Right to Know Coalition of Nova Scotia (RTKNS) is a non-profit organization. Through advocacy and education, RTKNS encourages the use and development of freedom-of-information legislation to foster a better informed and more politically active electorate in Nova Scotia and to improve the quality of public and private decision making in the province.
Posted on April 24, 2009, 9:23 am, by Alan, undereGovernment.
I keep an eye on USAJobs just to see what positions the Federal government is trying to fill. Lately, there have been a lot of postings for Chief, New Media, New Media Specialist, and similar positions. Most of these positions are in agency communications or public relations groups and are responsible for aspects of the agency Web site, implementing blogs, and assisting agencies in understanding this new Web 2.0 world.
Filling positions like these is important, as there are lots of government employees writing blogs, twittering, and using other forms of social media. But government is missing a unique opportunity to really engage with citizens. If you look at most of the blogs, follow the tweets, check the Web pages, government is going about its adoption of Web 2.0 pretty much the same way government has always gone about this – we talk and you listen. Is that really engagement?
Government is in a unique position where social media is presenting an opportunity to actually engage with citizens again. But social media is not a synonym for engagement. Citizen engagement is:
More than tweeting.Twitter, though a wonderful tool, is still a very shallow form of engagement and the number of user is still limited (though Ashton Kutcher, Oprah, and Larry King may have changed that). There was a recent non-scientific poll on CNN.com asking users to indicate what they thought about Twitter. The results, of the over 17,000 who responded, was that 63% don’t use twitter and 30% wondered what twitter was. Only 7% of the average citizen has used Twitter.
More than blogging.Blogging is a great way to communicate information, but it is not the best engagement tool. Though there is potential through the use of comments, when it comes to government blogs citizen comments generally outnumber government responses by more that than ten to one. Even the best government blogs, for example such asTSA’s Evolution of Security, have a hard time keeping up. A quick survey of TSA’s EoS five blog posts and associated comments between April 9th and April 21st, 2009 found that only 42 of the 377 comments were responses by the agency.
More than an electronic town hall meeting.Though a good start the recent electronic town hall meeting held by President Obama has to be declared a success from a PR perspective and a failure from a citizen engagement perspective. Why? Because the President was only able to respond to a handful of the over 104,.000 questions that came to him.
Have you ever filed a FOI request? What has been your experience? Has the information you sought been forthcoming, or did you find the bureaucracy working against you? How do you think the Act can further be strengthened, so that it serves its purpose better? Let Us Know!
Posts
