What I have noticed during these conversations is the number of different definitions terms being used about what government is trying to do when it comes to technology and where it is going. What I thought was more interesting was that in these discussions, it was obvious that they were speaking about the same things but describing it very differently. It reminded me of tale about the blind men and the elephant.

The Blind Men And The Elephant

I am sure that you have heard the child’s tale about the blind men and the elephant. Depending on which tradition’s story you have heard, it goes something like this: A number of blind men are asked to describe something (in this case an elephant) by just feeling it.  They each describe it very differently depending which part of the elephant they are touching.

One blind man who is feeling the trunk describes it as a plough Another blind man who is feeling the elephant’s ear describes it as a wicker basket. And another who is feeling the elephant’s leg describes it as a pillar. In the end of the tale, none of the blind men can accurately describe what it is and to the amusement of the king get into an argument or even a fight.

Describing The Government Elephant

This tale isn’t that far off what is happening in technology and government right now. There is no clear idea of what the next generation of government will look like and those involved are using very different terms to describe the similar things but are unaware of the overlap.

In these discussions I found that most of the terms and descriptions fell into three not surprising buckets – open government, Gov 2.0, and eGovernment. There was even some general consistency across who used those terms and how. Here is how the discussions broke out among those three buckets:

• Open Government. The discussions with vendors and customers from the Federal level inevitably center on open government. But within the context of what open government is, definitions vary broadly. Some are focused on bringing data sets into the light, some about making missions clearer to the public, others even on making the procurement and contracting process more transparent.
• Gov 2.0. State and local government agencies and the vendors that support them focus more on Tim O’Reilly’s concept of Gov 2.0 – using social media and other platforms to engage with citizens.  It is really much more towards the engagement of citizens by government that is enables by social media.
• eGovernment. Some discussions, believe it or not, still focus on eGovernment. They don’t usually use the term, but instead start talking about using technology to improve the level of efficiency and effectiveness within government. Interestingly, the vendors and government managers that tended towards this perspective were more focused on internal processes such as accounting, procurement and HR.

The interesting aspect is that instead of being separate concepts, there is really a Venn diagram with significant overlap between the different concepts. For example, there is significant overlap between eGovernment and Gov 2.0 – both are interested in improving the interaction between government and citizens, are enabled by technology, and focused from the inside out.

What do you think?  Do you think that there is significant overlap between these?  What do you think they are?  What do you think the significant differences are?

In one of my previous and more fun roles, I served as a strategic planner the Office of the Secretary at the Department of the Interior among other things I did. I can’t say I did a lot of strategic planning – political appointees quickly dispensed with any efforts we did in developing a real strategy – but I learned a lot and tried a lot.

I also collected and read a number of books on strategy and future thinking. I heard the joke so many times that a future thinking government was an oxymoron that I lost track. But it didn’t matter. I collected and read strategy books. I think it is important that government programs be proactive instead of reactive, of which a strategy is a key aspect. Besides, what else was there to do on the Metro ride home?

The books I read covered a broad swath of strategy and futures thinking – from Sun Tzu to Machiavelli to Porter to Schwartz to Ringland and many others. Some of the books where better, some were pretty bad, and some provided a lot of value to if you were willing to dig through all of the crap and mine the diamonds that were buried there.

That being said, I think a lot of Gov 2.0, eGov, and Open Government leaders would benefit from reading some of the classics on strategy and the future, and then going out there and actually starting from the end outcome and building a strategy to get there.  This should affect how they drive innovation and change within their organizations and how they look at engaging with the citizen.

Which classics should you read? Below is what I would consider my top 5 specifically applicable for government and those involved in the Open Government/Gov 2.0/eGov effort.

HBR’s Must Reads On Strategy – This is a great compilation of some of the top articles out of HBR on strategy. It includes almost all of the classics by Porter, Collins, Powers, Kaplan and Norton, and more. There is a lot of commercial and business focus in this little book, but there is also a lot for government leaders to learn from.  By the way, it wouldn’t hurt also to take a look at HBR itself on a monthly basis.

Strategy Safari by Henry Mintzberg – This is a great book to both get an overview of some of the best thinking in the field and how to actually apply it. The ten themes of the field of design, planning, positioning, entrepreneur, cognitive, learning, power, cultural, environmental, and configuration are all applicable to how we go about deciding what the outcome of Open Government should be and how we get there.

The Way of Innovation by Kaihan Krippendorff – This fabulous book is a different way of looking at strategy. The book combines strategy with creativity and innovation, something that is sorely needed in this effort as we try to manage changes in technology, culture, and our organizations forward. Though I am not a fan of the “Ancient Chinese” methods that supposedly pull from Taoism and Buddhism, I think Krippendorff makes some great points and has some great ideas around admitting we are stuck in certain mental models, that there are other options out there, what resources are available/necessary, developing a new innovation path, and making the change sustainable.

Art of the Long View by Peter Schwartz – This is a book that I first read almost 15 years ago and it remains one of my favorites. I admit I am biased towards the work that Peter Schwartz did at Shell and later through the Global Business Network on scenario planning and enabling strategic conversations, I still think that this is a critical book to shifting government leaders thinking on the future. I think we need scenarios about what the future of the government citizen relationship could look like. I think we need to have and encourage strategic conversations about how we get there.

Yes, there are other books I could have or should have included here including classics like Sun Tzu, Blue Ocean Strategy, Scenarios in Public Policy, and Perspectives in Strategy. But this is a good starting point that almost anyone can get into.

The Bottom Line: I love the story about how the TSA Blog originally came to be. According to the story, one of the former TSA Directors finally got to the point that he told his staff that if they didn’t create a blog for him, he would go out and begin commenting on other people’s blogs. That blog, through the dedicated efforts of so many at TSA, is now one of the best government blogs out there. And the story might be an urban myth, but it is a great story that turned out okay. But many times that type of happy ending is the exception, not the rule.

Clearly we need to think about the tactical – what database we put online and in what format or even what platform we use for a blog – but we are lacking when it comes to the strategic conversation. These books and learning’s from strategic management form a starting point for us to start thinking more strategically – beyond the next blog entry, beyond the next event, beyond the next stream on facebook.

But as a former fed with some moderate experience with scorecards and performance management, I am extremely disappointed by the scorecard and how the plans are being evaluated. Why am I disappointed? Because of the following three things:

• No one failed. Every agency’s plans either received a yellow or a green on the traffic light dashboard. If everybody passed, that tells me something is wrong. This doesn’t mean that agency employees aren’t working hard to implement the mandate, it just means that there was no way they could fail – any effort counted.  It is interesting that most of the yellows showed up where the agencies self-evaluated, so there is at least some self-reflection.

• The bar wasn’t set high enough. When you look through the criteria, it is obvious that the criteria are set pretty low. For example, when it comes to data integrity, the agency just had to have assigned a high-level senior official to the effort to meet expectations and get a green. That doesn’t mean that they have actually had to do anything.  Or another example, for public consultation there just has to be a mechanism for public feedback to score a meets expectation or a green.  It doesn’t matter whether it is easy to use, or anybody from the public has actually commented, or that anybody from the agency has responded to a public comment. An email link looks like it is enough.

• A majority of it is based on self-evaluation. Six of the ten criteria are self-scored by the agency according to a checklist (available here). I don’t know about anyone else in government, but the one time I tried to self-score one of my agencies on the PART evaluation as a red, I was quickly told during a review by a political appointee that scoring ourselves a red was embarrassing to the agency and the administration, and was not acceptable. I tried to argue the truth, but since when has the truth won out in a political question?  The fact of the matter is very few agencies have the ability to fail themselves, even though there a re likely some that didn’t meet the criteria.

The Bottom Line: There are some agencies and government employees that are doing the difficult work of making agencies more open and transparent. For that I applaud them. I also applaud the administration for evaluating the open government plans, but there are definite indications that this isn’t a true and fair evaluation of what agencies could accomplish.   If the administration is serious about this, then bring in a neutral third party that can really evaluate what agencies are doing. What do you think?

There are agencies that launch twitter streams, maybe have an RSS feed for their blog, they may have a Facebook fan page, and they think or at least say that they are engaging the public. There are politicians that successfully use the same tools to build a groundswell of volunteers and to educate the public about their political platform. They both think that they are engaging the public.

But if you look at these closely what you will see in the comments, in the tweets, on the wall, and in most any other social media channel that they use is the agency posting one thing, some citizens responding, and then nothing more from the agency.

Last time I checked that does not constitute engagement. A one-way conversation is not engagement.  Sure, you might see a few responses back from the agency but that seems to be as rare as an honest politician. That is at its best marketing and at is worst appeasement.

Why don’t agencies engage more, really carry on two or more way conversations?  For a number of reasons, the biggest of which is that engagement is hard work.  But that maybe changing – Microsoft may actually be making citizen engagement easier.

Microsoft's TownHall

Earlier this week at the Politics Online Conference, Microsoft announced the release of a new government and political social engagement tool called TownHall. Microsoft was kind enough to brief me about it and give me a peek at what it could do the week before the announcement.

TownHall is essentially a cloud-based application that has the ability to allow both politicians and government agencies to provide a platform for a higher level of engagement with citizens.

Reputation badges track participation points in Microsoft's TownHall

Constructive constituent participation is encouraged through a points-based rewards system similar to what Microsoft has used with Xbox Live. TownHall participants collect points by asking questions, answering questions, voting on items, and other activities that advance and contribute to the discourse.

Participants can also share their contributions out on to other social networks through integration with applications like Facebook, Twitter, and others with the intent through viral and organic growth that it may draw more participants into the conversation.

The code for Microsoft’s TownHall is available for free for any organization at http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/TownHall but only runs on top of the Microsoft Azure platform.

The benefits to the politicians and government agencies are that they can use TownHall as a platform to gauge public and constituent sentiment about a specific set of issues, to increase the level of dialogue and communication around an issue, and to get a better feel for what matters to their community. Admittedly, it is limited to those who self-chose to participate but so is the act of voting.

The Bottom Line: Microsoft has provided a good tool that will probably be of the most use for political campaigns and sitting politicians, though government agencies looking to gather general input will also find it useful. It will not immediately replace the formal comment and response mechanisms that are already in place for public comments on agency policies, but it will encourage government agencies to turn to the social media space to gather public comments. What do you think?

In the meantime, it will take me a while to dig through all of these plans and ferret out the details but as I went through the different agency sites something struck me – how transparent were the agencies themselves being? For example, is it easy to find the Open Government page from the agency homepage? Can the open government plan be accessed in a number of formats? How open and transparent are the agencies on who leads each agency open government team? Is it clear what data sets are currently available and what data sets will be available in the future? Is it easy to provide feedback or input to the agency?  These and more are just some of ways to evaluate how open agencies are becoming.

To better evaluate agencies, I am in the process of designing and defining a heuristic review methodology of agency open government efforts. The review methodology will be composed of a number of criteria that can all be evaluated on a simple four point scale to determine how transparent, participatory, and collaborative the agency is in their Open Government efforts. When it is completed, I will publish the criteria so others and the agency can use it to track their own efforts.

For example, one of my review criteria is “Is the Open Government Team listed on the site and is there a way to contact them?” I looked at each agency Open Government page to see what team members were along with their corresponding titles and if there was an easy way to contact them. The best outcome would be an agency that listed all of its team members, their titles, and more then one way to contact the team or individual team members.  The worst outcome would be an agency that didn’t list any of their team members and didn’t provide a way for citizens to contact the team.  I took results of my first look, converted them to the common ABC scale and posted the results below:

USAID – B – The USAID OG site lists the Director of Public Information on their site as a point of contact and provides an alias email address.

Department of Agriculture – C – The Agriculture OG site does not list a point of contact. They only list an alias email address.

Department of Commerce – B -The Commerce OG site lists the complete team and uses an alias email address for the team lead.

Department of Defense – B – The Defense site lists the team lead and uses an alias email address for the team lead.

Department of Education- B- The Education OG site lists the complete team and uses an alias email address for the team lead.

Department of Energy – C – The Energy site lists a single person (who I could not find on the org chat on the DOE site and don’t know her role) and uses an alias email address.

Department of Health and Human Services – D – The HHS site does not list the OG team nor does it provide an easy way to contact the team outside of commenting on the plan.

Department of Homeland Security – D – The DHS site also does not list the OG team nor does it provide an easy way to contact the team.

Department of Housing and Urban Development – D – The HUD site also does not list the OG team nor does it provide an easy way to contact the team.

Department of Justice – D – The Justice site does not list the OG team nor does it provide an easy way to contact the team.

Department of Labor – C – The Labor OG site does not list a point of contact and they only list an alias email address.

Department of State – B – The State site lists the CIO email and another email, but there is no list of who the team is.

Department of the Interior – C -The Interior OG site does not list a point of contact. They only list an alias email address.

Department of Treasury – C – The Treasury site does not list the OG team nor does it provide an easy way to contact the team.

Department of Transportation – B – The Transportation OG site lists two team members and uses an alias email address for the team lead.

Department of Veterans Affairs – D – The VA site does not list the OG team nor does it provide an easy way to contact the team.

Environmental Protection Agency – D – The EPA site does not list the OG team nor does it provide an easy way to contact the team.

General Services Administration – B – The GSA OG site lists three team members and uses an alias email address for the team lead.

Across the agencies reviewed, the average score for this criteria was a 1.89 which I will round up to a C. The agencies overall are doing okay when it comes to being transparent about who is on their Open Government team and how to contact them. This is also not representative of the overall efforts of each agency since it is only a single criteria.

I am going to continue to develop the criteria, evaluate agencies, and then publish the results of my findings here. What criteria do you think should be used to evaluate agency Open Government efforts? Please feel free to include them in a comment here and I will look at including your suggestions with attributions. Thanks!

Note – Thank you to Andy and the others over at GovLoop for putting the fantastic list of agency efforts together!

There are still significant and mission necessary restrictions in the memo such as accessing adult content, gambling sites, or promoting hate speech but in any workplace, not just the government, these types of restrictions are necessary and appropriate. And the memo is very clear on appropriate training being provided for those who would use this capability. Not sure what the training will be, but it will definitely include OPSEC given some recent issues or potential problems with soldiers in other countries.

Personally, I think it is great that the Marine Corp is open up social media to Marines. It is almost the equivalent to me being able to call home from my commanders cell phone in his Humvee to check on my sick wife while I was in Saudi Arabia during Desert Shield/Desert Storm.

But I said almost. Cell phones at the time were inherently more secure then what social media is today. Which brought me to the question – what is too open for government?

We have had a lot of conversations that government needs to be more open. That agencies need to be better engaged with citizens. That missions need to be clearer and efforts and purposes of programs need to be more transparent. I know this effort is just launching, and may not survive liftoff, but now is the time to start asking how far should we go?

It seems straight forward that our national intelligence infrastructure, law enforcement, and defense activities should be the most restricted. But what does that mean? Does that mean a secretary who works for the CIA is not allowed to have a Facebook page? Or how about a military officer having their own blog about some benign subject like cooking? I don’t know.

How about staffers at the White House or on the Hill? How restricted should they be? The are previous cases of leaking – who could forget not to distant story about the Hill staffer and the Washingtonienne blog?

What about the “more mundane” government efforts and programs – should they be restricted?  Now that the President has determined to open up additional areas in the Gulf of Mexico and off the coast of Virginia for offshore oil and gas exploration – a program run by the little know Minerals Management Service (MMS) within the Department of the Interior – how restricted should MMS employees be about their social media usage?

What about agencies like the National Labor Relations Board, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Transportation Security Administration or others? Our government obviously keeps a lot of secrets and it is very necessary that we continue to keep those.  How many of those should we continue to keep?

The Bottom Line: An old colleague of mine at Interior once reminded me that it is just important to define not only what you will do, but also what you won’t. When it comes to open government, I applaud the efforts to make government more open, but it would be great to have some direction on what we will not open up. We need that so government managers and external watchdogs know the boundaries of the playing field. What do you think?

• The best part of SxSW is not the presentations. There were some great presentations at SxSW this year – Clay Shirkey, Joi Ito, Charlene Li, and many others all gave great talks. But I got the most value from the people I spoke to outside the presentations. Sitting at the Driskill, speaking with a bloggers, marketers, PR people, agency people, visionaries, and other idea people was the best use of my time.
• That government is listening. No, not in a “Big Brother” kind of way. But in that there were numerous representatives from government agencies and people who are interested in Gov 2.0 who were in attendance, listening to the conversations taking place, and presenting on great ideas and issues. I would expect that there will be even more government attendees next year.
• The conversation is very consumer focused. One thing that I found lacking was any conversation around what the whole interactive space means for B2B. The assumption seemed to be, at least from the presentations and the people that I spoke with, that B2B could just learn it from B2C. I am not sure that I agree on that one. More on that later.

Some additional lessons specific to my experience this year.

• Book your room early. When it comes to rooms, book early and book often. And check Yelp. Unless you are an 18-year-old band member, being over the bars and clubs is not always positive attribute at 2:00 AM.
• Black is the only color you need to worry about. Purchase more black for my wardrobe – t-shirts, hoodies, jeans, etc. Black t-shirts with pictures of Chairman Mao, South American revolutionaries, technology brands, and geek statements are especially appropriate. If you want to be very different and really stand out, wear a suit.
• Be prepared. Bring a SxSW medical kit – Aspirin, Advil, Pepto-Bismol, stomach pumps, etc. Not for you (you would never need it!) but for your friends.

What did you learn at SxSW this year?

But the simple answer is yes. There are simple frameworks for a social media strategy as a starting point. Strategies can be as simple or as complicated as you want them to be. To keep it simple, I have broken down social media strategy into four areas – Objectives, Conversation, Locations, and Success.

These are not separate buckets nor are they a sequence of events, but points of convergence about how to consider the conversation you are going to have and how you want to engage with citizens and customers. There is and should be overlap between these, as they are interconnected and stream from one another. I have laid these out as a short statement and then a list of questions you should consider for each.

Objectives – Objectives are what you and your target audience want to accomplish from this relationship. What are the primary and secondary objectives for your social media efforts? Or what do you want to accomplish? Who is your target audience? Who is your secondary influencer audience? What do they want to accomplish?

Conversation – Conversation looks at the nature of the engagement. What is it you want to engage about? Is there room to grow the conversation? What would you like to take from the conversation? What would you like them to take from the interaction? What do you want them to feel? Who else would you like to include? Who else would you like for them to include? Who would they likely want to include? Remember, like any conversation, it is as much the content and what is said as it is what isn’t said or said in other ways.

Locations – Locations looks at where you are, where they are, and how to bring the two of you together. What locations and technologies are you using? What locations and technologies are they using? Where is the overlap? What would it take to move to more of their locations? How do you tailor the conversation for that location? How do you take the interaction across multiple locations? How do shifts in technology change the nature of the conversation?

Success – Success, based upon what your and your target audience’s objectives are, looks out how you define and measure whether you are successful or not. What does success look like for you? How would you know? What does success look like for your target audience? How would they know? How would you know if they felt successful? Are there quantitative measures that are relevant? Are their qualitative measures that are better?

The answers to these questions should be able to fit into a tight 2-5 page document or at most 10 slides. Admittedly, you can go a lot deeper on any of these areas and end up constructing another 150+ slide PowerPoint deck or a 200+ Word document. And in some cases you may need to when you look at who in your organization needs to be involved. But that isn’t the intent and I am not convinced that most of those types of artifacts really help anybody. Planning is necessary, but keep it simple and flexible.

So what do you think? Could your current social media strategy be simplified into these four points of convergence? What am I missing?

Though I understand his perspective and potentially agree that we are at the end of the hype and beginning of the real work, much of the surrounding discussion reminds me of my kids on a road trip constantly asking if we are there yet. It is an irrelevant question as we will get there when we get there.

With Gov 2.0, the simple question is that if we are at the end of the hype cycle, does it really matter? Gov 2.0 is simply a label with an association to technology that is actually an organizational and cultural shift. If we change it to Gov 3.0, or Citizen 3.0, or iGov, does the hype cycle start over and does it really matter? From my perspective, no probably not. Organizational and cultural shifts take time, effort, resources, and work to be successful – not hype.

I have posted my general impressions about Gov 2.0 Camp LA previously and will be posting on the future of Gov 2.0 in the near future, but I am very curious about what you think. Are we at the end of the hype? And does it really matter?

Cheers,

Alan

It’s about the people. This isn’t a new concept, but one that frequently seems to get lost in the noise about Twitter, Facebook, and other social media tools.  Annie over at ReThink wrote a great piece about it here. And to be clear, it is about both the end-user constituents and the people about government.  There are people on both ends of the conversation. Yes, one represents and is bound by an institution, but they are still people.

There are two sides to the story. Gov 2.0 is about rebuilding relationships between government and citizens in a new way. It is about both sides of the equation taking risks, opening up to each other, and (dare I say it?) being vulnerable. Isn’t that what being in a relationship is all about? But so far most of the focus has been on the government side opening up, assuming that because people have over 500 friends on Facebook that they will include government in their conversations. I am not so sure. I believe that government has to take the first step, and probably the second and third, but we as citizens need to be open to allowing government to be more like us, to make mistakes.

Moving from a monologue to a dialogue. For too long government communication has primarily been like a megaphone – when it is used it is one way and tends to overpower any other conversation. Admittedly, there have been outreach efforts in the past for two-way dialogue such as listening sessions, but in my experience these are often few and far between, and dominated by special interest groups. Slowly, this is beginning to change as there are more and more two-way conversations going on between government and citizens.

Better engagement by government is an international issue. It seems obvious, but sometimes we forget that countries around the globe are struggling with how to use social engagement platforms to better engage internally within and across agencies, and externally with citizens, businesses, and groups.  I was surprised at the number of international participants that were at the Camp and what a great diversity of opinions and ideas they provided.

All in all it was a fabulous experience and I met some amazing people. The Gov 2.0 is still in its infancy and has a long way to go. But conversations and meetings like this encourage me and lead me to believe we are on the right path.

If you were there or watched it online, what were your thoughts?

Cheers,

A