To download the first part of this series, follow this link.

Summary

The landscape of government communications is changing. This puts pressure on governments to communicate more effectively online. However, government organizations face many challenges when it comes to communicating with citizens.

In order to take advantage of the potential benefits of digital communications and channel shift, governments need proactive and integrated public communication strategies, including:

• Allowing citizens to customize their information so it is easier to consume and manage.
• Delivering information in a timely manner to encourage trust and confidence in government.
• Giving citizens the opportunity to share, discuss and collaborate where possible.

Get this white paper to learn how government can not only save money but also cultivate better relationships with citizens as a result of more frequent, consistent and measurable communication.

I would love to know your thoughts and find out how you are dealing with channel shift within your agency. What are the challenges? What is the best way to do channel shift? Are there simple solutions that we’re not thinking of?

I hope you find this white paper useful.

Liz

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Digital engagement tip: Make it simpler, where and when it’s possible.

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I think the highlight of my day today was the news that Samsung Pays $1B to Apple with 30 Truck Loads of 5 Cent Coins.

But alas, it was just a hoax. You can read all about it here. Hey, we can all dare to dream, right?

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It enables software reuse and this resonates with what the government is trying to do with its ICT strategy, as I previously discussed in my post yesterday “How government can spend less money on IT investments“.

The Impact of Open Source License in Government

• It enables innovation.

It gives you flexibility to change, to integrate, to cut code if you wanted to.

• Enables low cost to entry. The price is zero or low – where you can access the software for free.

Yes, you can download and try open source softwares for free, but it is also important to be honest that this may not be the case all the time. With open source softwares, you would have to pay for support if you want it, due to the nature of how open source software companies work. Their business model makes profit by providing you with enterprise level support.

But its still very important to know that you can access the software for free because it allows you to experiment, to play, that means that the cost of experimenting and possibly even failing is low. And you still have the open source software community there to help you.

• The cost of experimenting and prototyping shouldn’t be high.
• Because open source is open in its nature, there’s rarely a monopoly on the software.

There’s little commercial incentive to hide stuff about it, unlike proprietary softwares.

1. You CAN understand where the bugs are.
2. You CAN understand where the security vulnerabilities are.

There’s no real genuine disadvantage to doing that.

There’s some contrast there with some commercial organizations. They possibly want their software to appear in the best light and that doesn’t sit well with how we manage our systems these days. Everything is in real-time, and that includes problems and solutions. If we do not know where something has gone wrong, how can we know how to fix it? We need that transparency.

• Another effect of not having a monopoly on the supply chain is that you have competition. 

And this means, you have choice.  Customers will have competing suppliers that keeps them honest and competitive.

• Open source grows in a evolutionary way making it easier for innovation to happen

There is a momentum behind it. People want to fix bugs so people will be able to use it. In contrast to proprietary softwares that sometimes are developed for marketing purposes, that may succumb to what is popular in the market and not what is needed by your organization. You’re not paying for marketing features or unwanted add-ons that may look good but not necessary for what you need. That’s the eye-opening contrast between the two worlds of closed innovation and an open one.

• There will be spread in the market that we work with in government IT.

That means we have to lower the barrier to entry to those who we haven’t been so opened to, SMEs, volunteers, civic minded developers, other sectors.

The bottom line is, it is easier to work with open source than not.

Open Source in Social Networking

Because my roots is social media, I couldn’t sign off without giving a little something back to it. So here is a list of open source social networking softwares that you could download for free and implement in your organization to encourage collaboration and use of social media internally.

1. Buddy Press - Social networking, in a box. Everything you need to start your own self-hosted and WordPress-powered social network!
2. Dolphin - open-source, downloadable, scalable, customizable, full-featured, independent and free software package for building social networks, dating sites and niche communities. Dolphin is the only “all-in-one” bundle of PHP community scripts, Flash plugins, Adobe AIR and Mobile apps that provide full control, freedom and flexibility.
3. Lovd By Less - Built with Ruby on Rails, Lovd is an open source social networking platform that has everything you need to build your very own online community. The world doesn’t need another MySpace or Facebook, but many niche sites can benefit from increased social interaction. Less Everything built the app for their clients, but released it to the public for free hoping others would benefit from it as well.
4. Anahitapolis - a developer friendly and open source social networking platform and framework that helps you build the foundations of your apps and services in less time using a correct nodes-graphs-storiesarchitecture.
5. Elgg - an award-winning social networking engine, delivering the building blocks that enable businesses, schools, universities and associations to create their own fully-featured social networks and applications
6. Xoops - XOOPS is a web application platform written in PHP for the MySQL database. Its object orientation makes it an ideal tool for developing small or large community websites, intra company and corporate portals, weblogs and much more.
7. Mahara  - Mahara is a stand-alone system that can be integrated into a wider virtual learning framework. Unlike some pundits, we believe the Learning Management System remains a highly useful application for delivering learning. We also believe the overall environment can be enhanced and complemented by a learner-centred personal learning environment such as Mahara.

Hope you’ve found this useful.

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This post will delve into how government can spend less money on IT investments using open source. But before we go deep into that, let’s have a look at something all of us are familiar with, the government’s ICT strategy.

Government ICT Strategy 2011

The recent government ICT strategy published in 2011 highlights the need to better control ICT expenditure. But this does not necessarily mean spending less. It also means spending better, more intelligently. 

Some of the ICT strategy 2011 themes are: -

• We should be looking at whether we could be better use cloud approaches to using IT,
• Consolidating networks,
• Can we make better use of SMEs,
• We should relook at our engagement with our suppliers. Do we have enough of a mix? Do we have enough of a spread?
• Open source
• Open Standards

Getting the best value from the IT market

If government really wants to get the best value from the IT market, we really need to start to understand open source, open architecture and open standards.  We often associate ‘value’ with how much we’re getting for the amount of money we spend, and with our government forced to do more with less, its never been a better time for open source to stand up and get noticed.

So why are some government departments still not considering open source in these hard financial times? Just to show you how ‘detached’ government is from open source is, just take a look at these headlines over the years.

• Why can’t local government and open source be friends?
• Open source still feared within Whitehall, says IT architect
• Bristol’s voyage to open source software hits choppy waters
• Local government ‘detached’ from open source benefits

To help things out a bit, I thought I’d present some open source facts and figures.

Open Source facts and figures

Did you know that: -

• Wikipedia, Google, Facebook, New York Stock Exchange, London Stock Exchange, Citrix, Apple, Juniper, IronPort, Yahoo, NetApp, VMWare, YouTube, Flickr, Amazon, Whitehouse.gov, CIA/FBI.gov, CERN (16000 VMs), US DoD, Guardian, Disney, Cisco, French Air Force, US Navy are all powered by open source
• Approximately 80% of internet websites are powered by open source
• 90% of “Top 500 Supercomputers” run open source
• Open Source is already being used in the UK public sector – Government Digital Service (GDS), The Met Office, Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC), The National Archives (TNA) and many more
• Open source is used in space by NASA (1997)
• Open source is used in your android phone and your Mac

 Open source barriers in government

According to Tariq Rashid (Cabinet Office’s Tech Lead Architect) barriers to open Source in government is “not understanding what open Source is.”

So, what is open source?

• Its just software like any other: There are more similarities to open and closed software’s than not.
• FREEDOM to use it in any way you want: There are differences and that is in their license.  The license is not a unit of purchase, like closed software’s. It’s a term of user and it guarantees certain freedoms.  And if you’re experienced in public sector IT, you’ll know that some of the licenses and contracts that we engage in don’t have that freedom. We wave a flag around every year around reuse, but we are sometimes constrained in our ability to do that because of the licenses and contracts we’ve engaged in.
• FREEDOM to redistribute: If we’ve improved it, if we’ve built solutions around its much easier to share and reuse those. And we want to. We don’t want to keep reinventing the wheel. We don’t want to pay twice or more for the same thing and effort.
• FREEDOM to access the code and modify it: This means that if you want to, you can access and modify the code.  You don’t have to be a developer, a coder, an expert in PHP, Perl and C++ to use open source. If you don’t want to, you don’t have to. You can take it packaged, wrapped in a service and import it to perform specific tasks just like any other software.  But if you want to, you can change it, adjust it and integrate it with other stuff. So it’s a choice, its not a barrier.
• Obligations to share your improvements and changes: In most government use cases, it isn’t triggered. There is a fear sometimes in government, that if we use open source, we’ve exposed ourselves.  We’ll have to open up all of our systems. That isn’t the case.

So, I hope this blog post has somewhat helped for people to understand what open source is and start to consider it as a solution and start saving tax payers money.

Open source technologies

Some of the open source technologies I’ve personally worked with and could give you some pointers on or put you in touch with some of the people I know there, are listed below.

• Alfresco – ECM, Mobile, Cloud, CMS
• eXo Platform - Enterprise-scale portal, CMS
• RedHat - operating system platforms, middleware, applications, management products, and support, training, and consulting services.
• Liferay – Enterprise portal solution
• Ephesoft- Intelligent Document Capture / Scanning system

Other recommended reading on open source for government: -

• Why government needs open source by Dries Buytaert
• Demand a more open-source government: Beth Noveck at TEDGlobal 2012
• Local government IT: the open source dilemma

Hope you’ve found this useful.

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But just in case you still need the printed words, take a look here.

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When it comes to social media guidelines, I think it can be both easy and time consuming to write a bunch of rules and restrictions and expect people to follow them. But the truth is, guidelines are basically just rules of what you expect people to do or not to do. Its rare that in reality that those guidelines are read or clear in guiding someone’s actions online, outside the office and on their own electronic devices.

This is influenced by how people use social media in their personal lives and no training is provided to understand where the boundaries are when posting on personal social media networks. When sharing a piece of personal information (or how we might interpret as feelings and thoughts) becomes second nature, therefore people often think they can use their common sense. But often enough, in social media, common sense is NOT common! (a quote by James Coltham -@prettysimple) .

Sometimes these guidelines become blurry and somewhat irrelevant because when you post your feelings and thoughts, you thought you were only sharing your personal experiences. And how can talking about yourself harm others, right?

Wrong!

The good, the bad and the ugly and the possibly misunderstood

The video above is a great example on how good intentions when shared online can have devastating effects for individuals involved.  It shows 2 different scenarios where we could possibly learn a thing or two about social media guidelines and safeguarding citizen’s information online, especially when the usage of social media is outside of the workplace, where some social media guideline fail to address and policies are less clear and the potential inappropriate use of social media is greatly increased.  It also demonstrates when social media is used inappropriately and how no one, whether old or young and experienced or not, can make a lapse judgement when using social media.

Nursing Case Study

• Scenario 1
• Scenario 2

Some useful tips shared in this video

• Don’t assume all posts, even if private, are accessible by only the intended recipient.
• Don’t assume that deleted content is no longer accessible.
• It’s not acceptable to refer to a patient in a post, even if not revealing their name.
• Never take photos of videos of patients or people under your care on personal devices.
• Always follow employer policies for using media devices for treatment purposes.
• Carefully consider the full implications of all posts about patients / clients / citizens on any website, including those sponsored by your organization.
• It may at times appropriate to express empathy and support for patients / clients / citizens on any website, but they must be careful not to disclose private information.

Better safe than sorry

Social media is a conversation that can start offline and carry on online. Make sure you define those spaces and think before posting anything related to work online.

Here’s a useful social media guideline poster for civil servants designed by Helpful Technology that might help you define these parameters. But bare in mind, all services are different. Some deal with more private data than others. Also, you need to take into consideration the technology or platform that you are using. What parameters do they have set to protect your organization and any private data that may be at risk? Have you developed any necessary precautions or guidelines to support any technology shortfalls when protecting personal data?

I’m a Civil Servant: Should I Post This Update?

Try to stay ahead and think of possible scenarios and discuss the possible actions, then ensure your social media guidelines reflect them.

I’d love to hear possible scenarios like this in your services. Its not that we want to encourage this behaviour, but I think its good to have examples ‘closer to home’, as its a much better way of educating people on their actions online rather than producing a document that might or might not be read and only referred to when punishing someone who has already done wrong.

Hope this was useful.

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And while we were there, Ben Proctor (@likeaword) said “A pen is just a portable printer, right?” in a conversation and I thought I just had to share with other digital natives. What do you think?

How ‘digital’ are you? Vote!

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post’s poll.

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