Comments on on dot-gov: Thinking the Unthinkable in Gov?

I recently came across your blog and have been rea...

2009-03-18T22:52:00.000-04:00

I recently came across your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I don't know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often.

Betty

http://desktopmemory.info

Great topic, Gwynne. As a social media strategist ...

2009-03-18T13:04:00.000-04:00

Great topic, Gwynne. As a social media strategist for several companies, the unthinkables come up many times a day - for example, a tedious email-driven planning session to create an email-based newsletter...when use of our existing wiki and internal blogging platform will work just fine.

@Sarah, thanks for the thoughts. I agree that we n...

2009-03-17T22:37:00.000-04:00

@Sarah, thanks for the thoughts. I agree that we need to work and begin piloting and trying stuff out. Ultimately, though, if Shirky's analysis is right, we won't know which will be the footnotes and which the homeruns. At least not for a long while.

Although if everything is moving at the speed of light, will the historical analysis come faster, too?

@Noel, thanks for bringing up the challenges to in...

2009-03-17T22:35:00.000-04:00

@Noel, thanks for bringing up the challenges to internal communications. I was thinking very much citizen-gov interactions, but you are so right that the whole game is changing!

The hardest part will be integrating new technolog...

2009-03-17T17:22:00.000-04:00

The hardest part will be integrating new technologies into day-to-day work flows. Elected officials, in particular, have handling of written correspondence and telephone calls down pat, and are making headway on email. Handling inputs in multiple places will require staffers to acquire new skill sets. Add public records and other legal requirements and it gets quite complicated.

Our approach in MA has been to start samll, so you can figure out the ramifications as you go, but to get started. It's new, so the only way to get actionable data is to gather it yourself. And it's important to have some sort of governance structure so the data can be analyzed and findings incorporated into the next steps. This is much different than "make a committee to study this" approach that is so common and comforting to many.

The good news is that government officials and employees have personal lives. They see for themselves the chasm between commercial and community sites and the online offerings of their agencies. Frankly, this part will probably be easier than it was to convince them to have websites to begin with, when they didn't even know what a website was.

My "Thinking the Unthinkable" for govt? Moving aw...

2009-03-16T23:54:00.000-04:00

My "Thinking the Unthinkable" for govt? Moving away from using formal communication channels for most all comms between agencies, agencies to OMB, agencies to whitehouse, and formal comms up and down the heirarchy. My perspective is that our communication channels in govt have long since ossified - if we don't address this, there is no way govt can be flexible enough to support openness and transparency.

Yes, some things need to be formal, but probably more like 10-20% of the communications, not the 90% that we now have.