Thanks for your comment, Jason. But this is larger than any one agency or website. It is about an attitude. You are not right to think that government is slow to adopt new technologies. In fact, we have in part or in whole invented many of them. GPS, Internet, SCUBA gear, RADAR - these are all examples of government-driven innovation. Not to mention things like militaries using planes long before there were commercial airlines. The benefits of public-funded research for government purposes trickled into society later.
What is different about web 2.0 technology is that the novel sites and applications were almost totally invented in the private sector. There was no major government initiative to develop social technologies. The hottest web 2.0 companies did not receive DARPA funding, and may not even know what DARPA is. The fact that the last five years or so of social web development have largely passed us by, combined with other factors like slowness to adopt to change in general, and unique government IT issues, have created a situation in which an urgency is genuinely called for.
I note that there are now legitimate reasons why people in the government might use MySpace or Facebook. There is potentially useful information on Digg, Flickr, and Wikipedia, too. There are also legitimate reasons to use blogs. No one should be abusing their work computer in the public or private sector. But there are limits to what you can ban, as people will simply find workarounds anyway.
Martin Edic
· 1 year ago
Mark, I've been reading your series with interest since we provide a very comprehensive listening tool for social media and have been collecting hundreds of millions of social media results over the past year. I keep expecting some kind of contact from government agencies who might be interested in this data yet have had zero interest. Given that everything we collect remains in its original state including meta-data even if it has been deleted from its original source, I'd think they'd be all kinds of intelligence applications across many branches of government. Yet you write about a complete lack of urgency in understanding and accessing social media which strikes me as almost criminally negligent given the ease with which these tools can be deployed. Why am I not surprised? ;-)
Mark Drapeau
· 1 year ago
Hi Martin - I will not pretend to know what all of the millions of people that work for and with the government are doing. But my opinion is that we are not working closely enough with firms like yours to influence our brands, collect information about what citizens think, and do our jobs better. If you would like to contact me privately, I would love to see an example of how your firm could get me "intel" on something I am interested in, and I might write about that!! (My email is mark.d.drapeau@ugov.gov)
Teri Centner
· 1 year ago
I wonder what would be the outcome of an OMB or GAO study of how much government money is being spent on separate projects with the same goal(s). Within the DoD alone, I see both DISA, the Army, and the Navy all trying to re-create the wheel that the Intelligence Community already has set in motion with their very successful (within certain communities) Intelink suite of Web 2.0 tools. It just depresses me that we waste so many taxpayer dollars putting on conferences like "Government 2.0 and Beyond..." when we could be spending that money figuring out how to get us all on the same page!
Mark Drapeau
· 1 year ago
Hey Teri - I tend to agree. There is a lot of duplication, not just on this issue but throughout government. Ironically, social tools would help us communicate better and avoid duplication. And everyone should care about this. Is anyone from GAO reading this?
Ari Herzog
· 1 year ago
When you talk about the lack of governmental urgency to adopt new media, may I ask you, Mark, whether one's age matters? I've met many senior officials in the executive and legislative branches of the federal government, and it seems that more quote-unquote young people, e.g. under age 40, "get" the technology more than their older peers. Is that a fair presumption?
I praise you, Mark, for continuing to urge a quicker adoption and I have no doubt that if you controlled the purse, the money and desire would appropriately flow. But what about those who control the purse?
Mark Drapeau
· 1 year ago
Hi Ari, While in general you are probably correct about youth "getting" the social technology better, I am not writing about how many interns use text messaging to communicate with friends, or how many new IT guys are gamers. I am talking about a social software strategy for the government, and specifically within each cabinet agency, coordination among major players, roadmaps to move that forward, and a change in attitude towards adaptation and change, information sharing, and marketing and public relations. There are interested and sympathetic senior people (why do you think I am allowed to write this stuff?), but the federal government is just not that simple. It is a long process with lots of people involved, in complicated ways. I was at a conference on Monday and Tuesday and I heard things like "large budget of $3 million for ad campaign roll out" and "large company, about 1000 employees" Just the Department of Defense has about 3 million direct reports and something like $650 billion annual budget. Mark
Michael Funk
· 1 year ago
Well if this new iPhone app is any indication, maybe government 2.0 isn't as far off as we think.
This is a lot more polished and useful than I thought a political app would be. It sorts your contacts by state so you can call people in battleground states. Very cool. Grass roots politics comes to the iPhone. If you are an Obama supporter, this is definitely a functional tool that allows you to help your cause.
Mark Drapeau
· 1 year ago
Hi Michael - Without getting very political, I think that the campaigns of Howard Dean and now Barack Obama have pushed the limits of how to use human social networking technologies to raise money and influence voters. No doubt in four years there will be extensive fundraising using broadcast texting, mobile apps, location-specific pitches, etc. And the influences on the campaigns will surely, albiet gradually, trickle into mainstream government. Mark
ctovision
· 1 year ago
Mark, I really really enjoy your writing and your personal action in this space and encourage you to keep it up, you motivate us all.
You are making me think something different will be required to force action. We might need to take your arguments to the board of directors of the federal government-- the US Congress. The bad news is that they are not known for speedy action on smart things like this. The good news is that they control all funding so once they become convinced it is a good idea they have the power to make it happen.
I'm no in government so I have no problem plugging in with staffers and spreading the good word. I'll do that and encourage all your other fans who are not in the executive branch to do the same. Folks in the executive branch will need to continue to work through the system and that is important too, but clearly is not going to be the only solution.
Cheers, Bob
Mark Drapeau
· 1 year ago
Bob: Thanks. You might be right that this issue needs to be worked on both sides of the fence. We can talk more about this offline. -Mark
Kelcy Allwein
· 1 year ago
I was even more discouraged by the fact that we had no wireless connectivity in the auditorium (perhaps due to the newness of the facility but....). It was a cold blast of inertia after being so connected during the WIRE-ICES conference. Even when I had to attend another workshop on the third day I was still able to stay connected and participate digitally. However, even at that very connected conference we were still singing to the same choir. Your point about urgency is critical. We are not communicating the need for urgency very effectively. I just heard about another set of web2.0 technologies for a new stovepipe in the Intelligence community. No idea of A-space or Intelink. It can be discouraging
Mark Drapeau
· 1 year ago
Thanks for your thoughts, Kelcy. I thought that the hosts of WIRe/ICES did a great job of balancing a mainly old-school conference with the incorporation of some new social tools. In particular, for the relatively closed-lipped intel community to have two "open" conferences in the same week was awesome. The “Government 2.0 and Beyond… Harnessing Collective Intelligence,†conference hosted by DOD’s Information Resources Management College (IRMC), on the other hand, was arguably higher profile but was unfortunately more like 1.0 masquarading as 2.0, in my opinion.
Daniel Tunkelang
· 1 year ago
Mark, thanks for this series, which I just discovered from Bob's tweets. Am hoping I can somehow link in to this with the work I'm doing at Endeca.
Mark Drapeau
· 1 year ago
Hi Daniel! Thanks for your really nice post about my Government 2.0 writing (http://thenoisychannel.com/?p=511). I look forward to chatting with both you and Bob offline about various ways to move forward. Mark
Mark Drapeau
· 1 year ago
Ari, with respect, the suggestion that "there is enormous acceptance and usage of Web 2.0" anywhere in in the federal government is rediculous. The reason is, even though (say) the public relations office at the ficticious HBID agency has a blog and is playing with Twitter and thinks the tools are really important, the other (say) 350,000 employees of that agency have not incorporated social tools into day-to-day operations. They are mainly either (1) completely oblivious to them, or (2) use some in their personal lives but not for their work. I would like to see the results of a comprehensive "Gov 2.0" poll asking how many government employees have a Facebook account, post photos on Flickr, or even know what Twitter is. It will be low. The primary objective is using bottom-up social media experiments (which are admirable) to change top-down policy. Missing? At the least - Someone needs to "own the issue" in each organization and coordinate everyone, there needs to be a strategy for incorporation of the technology, and then there needs to be a roadmap and a plan, and eventual incorporation of social tools onto almost everyone's computer and tasks. There are many problematic side issues - Security? Incentives? Metrics? Contracts? COTS? Custom? Division between work and play? Mobile use? To answer your other question, I am talking with people all over the government; I have written about the intelligence community's work in this area and I will have a post coming out about NASA very soon. I have mentioned numerous other agencies in my posts - it's all important and we can all learn from each other. Mark
Bob Woolley
· 1 year ago
In my judgmentas a technical architect and egov manager, government will adopt social media like Facebook as the communication value with constituents becomes more evident. Governments are still largely under the impression that they need to provide all of their own IT infrastructure and channels. As far as Government 2.0 is concerned, from a technology perspective we need to redefine the Government IT Cloud, and when we do governments will begin to embrace Facebook, Youtube, Flikr, Zoho, Google docs and a host of other services hosted outside of normal channels. Our big challenge today is to avoid blocking these channels while the opportunities are in their early stages. We need to let "a thousand flowers bloom." We also need to proactively identify channels that help government communicate with citizens. In Utah we have specific twitter channels for utah.gov news, stateparks, and a variety of others, we also make extensive use of RSS and flikr and Youtube channels, and we are just beginning. From a citizen centric perspective it seems to me that governments need to add channels that meet with their customers, and that requires change.
Mark Drapeau
· 1 year ago
Thanks Bob. As I wrote in my earlier Mashable article (http://mashable.com/2008/08/07/theory-of-social...) on "A Theory of Social Government," while communicating with constituents is certainly valuable, and there are good firms like GovDelivery helping with some of that, there are many applications of social tools within the Executive Branch, including: internal agency communication and information discovery, intelligence and public opinion research, managing collaborative relationships with ad hoc groups consisting of members in and out of the government, and empowering people in other countries with cheap, simple software for laptops or mobile phones. I completely agree with you about the Government IT Cloud, and I am working on that issue a bit behind the wall right now. Thanks very much for your perspective. I do think that to some extent the larger federal government can learn from states, small cities, and small countries to see how they have done more with less my making good use of new tech. Mark
Leslie Poston
· 1 year ago
I love your Government 2.0 series. I've been learning quite a bit from it.
Mark Drapeau
· 1 year ago
Thanks so much, Leslie - Look for another one really soon!!
All Comments
What is different about web 2.0 technology is that the novel sites and applications were almost totally invented in the private sector. There was no major government initiative to develop social technologies. The hottest web 2.0 companies did not receive DARPA funding, and may not even know what DARPA is. The fact that the last five years or so of social web development have largely passed us by, combined with other factors like slowness to adopt to change in general, and unique government IT issues, have created a situation in which an urgency is genuinely called for.
I note that there are now legitimate reasons why people in the government might use MySpace or Facebook. There is potentially useful information on Digg, Flickr, and Wikipedia, too. There are also legitimate reasons to use blogs. No one should be abusing their work computer in the public or private sector. But there are limits to what you can ban, as people will simply find workarounds anyway.
I've been reading your series with interest since we provide a very comprehensive listening tool for social media and have been collecting hundreds of millions of social media results over the past year. I keep expecting some kind of contact from government agencies who might be interested in this data yet have had zero interest. Given that everything we collect remains in its original state including meta-data even if it has been deleted from its original source, I'd think they'd be all kinds of intelligence applications across many branches of government. Yet you write about a complete lack of urgency in understanding and accessing social media which strikes me as almost criminally negligent given the ease with which these tools can be deployed.
Why am I not surprised? ;-)
I praise you, Mark, for continuing to urge a quicker adoption and I have no doubt that if you controlled the purse, the money and desire would appropriately flow. But what about those who control the purse?
http://blog.launchpadcoworking.com/
This is a lot more polished and useful than I thought a political app would be. It sorts your contacts by state so you can call people in battleground states. Very cool. Grass roots politics comes to the iPhone. If you are an Obama supporter, this is definitely a functional tool that allows you to help your cause.
You are making me think something different will be required to force action. We might need to take your arguments to the board of directors of the federal government-- the US Congress. The bad news is that they are not known for speedy action on smart things like this. The good news is that they control all funding so once they become convinced it is a good idea they have the power to make it happen.
I'm no in government so I have no problem plugging in with staffers and spreading the good word. I'll do that and encourage all your other fans who are not in the executive branch to do the same. Folks in the executive branch will need to continue to work through the system and that is important too, but clearly is not going to be the only solution.
Cheers,
Bob