A message to the Gov 2.0 Expo and call to action for local government

By
Kristy
– May 24, 2010Posted in: conference, open government, social media

I am extremely jealous of the lucky chaps who get to participate in the Gov 2.0 Expo 2010, co-produced by O’Reilly Media and TechWeb in Washington, D.C. this week. My request for conference organizers and participants is to better understand the challenges facing local government in our adoption of Gov 2.0.

Nearly 800 city and county government webmasters across the country belong to a listserv sponsored by the National Association of Government Webmasters. Our listserv is extremely active, with dozens of new posts and responses daily relating to matters of importance for professionals in our field. Do you know how many local govies have posted anything related to the Gov 2.0 Expo?

By my count, zero.

The problem is that if municipal governments are lucky enough to have a dedicated web administrator, that person is also likely to be the web trainer, coder, developer, designer, content writer, project manager, contract negotiator, and…when there is time… champion of new web initiatives. The problem is, there is never time. Although I’m responsible for managing major web projects at the City of Reno, I’m also the person who responds to daily help desk tickets for web issues related to Reno.gov and our employee intranet.

It truly does take a village. In March, I had the privilege of participating in a presentation by the Center for Disease Control on their well-rounded use of social media and online tools (such as badges, widgets and virtual worlds) to engage the public in the H1N1 discussion. Their approach was truly a best practice in social media use and Gov 2.0, and they are known for sharing their policies and metrics with other agencies. During the Q&A session that followed, I asked the CDC presenter the question on the minds of everyone at this Social Media for Govt Conference – how big is your web team? Turns out, it included a team dedicated to writing web content, another team focusing on writing for the social sites, and a technical team for developing the widgets and other tools. Commendable approach, but I don’t know of one local government with that kind of resources available.

Local government is always considered the government closest to the people. In that vein, Gov 2.0 is phenomenally important to cities. How much interaction does the average citizen have with federal government beyond paying taxes once a year? Then take a look at citizen use of services at the local level in that same year – they may pay a parking ticket, report a pothole, register for a recreation class, apply for a job, look up a construction permit, apply for a business license, and the list goes on.

Municipalities are the most important level of government with the need to engage in Gov 2.0, with the fewest resources to do so.

Gov 2.0 Expo organizers ensured tickets were reasonably priced for government employees at a few hundred bucks for earlybird registration. But, unless you’re lucky enough to live in the D.C. area, factor in a plane ticket, cab rides and over $200 a night stay at the Washington Convention Center, and the experience winds up costing at least $1,500. This may be chump change for large Federal government agencies to send a few key participants, but many, many local government agencies have had all training and travel budgets cut and often eliminated for non-critical travel. I’m still paying off my participation in that social media conference earlier this year – about $1,000 on my personal credit card. Ouch, government engagement is expensive.

I just got done listening to a great Gov 2.0 Radio podcast highlighting the upcoming conference. When asked what changes we can hope to take place by the next conference, O’Reilly Media Gov 2.0 expert Laurel Ruma mentioned one change may be funding at the federal level for the Open Government initiative. Currently, President Obama’s Open Government Directive is somewhat of an unfunded mandate. How do we get funding at the local level for Open Government?

My call to action for my municipal peers is to join the conversation that federal and state governments are having. There are some big questions we need to participate in. Does local government need its own Open Government Directive to get more local governments involved? How do we deal with non-existent staff resources? The Feds have data.gov. Should we create our own unique platform for municipal data sets, or should we create individual sites, like San Francisco, Seattle, Washington D.C., and a handful of other forward-thinking, large metro cities have done?

At any rate, we need to get more local governments involved in the conversation. We keep talking about building citizen engagement tools, perhaps we need to focus on developing a local government engagement tool – one that compels staff at our local agencies to participate in the Gov 2.0 discussion.

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About Kristy

Kristy is a city government web manager who has a passion for local government, social media and technology. She loves to share knowledge with other govies and think of creative ways to get citizens involved. She is also a bit of a ham.