Municipalist

Weighing the risks of Web 2.0 use in government

Federal Computer Week empanels a forum to address a big issue: What are the risks of Web 2.0 for government? On the panel: Bev Godwin, who answered some questions from us back in December. The panel was asked to address various comments to an earlier story on government and Web 2.0 use, including:

Do not use Web 2.0 terms, such as blogs, when using these technologies because many of them have become pejorative terms in agencies, and people who are still getting used to the technologies often come with preconceived notions of what they are and what they can do. Instead, it’s better for agencies to simply consider them as tools, just as any other technology tool or utility.

Exactly. We addressed this recently here. One term we are disgusted with these days is "the blogosphere," which has little relevance to the vast majority of people inside and outside of organizations who use blogging, and who have zero interest in becoming part of some juvenile secret club that insists on using techie language, links to each other almost exclusively, and has become every bit the echo chamber that is 'mainstream media' these days.

Sarah Palin's daughter, the mainstream media, and the blogosphere

[See update at end of this post convincingly refuting our entire argument.] Wonder why so many in government and corporate America see blogging as behavior to be loathed, feared, and avoided at all costs? To learn why, consider the Sarah Palin pregnant daughter story.

On "Morning Joe" this morning, NBC's David Gregory informed host Joe Scarborough that Gregory's mother was 18 when he was born. This odd tidbit was dropped into a discussion among several big-time media players about the behavior of the mainstream media and many in the 'blogosphere,' particularly Daily Kos. Kos, and others, pushed for the outing of this story, offering rumors that Palin's baby born a few months ago was in fact her daughter's baby. The same daughter. Who is pregnant now.

Following this?

Those throughout the public sector, the group we are concerned with here at Municipalist, must look at this and wonder: This is what blogging is all about? Slinging around all this paranoia, impossible conspiracy theories, and partisan attacks?

Those outside the groundswell need to be invited on in. Peering through the window, to many it must all look like a giant pie fight. So why bother?

The new creed: We will no longer tout the benefits of joining the 'blogosphere.' There are no answers there, for those seeking serious engagement with constituents, customers, friends or foes. Instead, we say the answer is in fact found in creating a new way of thinking about blogging completely outside that quickly aging construct of so much prattle and poison. We will be pursuing this in the days ahead. Stay tuned.

Update: Turns out I am totally wrong! Mickey Kaus of Slate offers a strong rebuttal [see his Sept. 1 post]:

Note to Cass Sunstein and internet alarmists who argue that the Web results in partisans who listen only to their own facts, reinforcing their extreme opinions, etc.: A Daily Kos blogger is refuting the Kos-fueled Palin-baby rumor with a photo found on right-wing site Free Republic, of all places. Moral: The Web encourages cocooning but (unlike other cocoon-generators like cable TV, or gerrymandered congressional districts) it's also the solvent of cocooning, as a) bloggers actually read the web sites of the other side, in order to attack them; b) bloggers defend themselves against such attacks; and c) the Web makes learning from the other side extremely easy. ... In this case, viciously partisan Kos bloggers seem to have investigated and knocked down a bit of undernews that many of them would have dearly liked to be true. What's wrong with that? As of this writing, it looks like they got to the truth pretty rapidly.

Well, not that rapidly. The point is not how fast the truth was gotten to. The point is that this story -- an utterly impossible tale, by the way -- is actually taken seriously. By adults. That is a concern.

Update II: Michael Calderone from Politico on: Did Kos try to hide the evidence?

Update III: We wrote more about this topic here.

Fear of social media: a teachable moment

Here is Will Richardson, the godfather of blogging in the classroom, on how NOT to show high school students how to protect themselves from online predators in social networking environments. Summation: A cop shows up at an assembly of students and makes a graphic case that a MySpace profile of a student in the audience has too much personal info, and could certainly lead to danger, etc. The student is humiliated in front of her fellow students. Great comments follow Richardson's post.

Examples of "scare-tech" meetings, especially to youth, are ever increasing, it seems. My congressman recently held a "community forum" on the same topic for kids and their parents. I was not present but the fear tactic seems to have been employed there too. The local news media covered it, and no congressman is going to give a hoot about such "issues" unless there are votes to be harvested from seeming caring and in touch.

Quantifying the value to kids of online social environments, when it occurs at all, is often done just as awkwardly. Richardson and a tiny few are great at making the education case, that making use of social media tools can not only be positive for kids, but can actually aid their learning. Parents and communities should seek out the Will Richardsons of the world to show up and talk to them and to their students before calling in the terror team. Education beats scare tech every day.

[Update: One of Richardson's commenters points to this follow-up article on the situation in the Denver Post .]

[We would like to take this moment to point out our blog's K-12 category here. Since the subject Municipalist focuses on is public sector blogging at large -- and not just blogging by those engaged in governance -- then the [public] K-12 world is a fertile locale that we try not ignore. We have found plenty of intriguing big issues to write about involving social media and the education world. One of our favorite posts in the K-12 category is here. We invite ed-tech followers to stop by and check us out.]

'Behold the Commentocracy'

Having interviewed public sector bloggers at many levels of government and ability, we know this: How to handle comments is often their top issue, worry, and fear. Lately, the discussion and media coverage of The Problem That Dare Not Speak Its Name is increasing.

"Behold the Commentocracy, where big ideas and rough remarks sit shoulder to shoulder, altogether transforming the nature of the Web and of journalism," exclaims this important piece in Politico.

We have written before about our ambivalence concerning blog commenting. Andrew Keen, the brilliant if sometimes over-the-top skeptic of the current Age of Web 2.0, and several others, have recently written angry but engaging books bemoaning the unstoppable river of anonymous bile drowning whole corners of the Web. We love skeptics, so we listen, we learn, and we are certainly entertained -- especially by Keen.

The Politico piece includes comments from top bloggers on how this issue is frustrating them as well, including this from Ken Layne, of Wonkette:

“Nobody would tolerate if, at the end of 'Meet the Press,' if a bunch of weirdos stormed the studio and started screaming weird racist stuff,” he says. “They’d call the police.”

Those in government who risk blogging are doubling their risk by inviting comments, unless they monitor them closely, and then soon we will have this question: If your blog is public record, isn't my comment to your blog also public record? If so, why did you not publish it? Any person or persons who spend their lives thinking such thoughts seem to also have extraordinary abilities at finding very determined lawyers, for some reason.

When we find a blog or mainstream media article that includes great reader comments, we find ourselves reading every single one. It can be enveloping. So many insights and so much thoughtful stuff. But the loony, raging, juvenile ranting out there that passes for "comments" is pervasive and a real problem. And it is a bigger problem for those in government.

One public sector blogger interviewed here a few days ago has useful thoughts on this. We will follow this because the answer is elusive.

More on why corporate blogs fail

Among the valuable comments here following the Wall Street Journal's Business Technology blog post on the recent Forrester report on the sorry state of business-to-business blogging:

• I maintain and manage what I’ll call a “pr dispersal site” for a Fortune 500 company, and all efforts to “spice it up” with engaging content and an honest voice have been met with shrieks of terror from PR, marketing, corporate HQ, and the vast sea of go-betweens.
• ... A blog isn’t a pulpit, it’s a conversation. B2B marketers need to step back, understand this newer medium, and craft new strategies for successful implementation. Applying strategies from other media to the blog is like trying to induce a car to go using a buggy whip.
• Successful blogs have three things in common. 1) Personality. 2) They offer information that is valuable and/or entertaining to readers. 3) Time and resources are invested; Postings are not an afterthought. Most corporate blogs have none of the above. Like anything else, you get what you put into it.
• Most corporate blogs are strangled at birth by having to go through the legal department post by post.

Or, there is another explanation, however painful. And that is that blogging for the most part is a Gen. X/Y thing, and as long as the Boomers and their previous-century business practices remain in place, blogs will not have any real impact on how corporations -- and the public sector -- do business.

Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies

Here is a new book government can certainly learn from. In "Groundswell: Winning in a World of Social Media Technologies," Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff describe how to turn a new challenge for business into opportunity. The book has its own blog. From the book's description:

Corporate executives are struggling with a new trend: people using online social technologies (blogs, social networking sites, YouTube, podcasts) to discuss products and companies, write their own news, and find their own deals. This groundswell is global, it is unstoppable, it affects every industry and it is utterly foreign to the powerful companies running things now ...

School board blogger shuts down after teachers' union objects

Drunk teacher in the classroom! Former school board member is an embezzler! Tedious, infantile teachers' union threatens endless, expensive grievance and arbitration procedures! Superintendent and school lawyer fold 'like lawn chairs'!

Wouldn't you read a blog about that stuff? Especially if it was published by a school board member with an inside view and apparently plenty of good sources from the very school district where this stuff was going on?

Municipalist lives for blogs like that. But it's gone, sister! Gone, gone, gone.

The blog in question -- or "message board," as some explanations have described it -- was shut down Dec. 4 by its operator, Dave Ash -- a trustee on the Churchill County, Nevada school board, after he was basically bullied for months by the school district's teachers union, as well as his own school district administration.

Ash will hereafter be known by us as Super Dave, after the fabulously determined stunt man who could survive anything. Super Dave Ash offered as his public explanation that he pulled the plug to save the school district money it would be forced to spend to fend off a threatened grievance procedure from the union, which began objecting at precisely the time a poster on the site revealed that a district teacher was drunk in school.

Local media round-up: December 2007 blog-demise story here.

School board blogger's regular commenter addresses the fear

This comment to a Municipalist post I did this week about the fear of blogging came from someone who says he is a teacher who comments anonymously to KLBoardBuzz, the blog of Don Scott, former school board member in Westchester County, New York. Here is an excerpt to that comment left on this blog:

Fear has a lot to do with what people are willing to blog for the public to see. ... Any teacher who values his/her employment would be wise to not blog or post on a website read by school officials and thanks to Google, any post under a real name can now easily be found.

It is a known fact that some former and current board members read the KLBoardBuzz blog because they are frequent posters. And while the superintendent (nor the recently retired superintendent) has never posted, it would be a safe bet that they read the blog because it would be a disservice to the district if they did not take advantage of this opportunity to learn the thoughts of the people who care a lot about the school district and are willing to take the time to share their thoughts. So I am happy and proud to post on Don's KLBoardBuzz blog, though I feel I must use an alias.

Read the whole thing.

What do public sector bloggers worry about?

Guess!

Check out this comment to the Jan. 3 Q & A with blogging school board member Don Scott:

"As a school board member in a neighboring school district (Harrison, NY) I find Don's posts topical and interesting. I'd be fearful of starting one in Harrison -- because the discourse in my town tends towards the incendiary. Maybe when I'm off the board ..."

Fear. That's a theme heard regularly when Municipalist talks about blogging with those in the public sector. Stay tuned for more of this right here in the months ahead. We are hunting daily for examples of elected, appointed, employed and otherwise public bloggers who have found paths around these fears and are building community and seeing positive impact. And so here's a homework question: Is it necessary for public sector bloggers to be ... fearless?

Elected bloggers: How to overcome the fear?

This is from the first post to Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen's blog, begun in May 2005 with quite a bit of media attention:

I don’t know if this will work. The relative informality and immediacy that makes blogs interesting are at odds with the circumspection and care that a responsible office requires and without which you get your feet tangled up real quick. I’m going to try it for a while, but if it is dull or if the political cost is too great I may need to close up shop at some point in the future. It is really worth giving it a try though.

Well, Gov, you said a mouthfull. The sentence in bold is key. Municipalist also likes " ... or if the political cost is too great ..." Apparently, it is.

As of today, 30 months after it began, total posts to the Phil Blog: seven. The last post of any substance: October 2005. The two posts in 2007 are "remarks" from Bredesen appearances. There is no direct link to the blog anywhere on the governor's Web site, at least none that I could find. What happened?

What he wrote in that first post offers one big clue: Bredesen right away points to the tension between informality/immediacy and circumspection/care. Someone with that much insight and understanding -- of at least one key aspect of what the medium is all about -- you would think would end up being a very good blogger. Maybe it is less than realistic to expect that a governor, of all people, could do this, with any regularity or rhythm or substance beyond the superficial. But this guy nailed one big issue: The fear was present from day one.