Web 2.0 in Government
Social Networking is coming to a government near you and promises to change everything. Building online communities of people who share similar interests and are interesting in interacting is a perfect fit for government. After all, governments by definition are a community of people with similar interests that need to interact. The reason for government is to do things collectively that you can't do by your self.
I just came from attending the Governing conference session titled "Governing in a Wiki World: How Web 2.0 is Changing the Way Government Does Business". I think anyone attending would agree with me that it will change how governments interact with their citizen for the better. The session did a good job of explaining what some of the jargon was all about. The video wikis in plain english does an excellent job of explaining to executives what a wiki is and why it might be useful in your organization. The entire Commoncraft site is a treasure chest of free videos that explain social networking in very simple terms, for free! They also offer high resolution versions that you can license to use inside your organization.
So what would you use a wiki for? Well internally basically everything that needs to be written by more than one person or anything you want input on. Which in government is just about everything. A procedure manual, disaster plan, job description, agenda for a meeting, software documentation, the list has no end. By securing the wiki and inviting only those who need to participate you can control the content. For example you might want to limit editing access to only the HR department for the human resources manual and allow everybody to read, and limit access to only the executive team when discussing strategic initiatives (or maybe you want to open it to the entire organization and get some real feedback!). The efficiency gains over emailing a document back and forth and reconciling versions later is substantial
Externally you may want to share draft documents with special interest groups and ask them to edit it and make whatever changes they feel necessary. One site that everybody works on or multiple sites of the same document for the various interest groups and compare the differences later. I guarantee you that you will get input and ideas that staff would have never thought of and get to a finish product faster than ever before.
Did I mention if you own SharePoint you can start using Wiki's today will all the security and controls you need! (for Free!)
Social networking is much more than just wiki's and almost all of the technologies have applicability in government for engaging both employees and citizens to change government for the better. They are coming and faster than you might think!
