Archive for the tag 'citizen engagement'

May 6th, 2010 | Jaimey Walking Bear

Replicating the White House online engagement strategy in federal agencies

Jaimey Walking Bear

Cross posted from O’Reilly Radar •  Original post by Alex Howard | @digiphile

Cammie Croft, former deputy director of new media at the White House, is taking on a new challenge as the director of new media at the Department of Energy.

In her new role, Croft will be upgrading elements of the IT infrastructure at an immense federal agency to enable her and her team to implement the digital tools for online engagement that she applied during the presidential campaign and the new administration’s first year in office. The Department of Energy has IT infrastructure challenges that exist within many government bodies at all levels, from an outdated content management system (CMS) to difficulties supporting blogs or commenting.

cammie-croft-thumb-486x364Croft explained it took 10 months for the White House new media staff to progress to the IT infrastructure they wanted for WhiteHouse.gov. While the new media team did relaunch WhiteHouse.gov on January 21st with a new blog, it was hosted on a different CMS. Eventually, WhiteHouse.gov was relaunched on the open source Drupal platform — but it took many months to get there. “We’d like to open up comments on WhiteHouse.gov,” said Croft, “but we’re wrestling with how to make it a constructive online community. We like to say: ‘How do we avoid getting to the place that YouTube comments are?’”

Read the full interview on O’Reilly Radar.

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Jaimey Walking Bear is on the Marketing team for Gov 2.0 Expo. He can be reached @gov2events or @jaimeywb

May 6th, 2010 | Jaimey Walking Bear

How do our youth fit into the government’s citizen engagment plans?

Jaimey Walking Bear

Researcher danah boyd has a message for government: You’re doing it wrong

Cross posted from O’Reilly Radar •  Original post by Alex Howard | @digiphiledanahboyd.jpg

Young people don’t want to be the government’s friend on Facebook. They aren’t likely to welcome an official dropping into an online conversation uninvited. And if you want to communicate with them where they live, you need to be on mobile. These are just a few of the insights danah boyd shared with me this week.

For years, boyd has been at the forefront of the conversation about privacy and publicity in the digital age. Her groundbreaking digital ethnography research on class in social networking made its way into public discourse. Her subsequent dissertation, in which she investigated how American teenagers socialize in networked publics like MySpace, Facebook, LiveJournal, Xanga and YouTube, has informed academics, industry and parents alike about what it means to be young on today’s Internet.

Read the full interview on O’Reilly Radar

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Jaimey Walking Bear is on the Marketing team for Gov 2.0 Expo. He can be reached @gov2events or @jaimeywb