Social media brings people together. It adds a new layer of interaction not seen before in society; the impacts are such that social media even managed to elect the United-States’ first black President. It accomplished this because it destroyed typical Republican vs Democrat landscapes, and it forced the country to rethink its traditional views on geopolitics. Therefore, one could argue that social media not only brings people together, but that it also breaks down geographical barriers in a way not seen since the invention of the telephone.

In such a large country as Canada, with multiple levels of government, social media can facilitate and help the governance process like no other technology offering ever experienced. It can help citizens in rural British-Columbia get employment insurance (EI) answers online through instant messaging conversations with a representative from Human Resources and Skills Development Canada, who himself is located in Ottawa. Social media can connect a Newfoundland constituent to her federally elected official’s office directly, through the use of a wiki located on her MP’s own personal website.

Even more significant… this same citizen in St-John’s, who was actually asking her MP’s office a question concerning EI in her region, and after stumbling on a federal government collaboration site, has discovered that the exact same question she was posing her MP’s office, was actually being asked by a fellow citizen in BC; the St-John’s resident even saw the HRSDC response online as the entire instant messaging conversation between the BC resident and the Ottawa federal employee was published within the EI QA section that same day… A BC resident assisting a Newfoundland resident without direct government involvement… a picture of efficiency emerges… a self-serve government body operating in a government cloud.

2. Decision making speed and transparency can be increased

As previously discussed in other blogs, government entities are hierarchical in nature. This very hierarchy often causes significant delays in responding to citizen needs, whether it be access to information requests, questions around travel warnings, etc. Additionally, emails and telephones perpetuate this structure because these are the technologies which are the most widely used in governments today and over the past 20 years; this fact does not help to break the mold as they are non-collaborative technologies and are ultimately restrictive in nature. Lastly, these hierarchies date back to a pre-information age society where the rules could afford to be rigid because the information flow was much slower than it is in today’s knowledge economy.

Today and in the foreseeable future, the foundation and essence of these rules are still required. However, how they are administered requires some investigation. For example, the emergence of social media can effectively flatten typical government hierarchies as the transmission of information is drastically increased and the collaboration factor brings people and content together in a way never seen before. In a true social media savvy government, citizens can actually contribute to the body of knowledge of a particular federal, provincial or municipal program, not simply receive information. Once an answer has been provided to a citizen once by a public sector representative, it can be shared and communicated in such a way where citizens can themselves educate their fellow citizens, effectively reducing the information burden on government institutions. People want to help and be helped, and often social media is the answer. Such an ecosystem could drastically reduce the information burden on both public sector organizations themselves and on citizens seeking answers from a typical hierarchical system, which itself has relied on emails and phone calls to obtain answers for the past twenty years.

Essentially, new ways of designing and delivering government programs are required; this new place must be one where a balance is struck, a place where our society’s legal and policy building blocks continue to be respected, and a place where collaborative and open government is available to all citizens through social media.

3. New generations of employees do not ‘do’ email and telephone

My brother is 25, if I send an email, I get an answer within 3 days… at best. If I send him a Facebook posting, I get an answer within an hour… the point here is younger digital natives are used to these ‘new’ collaborative platforms. Texting is replacing phone calls, Youtube, Facebook and/or LinkedIn are replacing emails… the media types which we have been typical government staples have already been replaced within younger generations of professionals, and it is inevitable that they will enter the public sector workplace at some point or another, the key to this is managing this entry into the public sector workplace in a strategic fashion, where a balance between policy compliance and collaboration is respected.

Private sector entities have already adopted these technologies in many instances. Therefore attracting and maintaining young talent through technology usage is less of an issue than in the public sector, which still relies heavily on email and telephones as its primary means of communication. However, should the public sector actively engage these new communication and collaborative methods, it would find that young professionals would most likely feel more engaged and able to make a difference in the workplace and could even contribute to longer term strategic program planning as a result of their acuteness to these types of communications platforms. But beware, it is not simply a question of having this type of media available to younger generations of public sector employees, these new professionals are used to the essence of collaboration and are more challenging of typical government hierarchies. Hence a warning, involve the young professionals in program design and delivery as you are designing tomorrow’s government 2.0 programs for them.

4. Open government is possible with social media

How the public sector perceives itself in the information age is in need of a radical transformation because most public sector organizations have not quite fully understood that they have effectively lost the information battle; content is everywhere and is everything, it is produced within and outside firewalls, information consumers are now generators and generators are also consumers. Realizing that the information war is lost, versus conceiving new management frameworks which operate within this new context are two distinctly different elements.

Today, information is available to public sector employees and citizens alike outside of governmental firewalls at a much quicker rate and broader range than ever before. Additionally, the line between the corporate web vs the personal web is ever blurring, to a point where it will cease to exist in the very near future. These factors, to name a few, create an unprecedented level of stress on both the access to information and the privacy spaces. While social media is often seen as a key source for these new stresses, it may also represent the cure for this ever increasing information burden ecosystem that is the public sector cloud or web.

A social web experience means citizens can manage their own content, their own access and their own personal and private experiences within a government information cloud in ways never available until recently. Yes, rules and policies are still required as they are key building blocks of Canadian society. Such is the case for access to government information for example… no one is suggesting we part ways with our core values, simply that we incorporate our core values into a social media reality.

Consequently, one should investigate how social media can increase open government, how the concept of opening government data can be exploited to feed a knowledge economy as well as a knowledge society from St-John’s to Victoria. This type of study has never occurred. But such an undertaking should be conducted with a broad range of representatives around the table, from youth to senior bureaucrats, from academic thought leaders to business leaders… and this type of representation should be representative of all major geographic entities throughout Canada. The public sector applications are endless : opening public policy debate throughout the vast expanse of Canada’s territory, program funding discussions occurring with constituents and stakeholders from all walks of life, communicating government priorities, etc., all these activities could be a part of an opening up of Canadian government, and this, at all levels of government.

5. A mobile government is an agile government

Why is social media different? Because unlike the web, it has leveraged the potential of mobility, almost from its arrival, whether it be Facebook and Myspace, social media has meant mobile media. Reading any analytical study on this topic, one will notice that the mobility domain is one of the fastest growing industry in the world. Mobile devices are even found in shanty towns in South Africa or in extreme poverty environments in Bangladesh; mobile devices are everywhere regardless of social status, and equally present are Facebookers, Twitters, etc. Essentially, social media has expanded its reach to include all levels of society by leveraging mobile platforms throughout the world.

How is it then, that mobile social media penetration in a public sector environment is proving so difficult? An interesting question, especially when one considers the key concepts developed by social media platforms around instant alerts, integration of typical communication medias such as email into their platforms, leveraging text capabilities, etc. , all of these elements lead to a social media experience that is both work enabling and increasingly mobile in nature. Consequently, because our society is increasingly mobile itself, social media is becoming increasingly class agnostic, which in return should only increase the efficiency of open government; but why the slow adoption? Is the reason funding, policy related or simply that social media has no such place in a public sector setting?

Essentially, governments should be developing their mobility strategies of tomorrow, today. Imagine, reducing costs by eliminating the need for landlines… if you have a mobile device, why would you even need a landline? Imagine a world where government employees can collaborate on projects from home or at the airport or the cottage… do I really need to be at my desk utilizing costly office space? A place where Canadians can access government online services through their iphones or blackberries?

The needs for ‘heavier’ infrastructures and physically needing to be at one’s desk are disappearing… yet government seems to be the last place where some of these new realities are embedding themselves, even though this is exactly the space where the most returns could be obtained : a program employee being able to answer citizen related texts or wiki posts via his blackberry while on the bus ride home, email notifications about new and emerging discussion threads from employees’ personal iphones, etc. If true cost savings are to occur, we need to investigate these new ways of doing business, and do this soon… using a ‘let’s just do it’ approach.