Over the past several months we have used this space to share our thoughts on Gov 2.0 either by profiling the many initiatives NRCan is involved in or by taking you along on a personal rant just to make a point - which some might argue is the sole purpose of blogging.  In the spirit of collaboration, “we” (representing corporate) extended an invitation to a few business leaders at NRCan who are actively using collaborative technologies to engage and interact within their communities.

The following blog posting by Jennifer Hollington, a Director General in the Canadian Forest Service (CFS) and one of NRCan’s most prolific bloggers, elegantly demonstrates how she champions Gov 2.0 at NRCan.  This post first appeared in Café Jen (an NRCan blog) in February 2009.

A few months back, our ADM mentioned an idea for tapping into the knowledge of retired employees. He called it “Friends of the CFS”. It would be a network of retired staff, particularly scientists, whom current staff could contact with questions.

This brought to mind a passage from Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything:

[I]f you’re a retired, unemployed, or aspiring chemist, Procter & Gamble needs your help. The pace of innovation has doubled in its industry in the past five years alone, and now its army of 7,500 researchers is no longer enough to sustain its lead. Rather than hire more researchers, CEO A.G. Lafley instructed business unit leaders to source 50 percent of their new product and service ideas from outside the company. Now you can work for P&G without being on their payroll. Just register on the InnoCentive network where you and ninety thousand other scientists around the world can help solve tough R&D problems for a cash reward. InnoCentive is only one of many revolutionary marketplaces for ideas, inventions, and uniquely qualified minds that can unlock new value in their markets.

Even if government contracting rules got in the way of the full implementation of P&G’s crowd sourcing approach in the public service, the idea of being able to take advantage of the skills, knowledge and experience of retired scientists and professionals is appealing.

So, as I sat typing up this post, I wondered whether I could find examples of how the GC is reaching out beyond its borders to engage bright minds in addressing their challenges. I’m not talking public opinion research, in which the government seeks input on a particular topic for a certain period of time. I’m talking about an ongoing relationship with the general public or a particular constituency for the purpose of collaboration.

I found quite a few examples of how various government departments and agencies are using Web 2.0 technologies, such as Twitter, RSS feeds, Facebook, YouTube and Flickr. You can find a list of them at the Government 2.0 Best Practices Wiki, started by consultant Mike Kujawaski. Though the technologies are new and their application in the Canadian government even newer, this wasn’t what I was looking for. I wanted to find stories where government was interacting with people outside their organization.

The most impressive example I found of citizen engagement was Governor General Michaëlle Jean’s Citizen Voices Web site, featuring a blog (bloGG), including video installments (videobloGGs), and a forum.  Some blog entries carry her by-line while others are written by staff in her Office. On her September 3, 2008 post A New Season on Citizen Voices; she ends with this statement:

“To understand, we must listen. To act, we must include.”
The first comment to this post was made on September 30. The next one came almost 2 months later, on December 1 and began:

“This may not be the most appropriate means by which to contact you about our current parliamentary debacle. However, it is a means of contact - I apologize if it is totally inappropriate.”

What follows is quite amazing: more than 100 comments in the span of one week, centered on the political issues of proroguing Parliament.

Equally amazing is the Forums section of the site, enabling citizens to launch their own debates, rather than comment in response to an official post. Within a category called the Citizens Forum on the political situation, one person started a post entitled: “Devastated by your decision”, saying: “I had faith in our Governor General to see the wider view of these political matters. I am devastated by the decision to suspend parliament.” You have to admire the Governor General for embracing true citizen engagement, even when that engagement involves public criticism of her on her own site.

The Privacy Commissioner of Canada has a public blog, written by a group of staffers in the Office of the Privacy Commissioner. The blog’s mission is to increase contact between the Office and Canadians interested in privacy issues. Readers can make comments on blogs posts, which — based on my quick review of the site — generates responses from the staffers or other readers.

The Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety, a GC crown corporation, set up Workscape, a discussion board on occupational health and safety. To date, almost 450 members have created just over 200 posts.

Some sites to support discussions among public servants are unofficial, residing outside the GC domain. One such site is Common Look and Feel .ca. Its stated purpose is “a community space where those who work for and on GC Web projects can come together to share, learn and create.” The site is designed to help members learn how to incorporate new technologies and social media into their sites, while complying with GC Web standards.

But after several hours of searching, I couldn’t find much more than this. Which leads me to my question: are you aware of examples within the GC where departments have reached out to former employees or the public to tap into their knowledge?

I recently presented on NRCan’s wiki experience at a conference. It went well, but it was challenging. The attendees were just beginning to come to grips with technologies that NRcan has been ’storming and forming..then storming some more’ around for two years. So I ended up getting questions like ’What did you base you business case on?’ ‘What were the identified business needs you were trying to address?’ etc.

What makes these questions challenging to answer is that with the initial pathfinder rollout of these tools at NRCan we didn’t have an explicit business case nor did we have a detailed project plan. What we did have though, were strategic and high level views that we needed to collaborate and share our information and knowledge more effectively. Senior managers were becoming frustrated with information they knew existed but could not easily find. NRCan employees were working in their sector silos with no way of sharing their information let alone collaborating to create it. With these strategic business needs in mind (more of a vision really), we engaged a community of “frustrated but willing to experiment with new tools” employees and we launched the tools and watched what happened.

This approach did generate discussion as it always does alternatively being called “ technology push” or putting the cart before the horse. Our response to this was, as always focused on a two key aspects. The first is that the social media tools we are looking at for the most part allow us to do this. They are simple and viral and they cost very little to implement so the traditional requirements for upfront business needs definition to control risk and guide investment are not as important. In fact, in my opinion it would take more time to write a proposal and business case than to just put something out there and see what happens.

More importantly though social media are fundamentally new technologies and the best way to understand their business value is to get them into the hands of the users as soon as possible and have them tell you through the use of the tools. To a large degree this is what has happened with the NRCan Wiki. Most of the innovative uses of the wiki have come from the employees experimenting, coming up with good ideas and having the freedom to implement them. They have not come from a clearly articulated business needs analysis or business case done in advance.

In fact, determining business needs in advance of having a tool in hand may actually lead to status quo approaches and tools. There is the famous Henry Ford saying about the introduction of the Model T I first heard at an nGenera conference last year. The quote goes something like “if I had asked people what they wanted in a car they would have said faster horses”. We social media folks usually deploy this quote to highlight the weakness of focusing too much on responding to people’s perceptions of their existing business needs as a determinant of technology solution since people invariably define their needs in terms of improving the way they are already doing things, not how things could be done in a fundamentally new way.

This is not to say that business cases and business needs analysis are not necessary or valuable. In fact we DID do a business case for collaborative technologies and we HAVE analyzed the business uses of our wiki and other tools. The big difference here is that we did it at the same time we launched pathfinder versions of the tools. And, the primary source of information on business need and value for the business case was what emerged and continues to emerge out of the tools. So to put it into a few phrases we knew what basic IM issues we needed to address, we got going with the tools then trusted to the wisdom of our users to more clearly define the business need - then we completed our paperwork.  

Now that we have the internal NRCan Resource Wiki hitting its stride, a growing and active blog culture, and a vibrant video community of practice, where does NRCan go from here?  Do we add new technologies such as professional networking in order to provide even more ways for employees to collaborate and share knowledge?  Do we explore the potential of crowd sourcing to tap into the wisdom of our community?   Do we begin to turn outwards in order to engage citizens and clients in new ways?

The answer is all of the above.  However, we believe that underlying the implementation of collaborative technologies is a foundational need to integrate them with our traditional tools in order to create a comprehensive knowledge base for the whole department.  In other words, our priority these days is to mashup all our sources of knowledge. 

The reasons for this are obvious.  Collaborative technologies are increasingly being used by employees to discuss issues and share ideas, to provide status updates on key files, and to capture considerations and decisions around our projects and initiatives.  At the same time we continue to create studies, reports and datasets using our traditional tools such as word processing and document management systems and databases.  By bringing together new and traditional sources via an integrated knowledge base we can create synergies and provide a more comprehensive and complete picture of the work we do. 

Imagine being able to easily access all the sources of information on ‘climate change’ at NRCan.  You would find a wiki page describing the topic and current status of activities, scientific and policy studies present and past, blog discussions on the latest policy developments, videos of our scientists talking about their findings and a network of expertise with responsibilities in this area, all of this and more from a single point of access. This is what we are aiming for by mashing it all up.

 In order to achieve this objective NRCan has articulated two basic principles: 

1) Information and knowledge should be openly available.  That means putting information and knowledge into shared spaces so that they can be accessed by everyone;

 2) A common and basic level of information classification should be applied to all our sources of knowledge to enable better integration and improve findability.

Most importantly, we are also rolling out an enterprise search engine to search across all these knowledge sources.  Currently it searches wikis, blogs, discussion forums, the intranet and our departmental phone directory.  Over the next few months we will extend the search to content and document management spaces, our growing catalogue of videos and eventually to our legacy shared drives.  All of this taken together will lay the foundation for NRCan to make its information and knowledge broadly accessible, first to our employees, but potential beyond to other government departments and to Canadian citizens.   Now that’s a mashup!  

Is Web 2.0 changing the way government organizations are working together internally, as organizations?  Is Web 2.0 causing us to think more about the contribution we, as employees, can make to our organizations?  Is Web 2.0 breaking down some traditional silos and stimulating us to work outside of typical work structures?  In my opinion, the answers are obvious:  Yes!  Yes!  And yes!

Web 2.0 has started a revolution….an evolution and a new way of working together, sharing information, contributing knowledge and respecting the active participation of a wide range of users.  This is the genesis of Government 2.0. 

At Natural Resources Canada, we are in the midst of such a revolution.   We began with some simple exploration into a few ‘collaborative tools’.  But, we quickly discovered the power of collaboration and Web 2.0 technology.  From then on we were hooked and we were excited.  As we shared our stories with others, we discovered that the excitement was contagious…not because we simply talked about it or gave demos, but because this technology is immediate and accessible. 

When we started our journey into Gov 2.0, we knew we wanted to try out a lot of ‘really cool stuff’.  We also knew we needed to demonstrate value to NRCan employees.  Our focus was on two major deliverables:  a departmental Wiki and a Business Case for implementing Collaborative Technology.  Our Wiki 101 pilot, (101 users in 101 days) was established to assess how a wiki could enable the creation of rich, integrated content amongst government employees (after all, a Wiki is only as good as the content it holds).  We also wanted to build some support and identify lead users.  The pilot exceeded our expectations.  Employees were asking to take part, they wanted to help each other out, and communities of employees with common interests were emerging.

In October, 2007 we launched our Wiki to all the employees of NRCan and three months later, the Business Case was approved.  Since then, our wiki continues to evolve and grow and, we continue to introduce additional tools. 

Has the transition to Gov 2.0 at NRCan been easy?  No.  It has been hard work.  Has it been worthwhile?  Absolutely!  Our bold approach has enabled renewal in the department.   It is supporting new ways of working and increasing the level of collaborating amongst employees.  It is changing the culture of work at NRCan. 

We were thrilled to be invited as contributors to this blog to stimulate dialogue on topics such as culture change, social technologies, innovative approaches, GC collaboration, rules of engagement and many others.  Through this dialogue we will exchange ideas, thoughts and opinions; share best practices; and talk about the challenges, risks and our changing role.  Most importantly, we will learn from each other in an open and collaborative environment.  In the spirit of Government 2.0, let’s start collaborating…….