EyeSee

No communications endeavour is rish free. That didn’t come out right and it’s a dialogue. You have to listen first, these conversations are happening wheather you are listening or not. Then you push the news releases to the rest of the department.

Where are we going with all of this? As a push medium and p to p we are there. What is going to be the feedback and have to be baked into the system as well. Translate into action. How do you start it and what do you do?

How influencial can that feedback be? It’s never going to replace formal communication with the mass media, committees, taking conversations having in the pub etc.. and now have a chance to see what’s going on. Another way of getting information from citizens.

The answer is to just try it. The tools are free so it does not cost a lot. E.g wikipedia had misinformation on department, has had to get approvals to correct this. Wikipedia is a wiki and therefore trying to apply old rules to new technology. Go and make changes and if someone does not like it then they can change it.

Government should warm itself into consultation and online voting.

Think about what you want to do first then pick the right tools. It’s easier to go where the conversation is rather than tell them to come to where you are.

I am at Change Camp Ottawa and there are a lot of very good sessions lined up. I am currently blogging from the Social Media in Government session.

For live blogging check the Apt 613 Blog.

Public Health Agency of Canada, during swine flu they were using twitter to keep folks updated.

There are tonnes of folks complaining about government agencies on twitter, but is anyone watching them and responding? It seems that there is currently no mechanism to respond to these complaints and help out.

Fisheries is using twitter to send out releases, this is just the first step, working in both French and English in one feed, took a seven page plan to describe how to use to 140 characters.

Tweet Congress – degree on conversation happening with their consistuents.

The government is trying to use social media with policies that were created before all this technology was available. Tho shalt not use any other thing than windows being one of them.

How do you deal with the innundation of messages that are flooded in social media. Those are technical issues that have been addressed.

Identi.ca is a Canadian opensource microblogging platform that would solve all of these integration issues.

Educating the public is a great use of social media for government. News media are now picking their stories from Twitter.

Know where your audience is and go there.

Part of Canada 150 connect 150 public service people. Ideas fair at NAC on June 3rd. Everything was done using web 2.0.

Summary

Performance metrics – managing the expectations. Successful in managing the email capacity on implementation. That gets reported every year. The idea is that citizens need to know that their money is being used effectively. Followers is not a good measurement. Communication with peope to figure how to use web 2.0 to drive change.

Tomorrow is going to be the dawn of a new day….Change Camp Ottawa. What is this about? Why give up a long weekend for this?

“ChangeCamp Ottawa is being organized by the Ottawa community to bring together citizens, technologists, designers, academics, policy makers, political players, change-makers and government employees to discuss participatory governance in a web-enabled world.”

How do we re-imagine government and citizenship in the age of participation?

This seems a little out there and confusing so I thought that I would give you a bit of background on what this is all about.

I attended a fascinating session at MESH earlier this year, it was titled Open Government.

“What do we mean by open government? How is the web making new forms of governance and social innovation possible? Participate in this highly interactive workshop where facilitators Mark Kuznicki and Daniel Rose guide participants through an intense collaborative exploration of these topics. Together, participants will create physical and digital artefacts of their work together and leave a legacy that lives on after the mesh Conference is done. If you’re a technologist, designer, communicator, policy-maker, social entrepreneur or armchair policy wonk, we’re looking for you to help.”

Round 1: Each participant used a marker and index card to individually create a visual model of how they would express the idea of “Open Government” to someone who didn’t speak their language. The rationale behind the exercise is that by using shapes, line and colour it’s easier to see the assumptions and perspective that are naturally built into an abstract idea such as Open Government.

Here’s my version.

Here’s what everyone else came up with.

Round 2: Mark delivered a framework presentation.

Round 3: After listening to a 15 minute presentation from Mark, each group co-created a model of Open Government by sharing their index cards and using a big piece of paper to collaborate on a cohesive vision. Then one member from each group presented their work.

Our group came up with this.

Here’s Alistair Croll explaining our version.

This was just one group. To see what other’s came up fead the Change Camp Wiki.

So tomorrow citizens in our Nations Capital will get together the discuss what this means to them and how we can move forward with this.

Stay tuned for more updates on the Blog and on Twitter #cco09