Victoria Police recruit tweeting and YouTubing their Academy training

In a move designed to improve awareness and understanding of the process by which officers are trained (and encourage more quality candidates), Victoria Police is supporting one of its new Academy recruits to tweet their way through training.

Announced in Victoria Police News as The Twittering recruit, Stephanie Attard begun her career as Victoria Police's first recruit tweeter on 7 June this year.

From the article,

Armed with an iPad, 21-year-old Stephanie from Gladstone Park, will ‘tweet’ every day between 7am and 5pm about her time at the Academy.

Stephanie’s Twitter account, http://twitter.com/vicpolrecruit, will be unedited, and all tweets will be straight from Stephanie’s own finger tips.

And it won’t be just the good experiences she will share on her micro-blog - Stephanie will tweet about her good days and her bad.

Stephanie's Twitter account already has over 1,150 followers and she's actively and candidly responding to questions.

Videos of Stephanie's experiences are also being distributed via the VPBlue YouTube channel. Fortnightly videos are planned through the 23 week training process.

This type of approach can be an extremely valuable recruiting tool for any kind of organisation if allowed to be authentic and unscripted (as the Victoria Police effort appear to be).

Victoria Police are now widely using social media tools for community engagement and outreach, including their Twitter account, @VictoriaPolice (with a well constructed Twitter policy here).

They are also very active Facebook participants with both a main Victoria Police Page and a Recruiting forum and hold regular online chats on topics of community interest.

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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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