Last week I had the very good fortune to share a panel discussion with Mr. David Tallan – one of the drivers behind the Stewardship & Web Portfolio initiative, in the Office of the Corporate Chief Strategist for the Ontario Provincial Ministry of Government Services.  The topic is was I’ve been working on for the last two years: “What Do Records and Information Managers Need to Know About Web 2.0”?  We’d collaborated in advance – I’d overview the industry trends and emerging best practices for 2.0 adoption in public sector and highlight the risks and rewards, then David would then turn the topic specifically to how the Ontario government was piloting, prototyping and exploring new forms of inter-departmental collaboration as well as new forms of 2.0-inspired citizen engagement and communication.

But what struck me as we were getting set up and settled into the conference room was the buzz in the audience.  People were already talking, debating and sharing their current projects: what was worrying them, what new approaches they wanted to explore.  I turned to David and said, “we have to talk fast, this room needs lots of time for questions and discussion at the end”…

Clearly public sector is on the leading edge of this new generation of collaboration. Tangible business problems were raised and discussed among the panelists and with other participants in the room.  How can newer, simpler forms of web-collaboration tools – such as wikis, maybe community workspaces – be used to handle knowledge management and corporate memory preservation challenges? How can we better measure the consumption rates and usage patterns of communications published through blogs?  And how to public sector information professionals walk the fine and often-changing line of using external social networks for program awareness, public relations, citizen engagement when their access to such sites are often limited from their work computers?

The topic of corporate memory preservation inside government as the demographic shift slide towards that long-projected retirement bubble is one I’ve been researching for several years.  A significant factor in how information and content management systems can be used to mitigate long term risk of the loss of electronic culture and work product.

An extremely valuable discussion with a full room of public sector professionals wanting to learn more about new social media tools to better fulfill their citizen service mandates…  looking forward to more of this type of interactive discussion in October in Ottawa.

Tags: Collaboration, Public Sector, Web 2.0