The change has been gradual, but the results have been dramatic.  Over the last twenty years – since the spread of the Internet and the dawn of what has come to be known as the Information Age – the relationship between governments and citizens has changed forever.   Citizens are no longer content to be passive recipients of government services, paying their taxes and expressing their pleasure or displeasure only at the ballot box.  Armed with vast amounts of information and near-instantaneous communications, citizens are seeking not only better service from government, but service that is tailored to their specific needs.  

The early stages of the Information Age – evidenced by personal computers, the Internet and mobile communications – brought us to this point.  Now there are signs from around the world that a new phase of the Information Age – featuring new technologies and more innovative uses of older technologies – is upon us, changing not only the way that governments deliver services, but the essential relationship between governments and citizens themselves.

What we are witnessing today is the shift from e-government to e-governance.  New technologies allow governments to deliver services more efficiently, but the change is deeper than that.  These technologies – ranging from social networking to cloud computing – enable governments to seek advice and counsel directly from citizens, to inform and educate them, and to engage them in the design and processes of governance itself.

Accenture has studied this trend in depth, identifying dozens of cases of governments adopting new strategies (and adapting old ones) to better engage the public, deliver more effective public services and involve citizens in their own governance.  At the same time, we have conducted an ongoing international study – the Global Cities Forum – to hear what citizens believe government should be doing to help improve the quality of their lives. 

These studies have led to the development of what we call the Public Service Value Governance Framework, a model of governance that connects people – as citizens, service users and taxpayers – with those whom they elect to lead them. 

The framework is built around four components:

1.      Outcomes – Governments are focusing on improved social and economic conditions for citizens, such as health, learning and safety, and not merely on the amount of services provided or on efficiency.

2.      Balance – Governments must balance choice and flexibility with fairness and common good, addressing gaps between those who are able to take advantage of service improvements and those who are not.

3.      Engagement – Governments are engaging, educating and enrolling citizens as co-producers of public values by seeking their views and helping them make the best use of government resources.

4.      Accountability—Governments must not only be more transparent about their actions and performance, they must provide accessible means for citizens to remedy problems with government and public services.

In our global research, we have identified many examples of governments at all levels – national, state, provincial and local – that are adapting innovative technologies to put this framework in place.  In Canada, for example, to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of public service provision, the Federal Government has launched a government-wide pilot for a new internal collaboration platform called GCpedia, an internal version of the popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia.  The service allows federal employees to post articles as well as comment on and edit articles posted on GCpedia by their peers.  The federal government is using GCpedia to enable informal collaboration between federal employees within and across organizations.  

Tomorrow at GTEC, Greg Parston, the Director of Accenture’s Institute for Public Service Value, will be sharing these research findings on e-Governance. Greg will be speaking on Tuesday October 6^th at 9:15 in Theatre 1.

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.  

Last week I joined 70 of my GC colleagues at the first Web 2.0 Practioners Conference held at the Canada School of Public Service in Ottawa’s lower town. My first impression of this group of attendees was its level of diversity – age, discipline, department, and opinion about Web 2.0. The latter meaning mostly that while the group was generally unanimous in its appreciation of Web 2.0 for government, participants had many differing opinions about how Web 2.0 should be approached in government, what Web 2.0 tools should be introduced to government employees and the public and when these tools should be implemented.

The first in a series of four, this conference was pulled together in a matter of weeks thanks to the efforts of a small team with a big vision. It was promoted to federal public servants by word of mouth and on GCPedia (the GC “Wikipedia-like site designed to increase collaboration and information sharing amongst federal government employees). In fact most every other conference logistic was handled through GCPedia including planning, registration, agenda, table discussions and community development.

This event was also the first one that I attended with a Twitter board displaying the running Twitter commentary from conference participants and their communities. I have tweeted during other events recently and am fairly comfortable – though far from prolific – in the Twittershpere, but, to see the stream of comments in real time was fascinating and it gave me a whole new appreciation for Twitter and the value of broadcasting a message in 140 characters or less.

Within minutes, tweets were coming in from curious readers not in attendance wondering what this event tagged #w2p was about while others were thanking conference participants for the great tweets. That was my “ah ha” moment.

Might be time for a quick Twitorial:

• Twitter: A free, social networking tool allowing users to stay connected with other relevant users.
• Tweets: Individual posts of 140 characters or less responding to the question – “What are you doing?”
• HashTag: Label used to identify a common subject or theme often incorporating the cross hatch (#)
• Twitter Board: Running commentary of users connected by a common subject or theme.

So here we are, about half of us tweeting away; sharing what we are learning with our Twitter communities. In my case, I have 56 people following me, but if you do the math using that relatively low number of followers, the proceedings of the Web 2.0 Practitioners Conference (according to those tweeting) were broadcast to almost 2,000 people. What’s important to note here is that through this simple social networking tool, I and my colleagues were conversing about something we found noteworthy enough to share with others who find us relevant enough to follow. Yes, we were having a conversation – just like we would have had in the good ole’ days at the water cooler, in the elevator, at the coffee shop. Beauty is, the conversation now takes place in real time and with a greater number of people.

The phenomenon of emergent communities of practice at NRCan is one that’s been referenced repeatedly in our blog posts here. At NRCan, it really is fascinating to watch one community after another come to fruition over common interests and to see the energy and giddy enthusiasm of members who have self identified and are passionate about changing the culture of work. Communities of Practice (CoPs) are by no means new, but at NRCan their emergence seems to be directly connected to our Web 2.0 implementation that began almost 2 years ago. It was as if a new order of employee was created revealing wonderfully unexpected skills such as video editing, facilitation, subject classification, photography and countless others as well as, a new way of connecting, learning and sharing.

Some communities quietly meet on a regular basis to share and exchange ideas while others have created a niche market and are actively delivering products and services within the department. One such community is the Video Community of Practice (VCoP). In just over one year, this community has created some 15 videos for use in the department and by building in-house expertise, has reduced the need to outsource this requirement. Granted, some early productions will not be recognized by the Academy of Motion Arts and Sciences anytime soon, but that’s not the point – they meet a need, create an appetite for more video and make video as a knowledge sharing tool more accessible. The same goes for NRCan’s other CoPs – replacing “video” of course with the common element in each of the following:

• Technology Mentors (tech-savvy employees mentoring senior managers in the use of Web 2.0 tools)
• Learning Organization (providing planning, facilitation and training support as well as promoting Learning Organization concepts such as shared vision and values, continuous personal learning and systems thinking)
• Information Management (addressing IM issues through a horizontal approach)
• RADAR (creating weekly NRCan science and policy news aggregator to inform and support decision making)
• Shadow Team (bold, young policy analysts working alongside DM-appointed horizontal task team on NRCan’s international strategy development)

Community and social media blogger, Chris Brogan states in a recent blog post that “Community happens when people feel they’re among like-minded others and when they feel their contributions matter.”

As a member of four of these communities I find this work incredibly rewarding. My network of like-minded colleagues has increased exponentially, I am acquiring new skills and I am sharing my expertise with others. I also have the good fortune of having a boss who “gets it”. But, working as a community in a government context is not always easy. The issues of leadership, ownership, accountability, recognition, permission to participate and workload present huge challenges. Many of us still do this community work off the corner of our desks. Management promotes collective leadership but struggles with it at the same time. Old organizational structures and accountability and compensation frameworks rely on well defined roles and are based on individual contributions.

The question is no longer “should management change” but rather how management must change to fully leverage the opportunities associated with Web 2.0 and new ways of working.

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)

“There is something in the air, and it is nothing less than the digital artefacts of over one billion people and computers networked together collectively producing over 2,000 gigabytes of new information per second. While most of our classrooms were built under the assumption that information is scarce and hard to find, nearly the entire body of human knowledge now flows through and around these rooms in one form or another, ready to be accessed by laptops, cellphones, and iPods. Classrooms built to re-enforce the top-down authoritative knowledge of the teacher are now enveloped by a cloud of ubiquitous digital information where knowledge is made, not found, and authority is continuously negotiated through discussion and participation.”

Michael Wesch, “A Vision of Students Today (and what Teachers Must Do),” Encyclopedia Britannica blog, Oct. 21, 2008

If this is the state of university classrooms today, imagine what the workplace will look like tomorrow?

I came across Michael Wesch on YouTube about 2 years ago while I was researching collaborative technologies online for a presentation I was preparing. It was shortly after we revised our policy on acceptable use of electronic networks at NRCan. The debate about blocking employee access to social media tools like YouTube, FaceBook, Second Life and others was a heated one and pretty much divided right down the centre. I can’t recall what tipped the scales, but suffice it to say, the “nays” squeaked by and NRCan employees were not denied their right to learn, research, collaborate, investigate and network social networking tools. Phew! Without access at work who knows how many hours we’d be spending at home tracking users trends, collecting stats and finding cool videos and images online to embed in presentations or share with each other to fuel innovative thinking.

Many of my colleagues across all levels of government bemoan the fact that they are restricted access to social media tools altogether. In certain management circles I hear terms such as “disruptive”, “time-wasting” and a misuse of government resources – both people time and bandwidth” – used to describe these tools. Since when is learning on the job a waste of time?

I am attending a meeting this week with a community of my GC colleagues to share ideas on how government can effectively use YouTube for public outreach. Only problem is, YouTube cannot be accessed by the host department so we’ll be swapping our video stories via DVDs and memory sticks. Seems to me, universal access to a common platform like YouTube would make meetings like this more efficient and productive.

Are social media tools disrupting the classrooms and workplaces of the nation? According to Wikipedia, a disruptive technology is an innovation that improves a product or service in ways that the market does not expect, typically by being lower priced or designed for a different set of consumers.

In fact, Web 2.0 technologies become disruptive when they are forced into existing infrastructures. It is not until we integrate them into our processes and normalize their use will they truly transform the workplace. The students of Mr. Wesch’s class understand this concept. These students routinely mobilize entire communities in 140 characters or less (thanks to Twitter) while in the class room. They are improving their corners of the world in unexpected ways through innovation and collective decision making.

Is this behaviour too disruptive for government? Do we really want to discourage broad knowledge sharing and community development? Is it too soon for government to open up dialogues, relinquish some control and have a little more faith?

From someone who remembers the early days of the internet and the needless paranoia that ensued in the workplace – I say, open it up. Trust employees. They are already abiding by a code of conduct and working within the confines of policies and guidelines designed to protect them and the information they create.

And those students in Michael Wesch’s class? They are rapidly joining the workforce, and expect to have these tools at their disposal. They are not in the minority. All students graduating this year are not only fluent in these tools but have fully integrated these tools into their lives. They don’t know how to work any other way and the public service needs to be ready for them.

In 2006, it was decided that traditional IM approaches were not working at NRCan. The information explosion was continuing, our information resources were treated as isolated repositories, and most fundamentally there was no broad-based IM culture in the Department. Despite the fact that NRCan had an award-winning IM Awareness program, most employees did not understand. They did not understand the value of IM, nor did they understand its relevance – and what’s more, most employees lacked the competencies to administer the (admittedly complex) set of IM processes. Information Management needed to be rethought, and a new approach needed to be taken.

Beginning with a new vision, NRCan focused its attention on building a single, coherent and integrated knowledge base. More important was establishing a single gateway, through which all information sources could be accessible. From documents to databases and from intranets to blogs, all sites needed to be integrated and made broadly accessible.

Because of their potential to impact the way we capture, share, and manage knowledge, collaborative technologies quickly formed the central pillar of our IM strategy. Employees are motivated to classify and manage their information using these tools, and can do so effectively. This is a dream that seemed unattainable in the world of shared drives.

Faced with the challenge of harmonizing these new systems with our traditional, subject-based methods, NRCan adopted a multi-faceted classification approach. At the heart of this new classification structure is the recognition that the tools have changed. Traditional IM classification methods were trapped in a paper-bound, physical world. With new search engine technologies we could explore simplified approaches that are easier for our communities to use – and easier to use means more readily accepted. Operating on a search engine base makes matters easier. Just look at Google! Social classification systems now motivate more employees to take a role in classifying information, both broadening and diversifying the spectrum of IM. For instance, NRCan’s wiki pages are categorized extensively by NRCan employees, largely because they know that by applying a category to the content they create, they are immediately sharing their information with the whole department. They do not see information categorized and then lost in the deeper levels of a shared drive never to be seen again.

Modernizing records management to inhabit the electronic rather than the paper world has become a key pillar in the new IM. The work around e-records and retention is charting a course away from the paper mountain and towards the true root cause of the department’s information explosion: the electronic mountain. For every paper record created in the last 15 years, there is at least one electronic correlate. At NRCan, this is now taken as a fundamental principle.

Underlying the new world of IM is a fundamental recognition. By empowering our employees through an organizing vision that everyone understands, by simplifying the classification structures and by providing collaborative tools, we are making information and knowledge broadly accessible in shared environments to the whole department. At NRCan, an IM culture is emerging in ways that have not been seen before.

Some of the most interesting challenges facing the Federal Public Service can be found in the growing communities of public servants using external social media tools. You don’t have to look too far to see that public servants are actively using Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter – and not just as private citizens. If you look at any one of these tools, you will find broad and vibrant communities of public servants: citizens debating, discussing and meeting to talk about things they are passionate about – and often it is their work.

On the surface, this social phenomenon offers significant opportunities for government institutions struggling with public service renewal. What better way to harness the passion and inventiveness of employees than to give them the tools and the freedom to engage outside the bureaucratic firewall? And it takes only a small step further to see the deeper benefits, the potential to engage with stakeholders and citizens. Imagine the creation of policies and the design of programs in a world where employees are able to discuss, debate, and capture ideas from thousands or even hundreds of thousands of citizens.

The traditional approach is often unidirectional: good communications plans are designed simply to get the message out. Interaction and input from citizens is limited to the channels of surveys, focus groups or portal Web sites. Focusing on official and unidirectional channels is still effective in many contexts, but how long will this remain the case? In short, will traditional methods be sufficient to engage citizens of the next generation, when already they are furiously debating and discussing issues they care about, on their own terms and using their own tools?

Asking these communities to come to us to provide their input is like asking loud and boisterous partygoers to leave their party and come over to your house for tea. Reception will be much better if you just go over and listen – and ask important questions. The idea of an open government bureaucracy that engages citizens at all levels has some very obvious challenges, such as the impact on traditional decision making, privacy, and accountability. I think that the most important challenge can be found in how the core values of the public servant (neutrality, anonymity, fairness and most importantly supporting elected officials) interact with the values engendered in social media (openness, equality, and community). At one time, the political affiliations and opinions of a public servant were only discussed privately. But in today’s world of YouTube and Twitter, where what was once private is increasingly – and willingly – made public, the idea of anonymity goes out the window.

The bottom line is that public servants are a part of an increasingly interconnected, open and accountable world. And frankly, governments need to develop guidance for them, because public servants have already been using social media for quite some time, trying to make Canada a better place. And we must support them.

Afterthought 

You might be wondering why I am treating the broad use of these tools as a fait accompli. We could simply build internal systems or mandate that public servants don’t use external tools except through very controlled channels. We are already setting up internal tools, and they will have an impact. But I don’t believe they can replace the true value of external systems. Also, employees have great latitude to discuss their work interests as private citizens. In doing so, they are generating a wealth of information and knowledge that could be lost to the organization, if the split between private and public servant personas is institutionalized. Accepting the use of external social media tools embraces a public servant as a whole person, and embraces all they have the power to contribute.

(Thx 2 blog pixies)