Archive for '10:45 Fri'
Don’t share your best practices! Share the ones that are ‘Good Enough’.
Posted on 09. Apr, 2009 by ken@clickforhelp.com.
Lovisa Williams of the Department of State summed up the problem of building on cross agency’s efforts as “Don’t share your best practices, share them when they are good enough.” It sounded like a good start to a blog post.
I put the full post for this here. For more on workplace collaboration check out the workshop I am organizing on April 23rd.
Summary:
If collaborative efforts begin with sharing final outcomes which the authors don’t want to change because they have invested in these as being final, then essentially the collaborative process doesn’t begin. It’s more of a building on lessons learned than a collaboration .
It’s kind of like growing your vegetables in your own walled garden and only sharing the seeds after you have harvested the first successful crop. In order to build an agile and responsive government, we need to all plant seeds at the same time and figure out together how to get them to grow in the first season.
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How to Engage Citizens through Social Media
Posted on 28. Mar, 2009 by kadidid.
#PE20
Hi, My name is Kady Chiu with Kadidid consulting. You can find me at @kadidid. Below is the notes from Friday’s 10:45 session around Public Outreach through Social Media.
Educate - Frame the conversation - Deliberate on the issues - Identify shared priorities - Refine conversation - Bring back conversation - Act
Questions people want to get out of the session:
- How can we use web 2.0 tools effectively?
- Twitter strategy for outreach
- Using social media to create awareness
- How do you define success? (Google moderator)
- How to engage public in a meaningful way
- How do we use social media to gain trust in the customer base
- Connecting communities – promote collaboration
- Building online audience and drive to 1:1 relationships
- Media think tank outreach
- Communication to senior leaders on why they need to be involved in the social media
- Metrics, privacy issues, how do you know the impact
- Sharing best practices
- Security issues, guidelines on what to say and what not to say
- How we filter what will help us and what’s jus t the noise
- Inform the public on what we do
- Want to make sure that the vocal people do not drown out the conversation –by having topical blogs to drive the conversation
- Capitalize greater government transparency through social media
- Bridge cultures using social technology
- Elaborate and leverage the network
- Want to get beyond the numbers when measure success. How are we going to action the information to help set priority and utilize the information in a meaningful way
- How to overcome management resistance
- How to engage in the public through technology in the time of crises
What is meaningful participation? Meaningful is in the eye of the beholder, start with the mission and define the right mix that help you as an organization.
- Recommend a book written in 1965 by Ellul: Propaganda - How you skew information, depending on your purpose and how you are trying to influence. How unity and action need to work together.
- You can use social tool to establish relationship with people with 1:1 levels
- How do you start? Begin with a dialogue, keep it rolling by user generated content
o Make sure you know what people want to do
o How will you make it successful? Credibility
- It’s important to include what the citizens think (comments) as meaningful metrics
- One of the success measure is to see that their audience / comments self moderate
- People have to have a mechanism to know that their comments will make a difference
- Need to be responsible for managing the outcome, take ation and communicate that to the public
- Recommend to use Metafilter and Dailypost, which has a 24 hour delay to monitor the comments
- Set expectations to your audience has to understand that not every comments has to be responded to
- Social media Showing a face from the inside of the agency can express more government transparency
- America Speaks is hiring. Check out www.Americaspeaks.org/jobs
It was great meeting everyone!
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Social Networking Tools, Reach Critical Mass and Fail
Posted on 28. Mar, 2009 by schrier.
Notes from this 10:45 AM Friday session by Bill Schrier, bill@schrier.org
1. hashtag - 116F10
2. Social media functions:
a. Message out
b. Collaboration
3. Top 10 list of rules and outcomes …
a. Define measureable goals for “success” and “failure” in use of these tools.
b. Insure value is being added with the use of these tools … allow people to selectively decide what they want to hear, e.g. through multiple or specialized feeds.
c. Redundancy and backup - the more important the agency’s use of these tools, e.g. wiki’s - the more important to have backup and/or redundancy.
d. Moderate the tools - the Facebook and Twitter feeds to make sure they are not being hacked or used inappropriately.
e. Embrace failure - be willing to fail quickly and cheaply - but allow people to pilot use of these new technologies in legitimate business of the agency and go on to the next. State department tried using some blogging and it wasn’t working (not a lot of use or following) and so was shut down.
f. These tools are not for mission critical applications - use them for something you can do without.
4. Challenges:
a. Need open APIs for using the tools
b. SAAS model is easy to use, but how do you integrate that with the COTS software used by government?
c. Internal use versus external use, e.g. yammer vs. twitter or internal vs. external blogs.
5. Foundational discussion:
a. Each agency really needs a goal and directions a policies to manage these new technologies.
b. Be ready to have failures - “disposable” applications. Need to test or pilot these applications and if they don’t work, that’s ok? This is probably not true because government has public safety and other critical functions which can’t be put at risk.
c. It is more about the data aggregation - the ability to gather data and use it in the mission of the business.
d. Wikipedia crowdsourcing has become one of the very top search terms on gogole to gain information, and it is a non-profit …
e. Intellipedia instantly became a “flame war” between the different using agencies - maybe this was true of the intelligence blogs but not intellipedai
6. Issues with relying upon social networking:
a. Failure of infrastructure
b. Spam
c. SharePoint is so expensive and the more you invest the more you need to invest to make it work - so ideal social media needs to be simple, cheap and usable …
d. It must never get to the point where you can’t abort it? No no no not true! Underscores that mission critical communciations functions can’t be built on FaceBook or Twitter.
e. Is twitter the right tool to be used by a Mayor to accept replies about potholes? It is a venture-capital backed by private companies - the tool could go away tomorrow. Note that salesforce.com has a twitter integration to pull twitter feeds into a CRM.
f. Is there a national security issue with using SAAS, such as twitter or gmail in the sense that if they go down or are hacked, our security is jeopardized.
g. State department hosts 350 websites for department of state. Tier 1 applications are secure and locked down. Tier 2 apps are twitter and other open social networking tools. But even the Tier 1 apps reply on Akamai or companies who are paid to be supported. Twitter, Google, Facebook are not “pay” services. What happens if they go to “pay” model for corporations or governments even if it isn’t a pay service for individuals.
h. State department used twitter during the coup in Madagascar to get real time info quickly.
i. What happens if someones twitter account is hacked and it is being used for critical functions, e.g. officail state department reporting.
j. 87% of a person’s time online according to a Jupiter Study is spent reading and responding to e-mail.
7. Interesting issues:
a. Social media, e.g. Facebook installed for a specific purpose or set of purposes by the government agency, but then is “hijacked” for other reasons - this could be good or “bad”. But the community has to have a great deal over control of the use, or they won’t use it.
b. Using “free” services to for commercial purposes, e.g. selling shoes
c. The social media tool fills with junk -
d. Evolution of the tool example is the internal use of yammer in a company - starts with what folks are doing andproceeds to connecting on a more personal level and building the social fabric of the company
e. Another example: salesforce implementation with much more collaboration and transparency about what is going on in the sales
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Public vs Private Social Media
Posted on 27. Mar, 2009 by unhuman.
Warning: I’m not a blogger. You can call this a blog post, but I don’t.
I’ve worked in the private sector exclusively since the advent of Social Networks. I am exploring the government and wanted to know where priorities change. I hosted this session with the intent of having an open discussion of the topic and the result was just that.
Below are some thoughts that came out of the session. Nothing particularly and I’ll try to emphasize things that got more detail or stress.
- People blog / tweet: 1/3 Professional, 1/3 Hobby, 1/3 Personal
- It is important to vet people speaking on behalf of the government, etc. Private sector - anyone can do it.
- Working in this environment with aging community of workers can be a challenge.
- Knowledge Management. Wikis are important. Trouble is getting information onto the wiki (sometimes people have humans interview others to get content in the proper format). Some have resources for “gardening” the wiki to prune out duplicated/unnecessary content and move things as appropriate.
- Risk. Government doesn’t usually take risk with projects. Private sector, from my experience is based on risk/reward.
- Training / process to force use of technology.
- Social networks offer the ability to break the “chain of command”. One Air Force ?colonel? had a Facebook page where officers could approach him directly. That’s certainly not protocol. How is this managed?
- Documentation is a greater part of government process than it has been in my private sector experience.
Oh yeah, one guy mentioned http://govtwit.com, so check that out.
Thank you!
- Howie Uman - AOL - human@unhuman.com - Twitter: unhuman
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Getting People to do Stuff for Free
Posted on 27. Mar, 2009 by mollymoran.
I’m blogging from the morning workshop on how to get people to do stuff for free, facilitated by Sharon Tewksbury-Bloom, from Volunteer Arlington. The main focus is how to encourage people in your organization or your community to help with a project, as an alternative to using a “whip” or a “carrot” (authority or material enticement).
Volunteers are often motivated by a “motivational paycheck” in lieu of a material paycheck. Some people may be motivated by personal recognition, others by the chance to get out of the house. How can you apply that to your project?
Sharon is explaining a “motivational analysis” framework that she and her colleagues use: achievement (ex. grades in school), affiliation (being included in a group), authority (giving someone a title or a position as group or project leader), power (giving people access to powerful people).
Remember that networking and relationship-building is an activity you do for free, and this act will help you to get others to do things for free. If you do for them, they will do for you.
We’ve just broken into pairs to network — in 3-5 minutes, learn something about the other person to be able to offer them something that can help them achieve their goals - and vice versa.
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[Room 101] Policies, Procedures Gov 2.0 Effort
Posted on 27. Mar, 2009 by webbiegirl.
by Ken F
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[Room 108] Gov role in Health 2.0
Posted on 27. Mar, 2009 by sanford.
Participatory health care
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[Room 220] Connecting Communities with Library of Congress Using Flickr
Posted on 27. Mar, 2009 by budgeteer.
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