Jun 17th, 2009 |
Last week I made a passing reference to an interdepartmental meeting I participated in regarding government’s use of the social networking tool, YouTube to engage Canadians. I was thrilled to learn about the wonderful video work going on across government. A few examples:
Waking up Canadian is a quirky Citizenship and Immigration video announcing a change to the Citizenship Act affecting mostly those living abroad with rights to Canadian citizenship. In this case, YouTube was an ideal channel. The video was viewed over 100,000 times and was picked up by US media outlets.
Afghanistan Challenge is a joint initiative with NGOs and CIDA working together in a fundraising effort to improve life for Afghan women and children. The GC will match funds contributed by Canadians. In this case, the video is hosted on a YouTube channel.
Youth Privacy, a branch of the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada also has a separate YouTube channel onto which it is posting a variety of informational videos. One interesting initiative was the video contest aimed at the 12 – 18 year old market designed to promote good privacy practices in the use of social networking tools. A few of the winning entries are posted.
This is very exciting and the potential to reach broad audiences and initiate meaningful dialogue is enormous. However, one thing that struck me during this meeting was the duplication of effort. Many of us in government create our own YouTube channels to ensure our departmental brand is fully represented, while others rely on the search function of YouTube to drive users to their videos. We all start from scratch in the creation of our videos. Some of us hire agencies to do the work, others use internal resources. We each have our own unique experiences with the approvals process of posting videos to YouTube – is it collateral? is it advertising? We are all going through the same processes but re-creating the wheel each and every time.
Quite frankly, in government we are all still learning how to incorporate Web 2.0 tools like YouTube in our processes and infrastructures, but because of their ease of use and accessibility we sometimes tend to bypass certain processes in a valiant, well-meaning attempt to get on with the business of government. But why are we doing it independent of each other? Let’s take this opportunity to learn together and build on the experiences of one another. In the end, I am pretty sure that Canadians don’t really pay much attention to which department – municipal, provincial or federal – is providing the service or product they need. Nor should we in government. Social networking tools are in fact, well, social in nature. We are a community of public servants working together to serve an audience of Canadians.
I wonder if we really need multiple government channels on YouTube. Can we not just create one GC YouTube channel to which we can drive all Canadians for information? While we are at it, let’s put in place centrally located image/video repositories, processes and whatever else is required to enable collaborative GC video creation. What’s stopping us from engaging Canadians to participate in the creation of music sound beds for our videos – a community creative commons of sorts? The allure of collaboration and recognition would be enough to attract even the most reclusive of basement jammers.
Basically, my call for openness, collaboration and sharing – the one I seem to make in almost every blog post I write – is the same. Default to openness. Enable collaboration. Embrace information sharing. These are not new concepts, but thanks to social networking tools, they are easier to integrate now than they’ve ever been. Let’s make it easy for Canadians to access us, trust our information and rely on our services. We owe it to them, don’t we?
(More on “The art…or is it the science…of working as a community” next week – the second of a two part blog post)
One Response to “The wheel’s been created!”
Nice post! I agree with you on collaboration and sharing – and by the way, common services for video production do exist over at PWGSC. No idea how prepared they are for a 2.0-style approach though.
However, I feel there is a difference in the “behind the scences” approach to content creation and the approach towards delivery of that content. In terms of a single GC video channel, I am not so sure that’s the way to go — I have no issue with varied points of presence that are more targeted to our diverse audiences, communities or stakeholders. Forcing each user to sift through every piece of GC video content to get to what they are particularly interested in might not be the most effective comms approach.