There’s a bit of a tech craziness is going around Washington DC
lately with lots of twitter chatter about Government 2.0. It’s no
secret that this new administration is looking for answers in these
challenging times, but I have some concern that signal-to-noise ratio is
going to cause some trouble.
In the last two years, Washington DC has taken center stage
regarding technology adoption across institutions at both local and
national levels. Seems barely a few years ago that tech hackers never
really saw much value in hanging out with PR and marketing people. We
had to be forced to go network like it was a chore and play nice with
everyone we met. Now-a-days, it seems like we’re all tripping over
each other to exchange business cards, write on each others blogs and
trying to score tickets the latest tech conferences. Why is that?
Lots of reasons. GenXers are now in positions of influence and
arguably more willing to adopt new technologies. We have a new and
more open administration in the White House that is mandating more
transparency. And we have a bad economy that once again is attracting
big business to Washington DC area...oh and one more… we also have… Twitter.
To some, it’s life changing. To others, it’s entertaining at best,
and to a great majority of the rest of the world… it doesn’t register
on their radar… at all.
So it can be rather amusing to me (rolling my eyes), when I hear of
yet another social media “expert” that has suddenly have transformed
into newest and greatest Government 2.0 expert. It’s as if overnight
throngs of “twitterati” gurus have suddenly have become the new and
improved “goverati”. I can see the late night infomercial… hey you
too can join this bandwagon! For a nominal fee, all you have to do is
sign up for a twitter account and visit the best website in the whole
world, goverati.com (yes they have a website).
Aside from that silliness, all anyone should really care about is
whether Twitter as a tool can it be used to improve how government does
its day to day business. And that’s the secert behind it. It’s just
a tool folks, there’s not fancy or special about it.
The magic behind Twitter is its simplicity. Its a personal, simple
broadcasting tool and it allows individuals to send out non-intrusive
messages. These messages can be tips, links to other resources,
musings, events your attending or frankly anything you care enough to
write in 140 characters. It would be great to see more heads of our
federal agencies use it to broadcast what’s going on inside our
government from their perspective.
Unlike Facebook and other walled social networks, whereby you have
to be “friended” by someone to be allowed to look at each others
profiles… anyone can follow anyone on Twitter. The potential for
individuals and businesses is that by using this tool, everyone can get
a glimpse as to what others are thinking about or doing, across
institutional boundaries.
In other words, for government users, it can bring ideas from
outside to these tremendous bureaucracies as well as allow the public
to get a better glimpse of the people behind the scenes, invariably
helping humanize that “big and scary” government that likes to spend
our tax dollars.
Having grown up inside the beltway, I have witnessed, through my
personal network of friends that work for USA, just how much work goes
into managing this empire of a country from within these massive
institutions. The REAL experts are the thousands of public servants
that have staked their careers in keeping this country running.
So do twitterati gurus have all the answers for government? Heck no, of course not.
Should government agencies look to apply the right tools for the right solutions?
Of course! That’s what they’ve always been striving for, or didn’t you know that?
Well… could government then benefit from a little more personable,
self-promotion in the form a tool like Twitter? Yes. They certainly
could.
Eventually the hype will die down and Twitter will just be what is…
yet another tool to help us all stay connected with each other.
BY Ernesto Gluecksmann
Principal Consultant
Web Technology Management Services
Infamia Global Technologies
Originally published at webconsultingdc.com.
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