Here in Canada, we’re undergoing a routine review of all our major government-wide administrative policies - and that includes the Government Communications Policy.

Earlier this week, the Auditor General of Canada was appearing before a Standing Committee of Parliament, speaking to MPs about her department’s spending plans for the upcoming year.

An opposition Member of Parliament, David Christopherson, asked the Auditor General about the rumoured revisions to the Communications Policy. As one news report characterized their exchange:

“… [The Auditor General] … revealed this week that the government is drafting a new policy that could require departments to vet their communications plans through the Privy Council Office, the bureaucratic wing of the Prime Minister’s Office.

“There’s a draft communication policy going around that would have all communication strategies, all communications, everything, go through Privy Council Office,” Fraser told a Commons committee on Tuesday. “Well, I can tell you there is no way that my press releases about my report are going to go to Privy Council Office or our communications strategies are going to be vetted by Privy Council Office.”…” (Toronto Star)

You see, the Auditor General is an Officer of Parliament - her and five other Officers* are considered independent of the Government of the day.

The exchange got a little news coverage.

All thanks to the liveblogging of Macleans journalist Kady O’Malley.

I mean, who liveblogs parliamentary committee meetings? A lot of them?

Despite the attention paid to the exchange, it’s important to note a separate paragraph from the Toronto Star piece cited above:

“… Treasury Board President Vic Toews wrote the six officers of Parliament in March saying he wants to “preserve and strengthen” their independence. “I fully accept that due to the unique statutory mandates of agents of Parliament, not all Treasury Board instruments can be applied to these offices in exactly the same manner as they would to other government institutions,” he wrote…”

*and I happen to work at one of those Offices, in the interest of full disclosure. At the moment, our communications materials do not go to PCO for review or approval. And we don’t expect that to change in the future.

This seems to be a new development. The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, a standalone Crown Corporation wholly owned by the federal government, is advertising for a temporary media relations officer on Craigslist.

Well, the corporation isn’t. They’ve hired Quantum staffing to run the competition, and the consultant has posted the job description and requirements on the Ottawa Craigslist site.

It’s a mid-level position requiring experience in media relations and having acted as an organizational spokesperson.  Before you start snickering, we haven’t seen the same housing crunch and mortgage crisis  as the Americans.

Interesting, considering the job isn’t on the CMHC job site and is buried behind drop down menus on Quantum’s site. I can’t find the position on jobs.gc.ca, the public site intended to make federal government positions available to the general public.

Then again, the Craigslist posting was two weeks ago - maybe the position has been filled and Quantum is just slow in covering their tracks.

Thanks Daphne!

and I’m jealous of all the other Brits, heading off to their facilitation get-togethers, their community building projects and their semi-secretive social media initiatives for government.

Look at this recent twitter from Simon:

@Canuckflack Wait til you see next week. We’re going mashup crazy.

Meanwhile, he’s also pointing to experiments like the twittering of the next diplomatic mission to Washington. This from the official statement from 10 Downing Street:

“…Gordon Brown will visit the US next week, his second trip to the country as Prime Minister.

The Downing Street website will run a live microsite including images, rolling updates and a Twitter feed throughout the PM’s stay from 16 - 19 April. Log on from Wednesday to follow the PM’s activities.

Mr Brown is expected to visit Boston, the United Nations in New York and meet President Bush at the White House in Washington. His meetings will focus on the global economy and other areas of mutual bilateral interest.

Gordon Brown’s first trip to the US as PM saw him travel to Camp David in July last year.

Seeing as I AM a social media nerd, or a real politics nerd, I would ask:

• does this mean there’s a communications assistant responsible for the twitter feed?
• what sort of vetting process is there for twitter messages? On the fly?
• is the content going to concentrate on policy announcements? Any chance of side remarks about the entrees at the state dinner? Snide remarks about the little kids handing over flowers at events?
• what sort of twitter app are they going to use? Is it on a BlackBerry, Treo or other PDA?

Technorati Tags: government communications, United Kingdom, Gordon Brown, twitter, public diplomacy

Had an interesting meeting with a fellow Director of Communications yesterday - but this guy was from the Government of New Zealand. It’s always useful to compare how the communications function is managed in sister parliamentary systems - and often somewhat startling that the function can evolve in very different ways.

Midway through our conversation, I noticed that his Moleskine notebook had an embossed insignia on the back. Turns out Air New Zealand gives out custom notebooks to frequent fliers of a sort.

Sniff.

Earlier this week, I had the opportunity to measure the success of my career against that of some former colleagues.

Boy, was I shocked.

The key, you see, is that these former colleagues had moved into a provincial Crown Agency - a government organization distanced from direct political control and managed according to market forces.

It’s fairly easy to measure the success of your career relative to other government communications officers. Your roles and responsibilities are standardized. Titles are mirrored across organizations. We all share a common pay scale.

For the less intuitive, the government’s formulaic job posters provide a codex to deciphering all this information.

As a result, a simple business card can provide all the intelligence you need to judge your competitors, your colleagues, and the also-rans.

My former colleagues, however, had decided (separately) some years ago to test the waters by working in the private sector.

They eventually moved to the same Crown Agency.

On Tuesday, the provincial government released the names, titles and salaries of every employee of a government department, organization and Crown Agency making more than $100k a year. It’s required by sunshine legislation designed to make the government more transparent.

There, on the list, was one colleague, a Director of Communications, making over $160k. The other? A VP of regulatory affairs making over $300k.

The first makes more than almost any communicator working for the federal government.

The second makes more than almost every Deputy Minister.

I guess I should re-evaluate my reliance on a steady pension and a good health plan.

Well, I’ve finished work on it. A handy little guide for exploring the world of social media and building support for social media in a large organization.

(I admit it, I wrote the guide for government communicators, but thought that targeting it at large organizations would make it more useful to more people.)

I think the advice in this 23 page guide to secretly implementing social media in organizations could be equally useful for any government employee looking to try out new technologies - I’m pretty certain on that point, since I’m a government employee in real life.

You can find the guide at this link, and please feel free to share it with your friends, colleagues and bosses.

Here’s an excerpt, from the introduction:

How do you do it? How do you bring a spirit of innovation and experimentation to the communications shop of a large organization?

I’ve worked in a large organization – the government – for the last ten years. You can find bright, creative and resourceful people around every corner, in every department.

During the course of their careers, many of these people have thought of a move that could improve their work or their environment.

From experience, we all know that small changes in process or presentation are easily won. After all, it’s just another line on an approval sheet, or a tweak on the website.

Large organizations can also be convinced to launch a large-scale overhaul of their systems – whether it’s a supply chain, assembly process or online order system.

But it’s a real pain to get them to rethink their relationship with humans outside the security fence. After all, our customer service reps seem to be doing a good job, right? That sales force really does have a handle on the needs of the community, doesn’t it?

In speaking to hundreds of workers and managers for large organizations (government and private sector), I’ve been asked the same questions, over and over:

• How do you convince your boss to even experiment with social media?

• Doesn’t it mean a lot of extra work?

• Isn’t this sort of stuff blocked by our organizational policies?

This Secret Underground Guide to Social Media for Organizations is meant to help you answer some of those questions.

Technorati Tags: guide to social media, instruction, dummies guide, introduction, organizations, government

Michael Bryant, Ontario’s Minister of Aboriginal Affairs, has posted a series of 5 videos on a new YouTube channel, all dealing with a contentious aboriginal land claim in Caledonia, Ontario.

Over the past twenty years (or so), there have been several dramatic and sometimes violent confrontations over aboriginal land claims in Quebec and Ontario.

These videos seem to be an attempt to demonstrate the Government of Ontario’s continuing engagement in the dispute in Caledonia - which has been ongoing for two years.

While the medium encourages unrehearsed and somewhat rough production values, these videos may just be too informal for such a serious subject.

They are shot in a casual and unscripted style, with WAY TOO MANY references to the Tim Horton’s donut chain. In fact, it has become trite for politicians to use the local Tim Horton’s as the universal “man on the street” interview booth.

That said, the opposition parties’ criticism of the tactic seems blind to the opportunities presented by new media channels like YouTube and other video sharing sites.

“… “It shows complete lack of leadership on the part of [Ontario’s] McGuinty government,” said [New Democratic Party leader] Mr. Hampton, adding Mr. Bryant’s video campaign just makes a joke out of a serious situation.

“YouTube is not the place to communicate either policy or to communicate government messages. But this seems to be the kind of three-ring circus that Dalton McGuinty is running now.” (Canadian Press)

Over at our Department of Defense, they’ve been flipping around a powerpoint called “Killing with Keyboards” - which makes a very strong point that employees in defense areas can undermine national security simply by being too careless with their work documents and divulging too much about themselves in online communities - even communities ostensibly dedicated to professional development.

The powerpoint was prepared by a private sector contractor, and has been distributed to other groups as well.

The message, driven home with blunt force, is that your frequent but minor indiscretions online can accumulate into quite a database about your personal preferences (food, team - simple stuff like that), which can then be exploited by enemy agents and put your fellow citizens at risk.

Which is why it’s slightly disturbing that the powerpoint’s metadata itself provides enough information that, with a few Google searches, we can pinpoint the author, a gentleman who works here.

At what appears to be the Boeing Electronic Systems and Missile Defense Research and Technology Center.

 E-government gets a broad strokes treatment from the Economist in a special report:  The road to e-democracy. This from the  leader:

“… But shame and beauty contests are still weak forces in the public sector. Failure in bureaucracy means not bankruptcy but writing self-justifying memos, and at worst a transfer elsewhere. Bureaucrats plead that just a bit more time and money will fix the clunky monsters they have created …

That reflects another problem. In the private sector, tight budgets for information technology spark innovation. But bureaucrats are suckers for overpriced, overpromised and overengineered systems. The contrast is all the sharper given some of the successes shown by those using open-source software: the District of Columbia, for example, has junked its servers and proprietary software in favour of the standard package of applications offered and hosted by Google …”

Well, there are plenty of reasons why a government shouldn’t simply transfer all of its IT needs to one supplier - especially one as demonized as Google - but at least D.C. is trying.

Politics is retail, so they say. That’s politics at the municipal, state, provincial and federal levels, and it means paying attention to the details that occupy the everyday life of your citizens.

So why are private sector companies and web 2.0 firms doing such a better job at informing citizens about the nuts and bolts of their civic government and their neighbourhood lives?

Initiatives like EveryBlock, which accumulates government data, news sources, local blogs, flickr feeds and other sources to develop a ground-level view of your life, are not comprehensive but they are extraordinarily useful.

Most importantly, they take many data points and relate them to you and your location - instead of initiatives like DirectGov, which assume that everyone filters their information and their requests through an intricate knowledge of government hierarchy and bureaucracy.

Filmoculous has an interview with Adrian Holovaty, one of the developers behind EveryBlock, and he discusses the problems he’s had getting data from government agencies:

“… On a completely different note, it’s been a challenge to acquire data from governments. We (namely Dan, our People Person) have been working since July to request formal data feeds from various agencies, and we’ve run into many roadblocks there, from the political to the technical. We expected that, of course, but the expectation doesn’t make it any less of a challenge …”

“… I’d estimate we only have about 10% of the data we’d like in the long term, for Chicago, New York and San Francisco. As we expected, some government agencies haven’t been able to provide us their public data, and the reasons vary. A common reason is a lack of resources. In other cases, we’ve simply been stymied by bureaucracy. But we’re keeping at it …”

Part of the problem seems to be consistency of data collection, classification and distribution. Every city naturally has a separately developed civic infrastructure and information management system. Local politicians have also made different choices when it comes to making information publicly available. For example:

“… We publish building permits in San Francisco and New York, but not in Chicago. We publish filming locations in Chicago, but not in New York or San Francisco. We publish zoning agenda items in San Francisco, but not in the other two cities ..”

I don’t know if, as governments, we will ever find away around political considerations and historic quirks in how we collect, process and make available data. But we can start by thinking of responding to the individual need, rather than framing all our efforts by first identifying our institutional preferences and historic practices - and then deciding what we would like to provide.