With approximately $71 billion in information technology funding in the fiscal 2009 federal budget, is it any surprise that three of the largest U.S. government agencies receiving those funds and who are responsible for widespread institutional knowledge are also active participants in social networking?
The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration maintains a YouTube channel, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has 20 Twitter feeds, and the Environmental Protection Agency blogs nearly every day.
USA.gov, alone, lists 33 active federal agency blogs. I’m sure there are more that the General Services Administration doesn’t know about, let alone how many of the 540 members of the 110th Congress blog, tweet, or share videos. Or the judiciary.
I don’t know how many domains the government owns but one only needs to visit the 5-year-old regulations.gov clearinghouse for 160 federal agencies, over a million rules and adjudications, and 600,000 public comments, to grasp the interconnectedness of government, business, and we the people.
“This is a prime example of collaborative technology bringing transparency to government process,” says Karen Evans, administrator of e-government and information technology for the U.S. Office of Management and Budget.
I wrote yesterday about National Defense University research fellow Mark Drapeau who guest blogged on Mashable.com with an insider’s view of the intersection of government and social media.
Hidden in a comment (on August 5 at 10:03 a.m.) during which he responded to someone, Drapeau wrote, “…there is little across-agency coordination of Web 2.0 efforts and technologies.”
I’m not surprised about the interagency coordination bit, given President Bush’s establishment of a White House Office of Global Communications in January 2003 that was criticized two years later by the General Accountability Office in an April 2005 report that recommended development of a national communications strategy in an effort to enable interagency coordination.
The GAO met with staff of numerous executive agencies and determined the White House not only failed to “facilitate the development of strategic guidance to direct and coordinate interagency activities” but devolved into “tactical public affairs coordination.”
But a coordinated lack of web technologies? I doubted that.
I turned to Google.
Have you heard of CENDI, a government acronym for Commerce, Energy, NASA, and Defense Information, an interagency working group of scientific and technical information managers initially formed in the 1960s and now representing 13 federal agencies?
The participating parties are:
- Defense Technical Information Center (Department of Defense)
- Office of Research and Development & Office of Environmental Information (Environmental Protection Agency)
- Government Printing Office
- Library of Congress
- NASA Scientific and Technical Information Program
- National Agricultural Library (Department of Agriculture)
- National Archives and Records Administration
- National Library of Education (Department of Education)
- National Library of Medicine (Department of Health and Human Services)
- National Science Foundation
- National Technical Information Service (Department of Commerce)
- Office of Scientific and Technical Information (Department of Energy)
- USGS/Biological Resources Discipline (Department of Interior)
You can see the heavy library angle. I wondered if CENDI met to discuss social networking from the perspective of consortiums and knowledge sharing, and happily found meeting minutes on their website from January 2008 featuring Library of Congress project manager Michelle Springer and EPA chief information officer Molly O’Neill.
Springer talked about the importance for government to embrace blogging, social bookmarking, podcasts, wikis, video sharing, and other applications that shift from one-way broadcasting to a reciprocal conversation.
“Mixing authoritative information with user-generated content is a challenge for federal agencies; they must enhance access to the agency and its information without diluting the integrity, authority, and the public’s confidence in what is being disseminated,” said Springer.
O’Neill agreed, adding that nothing will happen overnight as “there are issues of FOIA, data quality, intellectual property, branding, and maintaining the authoritative nature of government information.”
The above line could just as easy define businesses involved in wanting the so-called cheaper, faster, and more reliable Enterprise 2.0 model but fearing a lack of control.
In the meeting minutes, O’Neill references the Collaboration Project, powered by the National Academy of Public Administration in partnership with Don Tapscott (here’s a NPR interview from May on building an online democracy) which aims to leverage social media technologies among government institutions. (Anyone can join in on the dialogue, as I created a free account last night.)
Echoing sentiments of the NAPA and Drapeau about a lack of coordinating technologies, Springer elaborated:
Agencies are very careful to say that these are experiments and prototypes. There are no standards across agencies. One of the reasons for getting involved in this type of media is to make sure that you have a presence in communities that are interested in the type of content that the agency has to offer and to control and brand the presentation of that content since users may take content from your site and place them in these spaces anyway.
Seven months ago, Springer said USA.gov listed 16 active blogs. When I spoke to GSA representative Danielle M. yesterday, I saw 33 blogs. Wow! I await the blog count next January.
While I previously noted problems with Drapeau’s first post, I am impressed with his follow-up on a theory of social government.
“For the government,” he writes, “Whether interested in recruiting employees, talking to subject-matter experts, or collecting counter-terrorism intelligence, using rich media to participate in discussions on the Internet and get people to engage with their brand will be increasingly important.”
I await his third installment.
Are you following along? What do you think of government using technology?
Should more money be funded for IT initiatives? If so, how would you re-allocate the budget?
Related posts:
- Delivering the Loop of Government
- Implementing Transparency at the FDA
- Hire a Federal Manager or Use the Web?
Comments:
Ari Herzog is an online media strategist and Newburyport City Councilor-Elect.
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I think we need to stop spending on “trying to keep up”, and rather invest in some “bleeding edge” technology. Look at Japan, they are technologically way ahead of us…from their cell network to their TVs to their cars…. We need to invest in “what’s next” and not “what’s now”. That new knowlege will spur new industry, and in turn, more jobs. Just my opinion of course.
Hi Caedan, you have great ideas for someone not even 10! And you’re right, to the extent I’ll have a post later today and some of the “what’s next” technologies the government is already investing in. If only business can follow government’s lead.
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