Hubspot social scientist Dan Zarrella shares his insighst and research on the most effective use social software.

How do you find pages that cite a permalink?. Microsoft evangelist Jon Udell describes a framework for sharing government meetings and records online.

by Alexander Howard  |  @digiphile

“What we have to do is open up the conversation about what it means to be a public servant,” said Carolyn Lawson, Director of eServices for the Office of the CIO, State of California. In kicking off the Gov 2.0 Expo’s first session, “Navigating the Maze, Lawson offered guidance, perspective, case studies and, appropriate to the topic of social media in government, lively give and take between the audience and presenter. Lawson explored the many ways that the state of California has employed e-services and online engagement strategies, along with a simple driver: cost. “Our workforce is furloughed three times a month,” said Lawson. “It’s really painful. Our exploding population really needs services.”

The reality of California’s budget woes come at a time when the expectation for government to be responsive online has never been higher. “Immediate access to data has become a cultural expectation,” said Lawson.
“The expectation is there now that government will be open, honest and will communicate.” Lawson described how both the California Unemployment Office and the Department of Motor Vehicles have used social media and online platforms to deliver better services without additional cost. “You can tweet @CA_EDD and get answers like how long until you get a check, where to go on the website or job fairs,” said Lawson. “I don’t think the creators of Twitter thought it would be a helpdesk for EDD.” That social response is paired by e-government services that enable workers to file for unemployment online. Lawson said that online applications for unemployment went up by about 1.8 million from the previous year. “What would have happened if we’d blocked that?”

California is using other online platforms and technologies to deliver services that have been affected by budget woes. California couldn’t afford to offer driver training in schools, explained Lawson. “Something had to be cut. What the DMV did, since they already had YouTube videos, is to create an entire curriculum.” The California DMV YouTube channel provides the means for every high school to watch training videos like the one below without additional cost:

“We were thinking of this a culturally relevant tool, not as a forum for expression” said Lawson. “These videos have more than nine million views. If we weren’t government, they’d be calling that viral. It’s all about being where people are.” And, on that count, the @CA_DMV has developed an iPhone app, “DMV Now.”

Lawson strongly defended both the importance of the role that social media engagement plays for the California state government and its utility. “Technology is not driving Web 2.0, Twitter or Facebook.,” she said. “People are driving these services. And blocking Web 2.0 isn’t going to solve your problems.” She made the analogy to the conversations about the telephone in the workplace in the early 20th century, or email in the 1990s. “What we do as a government when we cut off the ability to communicate through the Web 2.0 world is to remove our ability to be culturally relevant,” she said. Adopting social software or connection technology usage that emphasize protocol over common sense can be problematic as well. “One of the things that kills government’s ability to use social media is speaking to employees in terms of thou shalt, thou shalt not,” said Lawson. She shared a public available wiki of government social media resource that offers some best practices and frameworks for discussion or practice.

Lawson observed that California itself is still evolving in how it uses social media. “We still have many departments blocking the governor’s Twitter,” she said, alluding to Governor @Schwarzenegger‘s massively popular account. The challenge, as Lawson posed it, is to show how government use of social media combines with open data initiatives. “What are we afraid of? The consequences of transparent. We were really afraid of crowdsourcing ideas to improve California IT with Ideasalce. We got beat up – but we also got ideas. We’re the government: we’re going to get beat up. You can’t take it personally.”

Lawson broadly described a cultural shift going towards open government brought about by the Obama admin, though she recognized that many efforts had gone on before. “This is being pushed through by Obama’s transparency initiatives,” she said. “It used to be revolutionary for public documents to be available in a municipal building to people walking in. No more.”

So how should an organization tackle objections that put social media age into a technology issue, rather than a management challenge? “That’s where I have my ‘activity or accomplish’ conversation,” said Lawson. “Is this that conversation about the telephone in 1920s? Or is it something that we need to do to protect our data and information? You have to get people engaged in the conversation. That took us more than a year. If you can relate behavior to behavior to technology, that’s where you have a win.”

The bottom line is that nobody has this all figured out yet, said Lawson. “You just have to work your way through it.”

Transparency gets all the press, but participation and collaboration are equally important

by Alex Howard | @digiphile | Originally posted on O’Reilly Radar; May 13, 2010

Transparency initiatives at the White House, one of the three elements of the Open Government Initiative, have received ample attention from mainstream media and groups like the Sunlight Foundation. The implementation of the other two elements, participation and collaboration, have not. Can citizens be empowered to participate and collaborate in governance?

To begin to answer that question, I spoke with Beth Simone Noveck, professor of law at New York Law School, director of the White House Open Government Initiative, and U.S. deputy chief technology officer. Noveck is the author of “Wiki Government,” where she wrote about using social networking technology to connect people to policymakers.

Read the full article and listen to interview with Beth Noveck

by Alex Howard | @digiphile | Originally posted on O’Reilly Radar; May 19, 2010

How do you move from a culture of “need to know” to a culture of “need to share?” Richard Boly thinks about the answer to that question every day. Boly, a speaker at next week’s Gov 2.0 Expo, is the director of the Office of eDiplomacy at the State Department. His office is an applied technology think tank within the agency that’s focused on improving the agency’s communication and knowledge sharing.

Boly is responsible for overseeing Virtual Presence Posts (VPPs), enterprise search, classified web publishing, and social networking, including the development of “StateBook.” He recently spoke with me about all of these initiatives, as well as the cultural challenges of integrating social software into a large, distributed enterprise.

Read the full article

Michael Edson on how the Smithsonian uses crowdsourcing and transparency to further its mission

Posted by James Turner | Originally posted to O’Reilly Radar; May 13. 2010

The Smithsonian Institution epitomizes the phrase “an embarrassment of riches.” With 137 million physical objects in its collection, and 28 distinct museums and research centers, you could spend the rest of your life there and not see everything.

Michael Edson, who serves as director of web and new media strategy for the Smithsonian, got his start cleaning cases in one of the art museums. He now oversees the Institution’s online presence, which he talks about in the following interview. He’ll expand on many of these same topics at the upcoming Gov 2.0 Expo.

Read the full article

by Alex Howard | @digiphile | Originally posted on O’Reilly Radar; May 12, 2010

Would you “like” a government agency on Facebook? Would you “like” a service delivered by a .gov website? How would you feel if a government official “liked” you back? How would you like to be identified online?

There are no easy answers to these questions, as anyone who attended the FTC privacy workshops or recent “privacy camps” in the District of Columbia or San Francisco knows. Craig Newmark, the founder of craigslist.org, attended the privacy camp in San Francisco and shared a few thoughts about issues of trust, identity, social networking and government.

Online privacy is now even more top-of-mind for tens of millions of users, as Facebook’s social plug-ins roll out across the Internet, along with its instant personalization pilot. Thirty-three government agencies are on Facebook, with more than 400 pages between them. Those government agencies may not have added “like” buttons yet — but they’re interacting with citizens on Facebook, Citizen Tube, Google Moderator, Twitter and beyond.

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Code for America founder Jennifer Pahlka wants to empower developers to become civic coders

by Alex Howard | @digiphile | Originally Posted on O’Reilly Radar, May 11, 2010

In his inaugural address in January of 1961, President John F. Kennedy challenged his fellow Americans to “ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.” In 2010, the question has been updated: ask not what your country can code for you – ask what you can code for your country.

Read the full article

Code for America will be on hand in our Nonprofit Pavilion at Gov 2.0 Expo May 25-27, 2010.

Open 311, OGI, open government, open source, revisiting net neutrality and disaster response 2.0

by Alex Howard | @digiphile | Originally posted on O’Reilly Radar; May 7, 2010

Another week, another Gov 2.0 Week in Review. If you have news and tips about the government 2.0 space, please let me know at alex@oreilly.com or @digiphile on Twitter.

Crisis Response 2.0

I was excited to be on a panel on “Crisis Response 2.0″ at the Open Government and Innovations Conference here in DC, where we talked about how CrisisCommmons was helping to respond to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. CNN ran a story on how CrisisCommons was developing an oil spill reporting iPhone app being developed and crowdsourcing oil mapping with Ushahidi. Volunteers are sending texts, tweets and email to OilSpill.LABucketBrigade.org where they’re added to a database of oil spill-related incidents.

Read entire article

Our online Attendee Directory is now open. If you’ve registered for a Gov 2.0 Expo pass, you’ll have access to this great conversational medium. You can use it to quickly and easily contact, meet, and network with other attendees before, during, and after the event. If you haven’t joined the Attendee Directory, we encourage you to do so and get the conversation started with other Gov 2.0 Expo-goers today.

What else can you do while signed in as an attendee? You can create your own Gov 2.0 Expo agenda using the personal schedule function. Mark the presentations and events you want to attend by clicking on the calendar icon next to each listing on the website. You can then access it by clicking on the “personal schedule” link on your Attendee Directory dashboard or in the Schedule View page.

If you have any questions about either function, drop us a line @gov2events.