Are you ready to leave the sidelines and try Web 2.0 communication and collaboration tools? If so, you might still find it difficult to know where to start. Which tools do you use? Who at the agency should be involved?
Those are important questions, said Frank DiGiamarino, vice president of strategic initiatives at the National Academy of Public Administration. But before answering them, he said, keep in mind three suggestions.
1. Have a notion. Just because it seems like everyone else is doing it is not a valid reason to plunge into Web 2.0. “You need to focus on the business problem and the specific community you need to engage to solve that problem,” DiGiamarino said. If a blog or a wiki is the best mechanism to get input or start a discussion, then go for it.
2. Just do it. Staging a test project is often a prudent choice when dealing with traditional technology projects, but that’s not so when it comes to many Web 2.0 applications. “You can’t pilot an interactive Web community,” DiGiamarino said. “Once it’s out there and it gets going, you’ll find it hard to take it away.” The better choice is to start with a smaller, lower-profile project but one that’s nevertheless the real deal.
3. Tap your organization’s inner Web 2.0. Think you don’t have in-house Web 2.0 experts? Of course you do. They are the department managers and frontline workers who wrestle with your organization’s toughest challenges every day, DiGiamarino said. That is what makes their participation in interactive Web applications so valuable. “Creating new silos to manage this process is a big mistake,” he said.
— John Zyskowski
A Transportation Security Administration security officer who contributes regularly to an agency blog recently spotted some rumblings in cyberspace about TSA denying travel to owners of certain types of Apple computers.
The traveler wrote about the encounter on his personal blog. According to his account, he tried to bring his new MacBook Air laptop PC through airport security but missed the flight after TSA officers pulled the super-thin computer aside for a closer look. The traveler, a software programmer named Michael Nygard, speculated that the laptop’s solid-state storage perplexed TSA officers, who didn’t see the expected hard drive on an X-ray of the machine.
The traveler didn’t criticize TSA, but his post set off a storm of comments from others in the blogosphere about the agency’s ineffectiveness and its officers’ incompetence, plus a few conspiracy theories about government fear-mongering thrown in.
Strong reactions to government policies are not new, but the rise of Internet-based public forums, such as blogs and social networks, means that such sentiments can spread quickly and dominate online conversations.
An agency in this situation has two choices: It can sit back in silence and absorb the blows or it can fight back.
TSA officials have chosen to fight back and — like their colleagues at a growing number of government agencies — have dipped into the toolbox of Web 2.0 applications, a collective term for the blogs, wikis, audio and video podcasts, virtual worlds, and social-networking sites that people use to communicate and collaborate online.
The TSA blog’s response to the MacBook Air posting and the ensuing online discussion helped the agency counter the negativity and use the situation as a teachable moment for what the agency does and why.
“One of our goals seven years after 9/11 — when the public has gotten a little complacent — is to try and get the public back on our side and engaged,” said Ellen Howe, assistant administrator of strategic communications and public affairs at TSA. “The blog is a way to admit that we’re not perfect and acknowledge that there is frustration out there. It was like a valve opening up when we gave people this forum to talk back to us and tell us about their experiences and thoughts.”
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