Gov@Web2.0

THe following are approaches and opportunities on increasing participation.

1. We should grant Staff time-off for hosting participation events

• JAM Session with food and fun Events,
• Contest,
• Polls

1. Provide Tutorial, Pilots on wiki and blog for practice (explore and getting their feet wet),
2. We should have policies and procedures to encourage staff participation without asking their managers for approval.  Participation to collaborate on and share information should be written in the staff PARS.  Second there should be awards given on a quarterly basis through the offices to acknowledge successes.  For this should be two national exemplary awards given to:

• managers – uses innovative approaches and technologies to facilitate collaboration, participation and/or transparency.
• staff or team – on  using process and tools to collaborate, participate, and add transparency and meets open government mandates

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 Ways to Encouragement and Enticement to Change Behavior with Management encouragement

1. JAM Session with food and fun Events,
2. Contest,
3. Polls
4. RSS feed to inform new information or comment on their watch or interest page,
5. Tutorial, Pilot wiki and blog for practice,
6. Personnel Action Incentives

* Add communicative and collaborative duties to employees PARS

* Reward with Awards similar to Suzanne E. Olive Award for Exemplary Leadership in National EEO – Non-Managerial for diversity. We should add another award for individual collaborator facilitator and Monthly Office award to individuals for best collaborator

As I mention earlier that coaching, training, explaining, and leading by example would be appropriate and beneficial activities. But what about measuring? It’s a technical no-brainer to measure how much each individual has contributed and to generate some kind of absolute or relative metric. 

• Encourage friendly competition. Lots of people are fiercely proud of their PageRanks, TopCoder ratings, number of Wikipedia edits, etc. and work to keep them high only to preserve bragging rights. 
• Make people strive to improve their scores. I know I’ve been inordinately proud of my Technorati ranking, even though it has no direct bearing on my professional success. The desire to maintain it has definitely driven me to keep blogging regularly.

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Strategically rethink how to deliver on our mission. Individual offices or major programs should strategically develop service-focused uses that may involve using Web 2.0 approaches to reconfigure their business models or services in order to more effectively deliver on their own core missions or outcomes that require collaboration with other agencies. This rethinking should be a part of their required agency-wide strategic planning process and not just within their technology offices.

From Web 1.0                                                             to                                                     Web 2.0

Content publishing by website owner
(business to consumer, government to citizen)      to                    Content creation by members (peer to peer)

Data extraction by website owner                          to                      Blogging, vlogging, and interaction by members

Content management systems—producer              to                   Wikis—members, consumers, and producers

Portals                                                                            to                    Search engines

Directories and taxonomy                                      to                       Tagging and “folksonomy”

People, location,  and data                                        to                    People, location,  data, and application “mashups”

Stickiness                                                                      to                    Syndication,  “open interoperability” and

Syntax                                                                           to                    Semantics

We should continue to use of open source technologies on a Web 2.0 enterprise platform. For LAMP platform- Linux, Apache, PHP, MySQL we should continue to use MediaWiki  and WordPress.  We should explore the use of Gallery2 or Coppermine for picture, video and multimedia gallery similar to Flickr and YouTube to enable metadata for searching and discovery of images and file. In addition other wiki like DekiWiki may be use on our lamp server Web 2.0 enable CMS system – Drupal or Joomla.  We could also use ELGG as a social networking application similar to Facebook. We could also use a Microblog software, a WordPress plug-in, to replace twitter.

The second platform is also an open source technology platform with the use of Linix, Apache, Java, MySQL or Oracle for Liferay for social networking application coupled with Xwiki for wiki. This platform will enable us to link with portal through an API.

We should provide RSS feed and social book marking tools.

We should invest in government-wide solutions, such as captioning software to make videos and webcasts on Web 2.0 Platforms accessible to people with disabilities

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 First, if your Agency is a leader in Web 2.0 applications, you could promote cooperation with other federal agencies and other organizations to provide best practices, policies, procedures and a framework for open collaboration internally and with the public.  If other organizations work within our framework we could (in theory) loosely coupled with their application, such as wiki to interlink with their knowledge base that would enrich the collaboration between organizations to discover and access information. Horizontal business processes such as financial management, HR and procurement are subject to increased sharing across agencies and even jurisdictions. This means that government organizations no longer own or control them. Instead they are becoming clients to other organizations leading and ripe on increased adoption of social media. In addition, government IT infrastructure is subject to consolidation efforts and will be progressively commoditized and challenged by cloud-computing solutions.

Second, The “Federal Open Community” should be develop on the virtual cloud of next-gen open social tools  that could share internal blogs, gadgets/widgets, social networks, wiki,  with common login, profile and contact info with Federal open social tools: any  OpenSocial, Open Ajax API partners portal would be considered part of the “Federal Open Community Social Cloud”.  Once the infrastructure has been developed, information sharing, collaboration and joint projects and efforts may be better facilitated to build a one true One Government, thus meeting the president’s priority.

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1. The Culture of the Management needs to become coaches or inspirer to nourish, participate with and reward their staff. All must given time to first participate, practice and experience by collaborating with tools, such as blogs and wikis internally to further transparency publicly.
2. The Agency should be required to fund their “virtual” office space with remote access as part of their critical infrastructure, in the same way they fund their “bricks and mortar” office space.
3. The Agency should be required to appoint editor-in-chief and content gardener and Web 2.0 Evangelist for every web application they maintain, as do the top commercial websites. This person should be given appropriate funding and authority to develop and enforce web policies and publishing standards, including ensuring that prime real estate on government websites is dedicated to helping people find the information they need.
4. The Agency should develop standard job descriptions and core training requirements so agencies can hire and retain highly qualified experts in web content, content gardener, and new media—not just IT specialists.
5. Reward Employees such as 1. Honor Awards similar to Suzanne E. Olive Award for Exemplary Leadership in National EEO – Non-Managerial for diversity. 2. Office awards for individual collaborator, facilitator and /or Monthly Office award to individuals for best collaborators or practioners for enabling transparency

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With the explosion of information, and flattening technologies and organization, starting with e-mail, I think that a future agency’s Manager needs to focus more on the platform that enables collaboration, because and find themselves employees already have all the data. They have access to everything is needed.

In addition the managers should focus on their staff to trust, encourage, promote, nourish, reward for those who are practicing, coaching, training, explaining, and leading by example would be appropriate and beneficial activities on increasing transparency, collaboration, participation, tools development, available training and resources, and paving the accomplishing Open Government directive and goals.  They should learn to trust their staff to do the right thing and accomplish their assignments. 

So, what will the Manager do with the changing to a social culture?  The manager will have to work on the structure of collaboration. How do people get recognized? How do you establish a meritocracy in a highly dispersed environment and inspire your employee?

The answer is to allow and trust employees to develop a name for themselves that is irrespective of their organizational ranking or where they sit in the org chart. And it actually is not a question about monetary incentives. They do it because recognition from their peers is, I think, an extremely strong motivating factor, and something that is broadly unused in modern management.

The role of the new collaborative and open and information rich manager/boss is to then work on those collaboration platforms, as opposed to being the one making the decisions. It’s more like the producer of the show, rather than being the lead. By creating an atmosphere of collaboration, the people who are consistently right get a huge following, and their work product is talked about by people they’ve never met.

Example:  If we continue with today’s management style, staff may find the job is just wasn’t as much fun anymore. They felt that they could do more. The result will chase away somebody extremely valuable. If you start micromanaging people, then the very best ones leave.

Otherwise, if the very best people leave, then the people you’ve got left actually require more micromanagement. Eventually, they get chased away, and then you’ve got to invest in a whole apparatus of micromanagement. Pretty soon, you’re running a police state. So micromanagement doesn’t scale because it spirals down, and you end up with below-average employees in terms of motivation and ability.

Instead, the trick is to get truly world-class people working directly for you so you don’t have to spend a lot of time managing them. Having display this HR Policies, Organizational structure reforming, and Work place transformation may need change to change to adapt to the above relationship.

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The Agency should use their website including blogs to publish a summary of common customer comments and explain the actions they are taking in response to the feedback. Effort should be made to respond according to responders suggestion or comments. Doing so will create better transparency and accountability.

The Agency should use social media, not just to create transparency, but also to help our Offices, various projects and Staff accomplish their core tasks and meet their information needs. For example, the agency could post instructional videos on Blogs to explain how to apply for stimulus grants. To do this, the government must ensure that Staff as well as Citizen who need access to social media tools have them, and that these new ways of delivering content (i.e. stimulus grants) are available to all, including people with disabilities and multi-lingual needs.

The Agency has developed government-wide guidelines for disseminating content in universally accessible formats (data formats, news feeds, mobile, video, podcasts, etc.), and on non-government sites . To remain relevant, government needs to take our content to where people already are on the Web with communication plan to market and promote the available tools, guidance, and information, rather than just expecting people will come to government websites. Having guidelines will ensure that we’re part of the larger online community acting together

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Happy New Year, I came up and want to share with you 16 dares for engaging to Gov 2.0 with Web 2.0 Technologies

1. Social media is not just about the technology, but what the technology enables others to collaborate.
2. Social media is driven by people, not by your Office.  Stop trying to deploy by one team or office, and instead think of a way to bring together people from across your organization to engage collaboration.  Develop  and nourish your community of practice.
3. The risks of social media are greatly outweighed by the risks of NOT engaged in social media. continue reading…

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Government 2.0, as defined on Wikipedia  is neologism for attempts to apply the social networking and integration advantages of Web 2.0 to the practice of government. William (Bill) Eggers claims to have coined the term in his 2005 book, Government 2.0: Using Technology to Improve Education, Cut Red Tape, Reduce Gridlock, and Enhance Democracy.[1] Government 2.0 is an attempt to provide more effective processes for government service delivery to individuals and businesses. Integration of tools such as wikis, development of government-specific social networking sites and the use of blogs, RSS feeds and Google Maps are all helping governments provide information to people in a manner that is more immediately useful to the people concerned.[2]

A number of efforts have been made to expose data gathered by government sources in ways that make it available for mashups.

Web 2.0 technologies provide opportunities for various Agencies to share, disseminate and collect information from both internal and external customers in new and exciting ways. Technologies such as wikis, blogs and social networking sites all provide unique ways of collaborating electronically. Web 2.0 technologies are especially useful when additional two-way communication or real-time collaboration would be beneficial to the task.
 
Like any information technology initiative, the business uses, goals and expected benefits should be first established to help guide the selection and use of specific technologies. The inclusion of applicable information technology policies early in requirements gathering process is critical. Also of consideration are the Federal employee requirements to provide content, moderate, and maintain these constructs and the ability of the individual Federal organizations to digest the volume of input received.

continue reading…

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Social Media and the Federal Government: Perceived and Real Barriers and Potential Solutions
December 23, 2008

Produced by the following members of the Federal Web Managers Council: Bev Godwin, GSA/USA.gov (Executive sponsor), Sheila Campbell, GSA/USA.gov (Co-chair), Rachel Flagg, Dept. of Housing and Urban Development (Co-chair), Jeffrey Levy, EPA (Co-chair, Social media sub-council), Joyce Bounds, Dept. of Veterans Affairs (Co-chair, Social media sub-council)

A. The context for using social media within the federal government

Some agencies are already using social media tools with great success. They’ve shown how these tools can transform how we engage the public, include people in the governing process, and accomplish our agency missions. (See WebContent.gov for examples of agencies successfully using social media:
http://www.usa.gov/webcontent/technology/other_tech.shtml).

But many agencies are not using these tools, either because of perceived or real lack of resources, cultural resistance, or legal or other
barriers. There are varying interpretations around what is allowed across the federal government, and some agencies do not yet understand how these tools will help them achieve their missions.

The purpose of these recommendations is to address the perceived and real barriers to using social media, and to propose solutions that will result in greater consistency and a clearer understanding of what is expected and permitted across federal agencies.

continue reading…

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