Peter Smith’s Posterous

During the past six months, the top five methods the public used to initiate contact with the federal government were:

1. Websites (41%)
2. Mail (22%)
3. Phone (17%)
4. Part of job (16%)
5. In person (14%)

From a Gallup poll conducted in the USA during the summer of 2009.

This reinforces yet again that websites have become the main point of contact that citizens have with government - govvies, your web presence is the face of your org.

Yet in my experience, we're still in this really weird space within govt, where "the website" is an afterthought -- underfunded and under-resourced -- despite its importance for our publics.

For instance, in our own communications shops, the centre of gravity tends to lie elsewhere (news releases anyone?). Our IT teams are more concerned with internal systems. Many IM folk still see themselves as the record-keeping function. So "the website," blending all three functions, tends to fall through the cracks.

Sure we are starting to make a dint in this, slowly growing our web teams and maturing our web management practices. But we haven't yet caught up to where our citizens are. Will we ever?

Dr. Piper's Osbaldeston lecture. Really just testing here to see how Posterous handles PDF links.

Speech last night by Martha Piper, ex-President of UBC, as reported by the Ottawa Citizen:

In a speech at the National Arts Centre, Piper likened today's public service to the declining popularity of the wristwatch. Everyone over age 50 wears one, but most Canadians under 25 don't.

The wristwatch only does one thing, tell time, she said, and today's youth live by cellphones or BlackBerries, which communicate, compute, organize, schedule, find information, make calls and even tell time.

"Like the wristwatch, you can no longer survive if you are isolated in your Ottawa office working on one policy at a time," she said. "Instead, you must become more like the BlackBerry: performing more than one function, integrating the issues you are facing, being everywhere and most importantly, being in contact with the people you serve."

Instead, she told bureaucrats to broaden their agendas, take risks, reach out and listen to the views of Canadians both "physically and virtually," and earn public trust by "turning your wristwatch into a BlackBerry."

Excellent analogy for the audience, since so many of us are BB-addicted. And many of public servants are in the wristwatch demographic too.

My focus is of course virtual- what would virtual contact look like? One approach is hinted at in this summer's copyright consultations, using an online discussion or idea-generation vehicle to assist in policy development. Good that it happened, but it was still a case of "build it and they will come" rather than proactively going out and engaging citizens online in the spaces where they focus their attention. That's a whole other enchilada.

Jakob Neilsen recently published research on usability evaluations of social networks and RSS feeds. Summary:

As the satisfaction ratings indicate, we have a long way to go to improve the usability of social network messaging and RSS feeds.

The problems start with something as simple as the choice of username. For example, the United States Department of Education's Twitter ID was "usedgov," which sounded to users like "used government" and was off-putting. Logos were often bad as well, particularly in the small rendering that some services offer. Users depend on the ability to scan down a stream to pick out logos and user names, but this basic need was often thwarted.

The shorter the message, the more important the writing. Don't simply repurpose the first N characters of a longer piece of content. Too many corporate feeds didn't bother writing for the medium and suffered accordingly, as users didn't know whether to click the links (and therefore didn't).

The good news is that we can only go up. Users do want these messages. In moderation. If they're good.

"Usedgov" - Ha ha, Love it. If the feed in question was simply about repurposing existing content without re-working it, then in one sense, it is "used govt." - Announcing our Twitter account: get yr slightly used govt content here folks!

Seriously though, looks like this study covers good practical issues to keep in mind when setting up our own social network presences.

On 29th April Professor John Naughton, the first of our ‘Big Thinkers’, presented his view on the growth of internet and its implications for comms. He made 7 key points:

1. We need to see the ongoing changes in our digital ecosystem in some kind of long-term perspective. In that sense, what happened with print is probably the best historical analogy we have.

2. Most people still don’t understand the Internet. Firstly they tend to regard the Web and the Internet as synonomous. They’re not. The Net is the infrastructure on what everything else runs and is much bigger and more important. Because of its open and permissive architecture, it’s an enabler of disruptive innovation. Disruption is a feature of the Net, not (as politicians, content industries and governments believe) a bug.

3. Ecology provides a better analytical framework than economics for thinking about what’s going on.

4.The emerging digital ecosystem is immeasurably more complex than the one it’s replacing. Only those who can handle that complexity will thrive in it.

5. The Web isn’t static. On the contrary, it’s constantly evolving before our eyes. Examples: the amount of javascript programs that now run inside a single web page; mash-ups; RSS.

6. The network — not the PC — is now the computer in many contexts.

7. We need paradigms (mindsets, mental frameworks) in order to operate effectively. But paradigms also blind-side us. Thus to broadcasters the idea of “user-generated content” is an oxymoron. It can’t happen in their paradigm. So they didn’t see YouTube, Flickr etc. until it was too late. Ditto for newspapers and blogging.”

Just stumbled across the UK government's Big Thinkers blog and this post caught my eye. Good summary of the big picture. i.e. what's going on with the shift to digital.

BTW John Naughton is a perfesser type in the UK with a fancy title - "Public Understanding of Technology." http://systems.open.ac.uk/page.cfm?pageid=JohnNhome

He blogs at http://memex.naughtons.org/

services like Facebook and Twitter are emerging as critical pieces of social infrastructure. It may be worth thinking of them as public goods. We know a lot of different ways to provision public goods – states maintain them using taxation, private entities build them and charge access fees, communities build them and rely on user support, NGOs provide services and use a hybrid of user fees, donations and foundation support. I don’t think it’s crazy to think that this might be how we choose to build social networks in the future… or perhaps if any of the tools we rely on becomes less reliable.

Fascinating concept. Back in the day, the postal service was a "critical piece of social infrastructure" also. So, are social networks the 21st century equivalent of the postal service? A public good that requires government attention. I'm obviously not saying that they should be run as an agency of government the way that the post office is. But government could underwrite social networks to ensure their ubiquity or availability?

When you're addicted to electronic communication, it doesn't matter the form.