effective moderation of a forum, it can harder for them to speak with your voice authentically. One of the key rules for blogging is to 'be real', so outsourcing your blog to an agency is itself poor digital etiquette and runs the risk of leading to a backlash.

Learning by doing is always an option. There are plenty of online conversations going on that can be watched and participated in to learn the ropes. After all this is how many of us learn - through trial and error - to get on with our classmates at school and workmates in the office.

Agencies can also attempt to hire experts as staff - although there are few in this space, particularly in Australia.

Finally agencies can draw from their internal expertise. Most agencies will have at least a couple of staff who are experienced bloggers, forum participants or moderators. These individuals can be advisors or play an active role in supporting the agency's engagement online.

So is your agency 'netiquette-ready' to engage actively online?

If not, what strategies are you employing to become netiquette-ready?

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Why Government should engage their community online

Crispin has published a post, Why (Government) Organisations Should be Engaging their Community Online, over at his Online Community Engagement blog providing eleven reasons why government should be engaging its community online.

This is a nice piece and I thought I might add a few more that spring to my mind.

Global reach
There are many Australians overseas at any point in time who cannot easily take part in a locally held event. Online provides a cost-effective way to allow these people to have their say.

Private yet controllable
The internet both allows people to protect their privacy and allows governments, via moderation principles, to manage the tone of a discussion and maintain order. For governments who require a certain level of decorum but equally are required to protect the privacy of citizens, internet engagement tools provide a nice balance, when properly implemented.

Supports diversity
When properly designed and managed, the internet can supports engagement with hundreds of thousands of Australians with physical or mental disabilities who may not be able to hear, see or attend other types of engagements. While we can rely on able-bodied representatives, sometimes government is better served by engaging directly with the people impacted by policies.

Speed to market
Online engagement can be set up extremely quickly, drawing on pre-existing online tools. This makes it a very rapid way to get feedback and start conversations during fast-changing situations.

Early warning and resolution
Online communities can provide early warning of building media events. Often the original issue can be identified and addressed before it becomes a more significant - and often over-exaggerated or misreported - story in the mass media.

Keeping it real
Many government departments operate as faceless bureaucracies, where people often feel alienated, disenfranchised or disengaged due to the lack of a human face. Online engagement allows a government department to provide its customers and clients with a face and demonstrate that staff are human beings who care about their customers and work. This genuineness is critical for building human relationships and provides a basis for productive working arrangements.

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Crowdsourcing government policy and service delivery improvements

Are many heads better than one (or a few)?

In the past the answer was often no, because the mechanisms used to collect, collate, rate and assess the suggestions and recommendations of hundred, thousands or millions of people were cumbersome and time-consuming.

In fact whilst our society was originally built on the democratic principle of crowdsourcing (where we ask what everyone thinks then pick the most popular candidate or solution), except in very small communities it has become impossible to place more than a few major issues or decisions in front of the population for comment.

However the internet has begun empowering organisations to consult their customers and government their citizens in more rapid and effective methods.

These tools, often termed 'ideas markets' allow large groups of people to comment on proposals or suggest ideas very rapidly (matching similar ideas to reduce duplication). They also allow these groups to prioritise these suggestions by voting them up or down and adding further comments.

Dell launched such a site in 2007 named IdeaStorm to source product improvement ideas from its millions of customers. IdeaStorm now provides more than 60% of new product ideas and improvements for Dell, helping to turn around the company's declining market share and adding several major new products to the company's line-up.

In fact Dell was so impressed that it used the same concept a second time, opening a similar site named IdeaStorm for Healthcare and Life Sciences, an online community for collecting ideas on how to improve health care with IT solutions.

Other companies have used similar sites to listen and better understand their customers and prioritise suggestions. This includes organisations as diverse as Starbucks, Sun, Nokia, Sony and Random House.

It also includes the US's President Obama, whose Change.gov site ran an ideas market termed the Citizen's briefing book before his inauguration to collect and prioritise suggestions for the top issues he should focus on once he took office. Over 70,000 people participated, providing tens of thousands of ideas, prioritised by over half a million votes.

President Obama repeated this experiment with his recent virtual Town Hall Meeting, allowing citizens to suggest questions for him to answer. It drew over 92,000 participants who asked over 103,000 questions and cast 1.7 million votes, using freely available software from Google.

It is now inexpensive and fast to establish an ideas market. Little IT involvement is necessary as many do not require internal IT resources (servers and network) and most support moderation and other controls to prevent inappropriate suggestions or comments. Commercial out-of-the-box solutions include Google Moderator (used by the US President) to UserVoice, Get Satisfaction, IdeaScale and Salesforce Ideas (used by Dell)

Just like other suggestions processes ideas markets can be non-binding. Dell doesn't implement all the ideas it received - and uses the opportunity to explain why it cannot implement some suggestions.

President Obama only directly answered the questions he and his advisors chose to answer, but used the other 103,000 to improve their understanding of public concerns. I also expect they will answer a number of further questions through their actions over the next twelve months.

So could we use this process right now for Australian government?

Frankly I don't see why not.

Our citizens are some of the most highly educated in the world. We already ask them to engage in many ways, from providing their stories on road safety, to submitting questions to Ministers, to participating in community cabinets or expressing their views via consultation submissions or, recently, via online blogs (such as by the DBCDE).

Into the future I expect to see Australian governments provide even more opportunities for citizens to engage and contribute with even lower barriers to entry. This also means increasing workloads for public servants, who need to collate and prioritise the responses received.

So why not build in the mechanisms for citizens to collate and prioritise suggestions themselves, improving consultation outcomes while reducing government costs?

It is a win-win scenario here, as it is overseas.

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Challenges for gov 2.0 in the US - how many are mirrored in Australian government?

The Register has published an article, Google force feeds Web 2.0 to US gov, providing some key insights into challenges the US government is facing in implementing government 2.0 (or egovernment) initiatives - largely due to embedded policies and processes within legislation and the bureaucracy.

Some of these issues, and potentially other issues that do not apply in the US, have not been resolved in Australia either - generally they require significant whole-of-government co-ordination, consideration and support from political levels to address and resolve.

I think that this is one of the remaining barriers to greater use of the online channel in Australian government. The risks of not engaging online, in many cases, outweigh the political and bureaucratic risks of engaging. No-one wants to get their hand caught in the fridge.

So my challenge to readers of my blog is - what are you doing to help resolve the issues around online participation in government?

If you're a public servant are you engaging with your peers and educating your colleagues?

If you're outside of government, are you providing the evidence and support your government customers need to help them overcome these issues?

Are you willing to take a leadership role in driving Australian government's online success - or are you waiting for others to take the lead, and any potential blame - on your behalf?

It's not simply about earning a pay packet, it's about supporting Australia's evolving democratic processes into the future.

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How will a national broadband network help Australian government agencies?

Yesterday's announcement of the Australian Government's plans to build a national broadband network has created a huge amount of buzz online.

If you've not seen the news, yesterday morning the government announced that they have terminated the tender process due to cost concerns and shortcomings in all tender proposals. Instead the government will invest up to $43 billion over 8 years to build a national broadband network using fibre optic cables to 90% of homes and offices, offering 100Mbps broadband.

This technology is also future-proof. Using emerging technologies, fibre-optic cable can be upgraded further to Gigabyte speeds without significant additional investment and over time this is likely to get even faster.

So what will this mean for government departments?

There are many applications for a super-fast network - many of which are beginning to emerge in Japan (with 160Mbps broadband available) and South Korea (with 120Mbps broadband available and moving to Gb speeds).

These include telepresence, a step beyond video-conferencing which allows groups to work interactively together over extended periods despite being physically remote. Conferences could be held without people leaving their offices, both within Australia and internationally - saving vast amounts of money in travel and accommodation and generating environmental benefits as well as saving work hours.

This concept could be further extended to provide access to telepresence staff in government offices. Basically while every office would retain a base level of staffing for activities requiring live interactions, when one office is quiet and another busy the staff from one could be serving customers in the other, via teleprescence. This would dramatically improve staffing management, allowing every office to have the appropriate number of staff at all times. Potentially a core staff group could be available out of the current business hours government operates within, providing access to critical information and services anywhere in the country face-to-(virtual)face.

Equally government office staff could work more readily from their homes, holding conferences via telepresence where necessary and otherwise only commuting to their office for specific reasons, supporting greater diversity and workforce participation.

Medicine is another area that could be revolutionised. With high-speed broadband the ability to use telepresence to oversee and, coupled with robotic aids, to actually conduct operations becomes a possibility. This provides enormous flexibility for a national health system, allowing doctors to be located anywhere in the country (or even overseas) and still provide vital medical services at remote clinics across Australia. Termed telemedicine, this approach is increasingly being discussed and implemented overseas.

Also in the medical sphere, anyone who requires ongoing medical monitoring could be monitored remotely using their broadband connection. This would significantly reduce demand on hospital beds and allow many people to recover at home without sacrificing quality of care. Of course there would need to be a balance between the speed of access to medical personnel in emergencies, however ongoing monitoring would provide early warnings of medical issues and provide greater flexibility to respond appropriately.

Education is another service that benefits from fast broadband services such as telepresence and the ability to stream video and audio in real-time. Experienced teachers could teach classes anywhere across Australia, and students, also spread across the country, could interact in real-time - supporting home schooling, subjects with fewer students and better use of good teachers.

Infrastructure management also benefits from faster and more reliable internet speeds. Every piece of infrastructure in the country, roads, bridges, tunnels, dams, power plants and more can be monitored remotely. This would help identify issues before they become life-threatening and allow governments to pre-emptively address failing infrastructure. This type of technology is already in use in some international engineering projects, monitoring bridges and dams for stability and reporting back to central offices using the internet.

In the service provision sphere, all the services currently provided by government online or by phone could be provided in a far more interactive and engaging way. Full-motion video could provide walkthroughs on how to use services, and video-based help would be available. This would encourage increasing take-up, particularly as phone services gets integrated into online, meaning that people could easily start a telephone call then, using a video and internet-capable phone, directly receive the forms they need and be supported through an online transaction while continuing to speak with the government customer service operator.

These are only a sample of some of the opportunities for government to provide more cost-effective and convenient services using real high-speed broadband. Many others already exist and are being rolled out elsewhere in the world and more wait to be discovered.

Of course government will need to be more open, flexible and innovative in its thinking around the online channel. There will be the need to rethink the entire approach to many services.

However I believe that if the Australian government is capable of rolling out a real national broadband network it is also capable of developing innovative and effective services for citizens and business to run across it.

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