Social Media, Transparency & Obama
It’s worth keeping an eye on what US President Barack Obama is doing with his social media now that he’s taken office. While there’s been a lot of talk about whether he can keep his blackberry and how his team will cope with an all-windows environment, ultimately that’s just a surface issue. Social media works on Windows too, and the US president will likely have more important things to worry about than his Twitter addiction. It’s likely that he’ll be able to reach a compromise on the blackberry – the two main concerns are unvetted comments going out live and the issue of Presidential records – neither of which are insurmountable odds.
Rather the important things to note will be how he deals with governmental transparency, access to information and licence and technological interoperability.
The announcement that Change.gov is now under a Creative Commons licence is certainly a good sign though Change.gov is for the moment not part of the government. Whether that open licensing can be extended to whitehouse.gov and other government websites remains to be seen. Certainly government information can be made available under CC licences; some valuable work in this field has been done in Queensland with the GILF project.
Some commentators have ragged on Obama for not having commenting functionality on his site but this misses the broader point. Comments on large scale sites like Change.gov don’t really fulfil much of a collaborative function, rather they tend to be drive-by abuse and little in the way of discussion. The knee-jerk response to apply comments to all social media misses the larger question of what constitutes useful interaction; websites with useful comment sections tend to be smaller, with dedicated communities of commentors who share a common political background. The comment threads on News.com.au are a good example of what happens when large groups of commentors with no shared political understanding interact: noise. Comments are enabled on the change.gov site and they’re about as useful as you’d expect.
What will be more interesting will be Obama’s commitment to transparency and the tools to make it work. The memorandum on FOI is a great start:
The Freedom of Information Act should be administered with a clear presumption: In the face of doubt, openness prevails. The Government should not keep information confidential merely because public officials might be embarrassed by disclosure, because errors and failures might be revealed, or because of speculative or abstract fears. Nondisclosure should never be based on an effort to protect the personal interests of Government officials at the expense of those they are supposed to serve. In responding to requests under the FOIA, executive branch agencies (agencies) should act promptly and in a spirit of cooperation, recognizing that such agencies are servants of the public.
Availability of important information is the difference between uniformed and informed argument. Enabling comments without enabling access to information is pointless. As long as the information is made available under non-restrictive license (or none) and is made available with a useful API, there should be some interesting OpenAustralia style government transparency projects coming up.
“rather they tend to be drive-by abuse and little in the way of discussion.” says who?? *puzzled* lots of massively large sites have great discussions and community. Have a chat with CNET, ZDnet etc – they have blogs and forums with huge readership and good times.
Once we start buying into this “oh turn comments off, it’s just a debacle” philosophy, we’ll never get collaboration on line, just a bunch of websites with no discussions. And frankly, it’s not for you to judge whether our comments are useful or just noise.
Future of Melbourne wiki and New Zealand Police Act wiki both point to the way forward for meta government. The head of the European Union and the President of Iran both blog with comments on. If one of the Axis of Evil (no, not Europe
) can blog with comments, why can’t the self proclaimed leader of the Free World?
I know it’s tempting to say there is no way to manage behaviours online, but that’s simply not true. Incidentally my point was that Obama doesn’t HAVE to have comments on, but there is no difference between a website vs a blog with no comments. Sure, turn comments off, but don’t call it an engagement strategy with the voters. Call it a press release website, which is what it is.
Comments on Government Sites {seesmic_video:{“url_thumbnail”:{“value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/DhcVdRdCqm_th1.jpg”}”title”:{“value”:”Comments on Government Sites ”}”videoUri”:{“value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/4Y75L8xwZE”}}}
that’s my point Laurel: CNET, Zdnet etc are focused communities with shared values where conversation is actually useful. That shared understanding simply isn’t there in the American polity.
Europe is a different polity to the USA, there’s more of a focus on shared decision making and process oriented politics, that simply doesn’t exist in the USA. The USA has one of the most divided political systems in existence, and the textual/network analysis that’s been done on American political blogs confirms this (sorry, don’t have link to hand, will find it this afternoon) – there’s no interaction, simply shouting across the barricades.
(The textual/network analysis of political blogs is the centre of my phd research – what i’ve found so far tends to support this.)
The New Zealand Police Wiki act experiment actually supports my point, in that they made sure all the necessary information for informed discussion was available prior to opening it up for public debate.
And frankly, it’s not for you to judge whether our comments are useful or just noise.
If you want to have an effective polity and want social media to be useful, then we need people actually studying what’s going on and trying to improve it. Social media is as much in need of criticism, review and development as broadcast media is.
NO better illustration of how Governments are struggling with blogs…
http://snurl.com/cyyb7