Last week NRCan gave a presentation to the Conference Board of Canada on the role of social media in risk management. The presentation took the usual form: we discussed our experiences in managing the risk of social media implementation, focused on how to address quality of content on wikis, and how to guide and inform employees on the acceptable use of new and open technologies.

What was different about this particular presentation was the inclusion of a few slides on how social media could be used to contribute to – and in fact reinforce – risk management activities. We had an audience interested in all aspects of risk management, and as good presenters we looked at our own NRCan Wiki, our blogs and other tools to find good examples to illustrate how social media could help reduce risks – or at least serve as a way to identify risks earlier.

Joe the security guy
Take one of our IT security guys for example – let’s call him Joe . He’s a well-respected and knowledgeable NRCan employee, whose work concerns protecting corporate systems and ensuring that we’re kept well informed on any potential risks. Joe wrote a blog entry about the dangers of Twitter. It was a good, well thought out entry that generated a discussion amongst employees. Some employees were concerned that this attention to potential risk could slow things down, and the issue was discussed from a diverse variety of perspectives.

How does this support better risk management? The first thing to note is that Joe posted his blog entry voluntarily – not because he was asked or because there had been a problem, but because he saw something on the horizon and took the initiative to address it by starting a discussion with his fellow employees. This discussion took place before the Department had officially identified Twitter as a tool being used by employees, and long before it had indentified the need to provide relevant policies and guidelines.

Now that the need has arisen, the policy does not need to start from square one. There is already a base of research and opinion to be found in the discussion sparked by Joe’s blog entry. Joe has created a living repository for information and knowledge that could play a valuable role in building a risk management approach, a repository fuelled by the experiences of NRCan employees. Now policies can be built not only on theoretical implementation plans, but also on how real employees have chosen to make use of social media tools.

This is the power of social media: to build on the wisdom of crowds. In the social media forum, the latest concepts are discussed by people that have an interest in the topic, no matter whether they have an official role in the file or not. With social media, a body of valuable knowledge and experience can grow organically, fuelled by the passion and interest of real people, including those who may not have been reached through traditional lines of communication.

We must not only recognize the value but also make use of the discussions and analyses that are generated through the knowledge skunkworks of social media. Taking this inclusive and proactive approach will help us anticipate new trends and build corporate knowledge, not only for managing risk but also for any other subject matter or mandate.

Getting people to use Web 2.0 takes more than just having a great new tool – the buzz around social media is key to its success. And while access to GCpedia may be limited to public servants, discussion of it certainly is not. Most of the buzz around GCpedia is positive, but more importantly, a slice of the discussion offers TBS and users some very concrete ways to improve the Wiki in terms of what went right and what needs to change in the deployment of future Web 2.0 tools. That’s why the public service needs to pay attention to what people are saying about GCpedia – especially outside of its walls.

Here are the top 5 things to know about how GCpedia is discussed on the web:

1- Wikipedia’s take on its GC cousin – Oddly enough, the Wikipedia article on GCpedia is an orphan, as “few or no articles link to it.” It is also tagged as a stub – there isn’t much about GCpedia on its closest public analogue. As is Wikipedia’s aim, the language about GCpedia is neutral – so, one has to wonder why TBS hasn’t taken advantage of what is potentially a good, and at least a cheap and easy opportunity to tout the goals of GCpedia. (Who cares about GCpedia outside of the public service? Taxpayers, quite possibly,)

2 – GCpedia will save the public service!  – David Eaves makes the point that GCpedia is an excellent way to capture all of the tacit knowledge that will walk out the door when senior management  retires in droves. Used properly, GCpedia could serve as a wealth of go-to information for those who will advance to mid-level and senior positions. Government departments and agencies need to be willing to endure the temporary pain of dedicating staff to interviewing almost-retirees and posting the findings to GCpedia, to avoid a longer term consequence: losing the collective intelligence getting ready to exit the public service.

3 – GCpedia remains the domain of GCgeeks? – Peter Smith is worried about how well GCpedia lends itself to use by newbies. The level of technical knowledge necessary to using GCpedia is one of the reasons Eaves cites for why soon-to-be-retirees aren’t likely to post what they know themselves. Smith is right – the interface is confusing, and could easily intimidate anyone with techno-trepidation. What is the solution? One is likely more training than what is largely available thus far, especially if TBS is sold on the MediaWiki platform.

4 – Lots of talk on Twitter – Interestingly enough, many public servants have turned to Twitter to talk about GCpedia. This isn’t surprising, just important. Remember that Twitter may well be the easiest real-time resource for anyone who wants to take the pulse of the Web-2.0-crowd’s feeling about GCpedia.

5 – Mostly love, but some concerns, too – Overall, the talk about GCpedia is overwhelmingly positive. And where challenges are discussed on the Web, so are solutions, which gives GCpedia’s owners and users an opportunity to engage in in-depth and strategic discussions about the role of this communication channel. That discussion is vital if GCpedia is going to live up to its potential.

While not the mainstream, despite what advocates would like to think, web2.0 technologies are occupying more and more of government workers’ attention!  The potential of these tools to help in communicating and sharing knowledge with colleagues, and in engaging partners and citizens across the firewall has gotten a large number of us enthusiastic and passionate about their use, and has prompted some executives to exclaim “there is no going back”.   At the same time there is an emerging question as to whether the knowledge created in these technologies is valued and captured as a government asset.

Knowledge management and Web2.0

Knowledge management types are generally interested in social media, seeing them and often describing them as knowledge management tools.  There are a few good reasons for this. 

First of all Web2.0 tools are open and allow for broad participation and contribution.   Government departments can tap into the collective knowledge and intelligence of their workers on a much larger scale and share knowledge, whether its forestry scientists mashing up maps to plot boreal forest research or GCpedia users ‘crowdsourcing’  an issue of common interest. 

Second, and I think more fundamentally Web2.0 tools aim at capturing thoughts, considerations, decisions and points of view as they evolve and change.  A good example is a wiki page on a new policy that not only contains the policy itself but also the discussion page which records the background discussion and exchange of ideas.  Extend this out and there may be Twitter feeds and blogs that provide ongoing input and commentary on the same policy.    

Taken collectively not only do you have the final result but also a rich source of information containing considerations, discussion, debate and decision, in other words the stuff of knowledge management.  Contrast that with traditional office tools that are focused on the creation of final documents and not on valuing the in-between or ‘transitory’ versions.  While knowledge managers may be one of the biggest beneficiaries of Web2.0 tools there is a significant challenge:

There is a little recognition given to the value of web2.0-created information and knowledge - few recognize, for instance, that a Twitter feed or a blog post would be considered a knowledge resource that needs to be preserved and managed as would any other record or document.  There are cases already of groups and individuals using the new tools and approaches to create communities and generate knowledge only at the end of the process to find that the results have not be considered as assets to be integrated into the government knowledge and information repositories.

Instances particularly worth noting are those where tools have been used to conduct conferences and internal consultations and at the end of the process it is not clear that the information and knowledge has been preserved.  In fact, in a few cases where external services have been used, rights to access this information may have been lost when the service is no longer under license.

While the government is taking steps to recognize the value of knowledge created through Web2.0 such as new policy instruments like the Government of Canada’s Directive on Recordkeeping, there is mindset that has to change.  What we should do first and foremost is recognize that we ARE creating valuable knowledge resources via these technologies and take steps to ensure that the resources be preserved as part of the government of Canada’s historical record.    

Late Tuesday afternoon, we launched NRTube which is NRCan’s internal, YouTube-like video sharing tool.  Consistent with our suite of tools, NRTube is open source with a simple interface.

The tool was quietly announced via an email from the CIO to all employees.  There was no great fanfare.  No balloons, no confetti, no big splashy posters.  Just a short message inviting employees to test out NRTube by using it as much as possible and posting any performance or other issues to a feedback page on our Wiki. 

What resulted in the 24 hours following the launch was inspiring.

1. At 8:28 on Wednesday morning I received an email message from an NRCan scientist with the subject line:  NRTube - no contest!  His message read:  I posted two videos at around 16:30 last night. Currently sitting at #1 and #2 most watched overall. #3 is so far behind we can’t see it in our rear-view mirror.
2. At 10:43 am I received a telephone call from a 2.0 colleague at NRCan absolutely giddy.    “Have you seen the stats for NRTube?”, he exclaimed.  “Check out the number of watched videos!”  At that time the number was 913.  It was pretty cool to watch the number increase as we continued our conversation and by the time I hung up the receiver about 15 minutes later, the number of watched videos had climbed to 1,191. 
3. At 1:58 I made a phone call to a Director in our Sydney, BC office with whom I am coordinating a Web 2.0 workshop for the Fall.  He sheepishly admitted he has spent about an hour of his morning watching some NRCan videos on NRTube and proceeded to tell me about his favourite ones.  

Wow!  On all three counts I was thrilled. 

Regarding the scientist, this is the same scientist who was luke-warm to NRCan’s suite of collaboration tools back in April when I first contacted him to set up a meeting.  When we finally met a few weeks ago to talk about how he and his group could begin incorporating some of the tools, I suggested he use NRTube, once it was released, to help him manage his volume of video.  This suggestion was met with indifference and a comment about not seeing the value of sharing his material with an internal audience.   And now, he posted 2 videos to NRTube within 15 minutes of its launch and by the next morning his two videos were, by far, the most viewed videos out of 21 videos posted. 

His initial reluctance to use the tools for internal knowledge creation and sharing is in keeping with most from the science community.  Scientists are quite adept at collaborating and sharing their knowledge – just not so much outside their community of peers.  But now, I suspect another Web 2.0 champion is born!

At the time of writing this blog posting, NRTube had 36 videos that had been viewed over 1,650 times.  I think I am catching my colleague’s giddiness.  The fact that employees are using NRTube is great.  That they are watching videos about NRCan science – amazing images of explosives testing, a succinct history of the Geological Survey of Canada, instructional videos on how to make our homes more energy efficient and more – is fantastic!  These videos are imparting knowledge. 

All of a sudden I feel that employees at NRCan are really beginning to see the value of Web 2.0 in the workplace.  There has always been a very active community of Web 2.0 champions, but it seems that NRTube might just be the tipping point that sees Web 2.0 tools become so integrated that we forget what it was like not to have them. 

Put out the tools and let the community decide how to use them.  Darn right!  For me, it’s the small victories that are the sweetest – one employee at a time! 

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.  

You will likely be familiar with e-Obama. That’s the cute-if-awkward (lacks alliteration and sibilance) handle sometimes used to describe the tech-savvy new president of the United (kind of) States. Barrack Obama’s victories in last year’s Democratic primary and in the presidential election campaign that followed were widely considered a tech triumph, in that they relied on all manner of social media tools and techniques.

And Obama has in fact been true to that school, launching a serious (and busy) public policy wiki, adding a Chief Technology Officer to the mix at the top, ensuring (against vociferous objection) that he himself keeps plugged into cyberspace via Blackberry, and generally turning the Oval Office into a kind of cybersuite.

It’s all been great for the evangels of e-government everywhere, whether considered as service delivery or as the more exotic digital democracy. There’s many a slip, though, and one of them could materialize next month – specifically around May 21. That’s the deadline for a promised directive outlining just what agencies will do to make government more transparent, participatory and collaborative. As proposals go, it’s what you could call breathtaking in its audacity.

Obama’s assignment to his technology types was one of the first to materialize the day after his Jan. 20 inauguration and could well have been overlooked in the crush of copy. It’s on the record though, clearly enough to give government watchdogs one more thing to watch for. You could watch too.

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……. 

Turns out that you don’t have enough to worry about. A recent British report is reminding public sector tech types of challenges beyond privacy and security and such detritus as coding,

Like – managing expectations.

Researchers with the Hansard Society, a research forum which promotes public involvement in politics, wants government to ensure that expectations of online government aren’t set too high.

“Online deliberations offer a promise of transparency; unclear communication from engagement teams is often read by participants as obfuscation,” the Hansard study warns.

“Web sites that combine careful planning and appropriate marketing with the development of reflexive engagement strategies have a greater chance of success. In such cases, policy leads have benefited from user input with government departments seeing enhanced public trust and receiving positive feedback from stakeholders. In turn, end users report more faith in the political process and better understanding of government.”

The report, part of the society’s Digital Dialogues review, says people visit the Digital Dialogues web site for any number of reasons – “from general interest in online engagement to a strong interest in the policy matters being discussed,” according to a summary in CIO magazine.

“Many had previously not engaged in political processes; even when they had, most were initially critical of government,” the report says. “Such distrust was overcome when moderators facilitated open discussion and provided information to Web site users.

“When government departments were reticent, they courted controversy and disengagement became inevitable. Some Web sites failed to gain traction (measured through few repeat visits) because users did not believe that anyone was listening or responding to their perspectives; in such cases, departments were paralyzed by a sense of ‘risk’ and failed to harness the range of engagement opportunities at their disposal — responding only on topics deemed ‘safe’.”

In one sense, there’s nothing new in any of that. It amounts, however, to a reminder for CIOs and their nearest and dearest: Don’t get so caught up in tweaking the latest back-end wiki that you overlook the front end of the operation as a whole. The digital democracy side of Government 2.0 may indeed be lagging as service delivery is ever more automated. But be warned: It hasn’t been written off entirely.

You will no doubt be familiar with the breathless tone to much popular discussion of various social media tools. They’re everything from “transformational” to “revolutionary” and beyond, everywhere from Big Business to Big Government..

There is of course something to that. Wikis are routinely fuelling all manner of leading-edge tech development in most orders of government, and communications managers everywhere are trying to figure out to use these applications to engage their various communities.

Still, a little perspective is in order. Facebook, for example – the best known of today’s social networking brands – has clear roots in Usenet, which attracted hundreds of thousands to cyberspace before flame wars scorched that good earth.

As for the popular deployment of wiki projects, U.S. writer J. Davidson Frame, an astute writer on technology in a public sector setting, finds origins everywhere from ancient Athens to the Oxford English Dictionary. (It was propelled by Wikipedia-like contributions from thousands of volunteers – 3.5 million contributions, as a matter of fact).

Frame notes those and other parallels for the U.S. newsletter NextGov and then takes it up a notch:

“When thinking about introducing social networking concepts into government, perhaps the most interesting question is: How far can we go in this direction? Obviously, we face Constitutional constraints on how we govern the USA. But this shouldn’t stop us from raising intriguing thought questions: Can self-regulating social networks replace Congress and the President? In creating regulations, does it make sense to develop them in the same way that Wikipedia entries are created? Should policies be created by communities of interest comprised of people who are most heavily affected by them?

“Given the growing force of social networks, it is time to start – in the words of Herman Kahn – thinking about the unthinkable.”

Transformational indeed, you could say.