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Getting Government Hooked On subir dey
Social Media has already started penetrating individual’s life in a big way. It’s now time for governments to jump onto the bandwagon Democracy is a system of governance that, in a very simplistic manner of saying, gives power to the people. The power to decide the way their nation is run, the way the nation interacts with other nations in the world, the way the nation governs those who make it a nation. Social Media gives the same power to the common netizens who, for years have only been the receivers of knowledge and information online. With the increasing proliferation of Social Media over the past few years it can safely be assumed that Social Media is here to stay. What started as initiatives from members of the public, like Tom Steinberg’s fixmystreet.com or chicago. everyblock.com has now steadily crept into the mainstream. With the UK government stepping into the Social
President Obama was soon to announce the Open Government Initiative. “My administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in government. We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration. Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in government,” He said while unveiling the initiative. On his first day in office, the President signed a memorandum1 directing all federal agencies to participate and collaborate with the people and ensure that there is transparency in their functioning. Leading by example, he circumvented the White House Press Corps while seeking opinions from Americans about his administration and received over 11,000 responses. The questions from citizens are available on YouTube’s CitizenTube channel2 and viewers were required to vote for the questions that they wanted him to respond. This was a very interesting demonstration of cyberdemocracy and populism. This interview was Obama’s first after his State of the Union address3 which was viewed by 1.3 million live on the White House’s website. Of course this is apart from the approximately 48 million others who watched the address live on TV. The White House also said that about 50,000 people participated in a Q&A session with Government Officials after the speech via facebook. While the White House hasn’t been able to figure out exactly how many people viewed the speech through their iPhone app but they did announce that more than
People have always been using the Social Media of their time for a variety of purposes, including, to change in the way governments or society work Media sphere with twitter and friendfeed accounts for the Parliament and 10, Downing Street, Digital Britain and their High Commissions and Consulates. This is a realisation that has dawned upon quite a few government agencies around the world, the heaviest user of Social Media in governance is the United States of America, predictably enough, considering the way the Internet has penetrated the lives and lifestyles of its citizens. However, one can also attribute this development to President Obama’s social media powered election campaign. As a natural progression of his success with the Social Media experiment, 50
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a terabyte of data was streamed4. This isn’t surprising considering the fact that little over a year ago 13.9 million people watched the President’s inauguration on CNN.com alone. Similarly, when Obama goes on overseas trips the number of questions he receives is staggering. Sample this, 17,000 responses from a visit to Ghana and 250,000 from a visit to South Africa, albeit some of these responses were from outside Africa but still, considering the thin Internet penetration in the continent these numbers say a lot about the potential of Social Media integration in governance. As for internal transparency, Data. gov, leads the way in democratising public sector data and driving innovation. The data is being surfaced from many locations making the government data stores available to researchers to perform their own analysis. Developers are finding good uses for the datasets, providing interesting and useful applications that allow for new views and public analysis. The government is now publishing online data that has never been available in the past about federal spending and research. Data.gov started as 47 data-sets from a small group of federal agencies and as of December 2009, expanded into more than 118,000 datasets with many more such initiatives like reversing an executive order that previously limited access to presidential records and web-casting White House meetings and conference. What’s even more interesting is the administration accepting that, “By themselves, however, these steps do not provide the transformation in the philosophy of governing that the President wants. They are improvements over past practice, to be sure, and valuable ones. But more needs to be done.” Of course, the UK and the US aren’t the only countries that are on Social Media,
other countries have joined in the fray. For instance, the Singapore government is on Facebook. Its feedback agency Reach Singapore, sees new media as a key opportunity to drive public feedback and citizen participation. Their use of facebook has seen a lot of feedback and has generated discussions on various issues. Says Dr Amy Khor, Member of Parliament, Mayor of Singapore’s Southwest district and Chairman of government feedback agency Reach, “What we are seeing now is active discussion on the discussion board. These range from transportation to environmental issues.” Similarly, Hong Kong officials have used social media to conduct various ‘e-Engagement activities’ on different policy initiatives. Some of the examples include online surveys, blogs, collecting feedback from Facebook, live Web chats, dedicated Web sites to consult the public on specific issues and mail exchange with the public. However, the way the US has leveraged on the ubiquity of the Internet to include its citizens in governance 2.0 is admirable. We are sure that as other countries realise the benefits of this medium and as Internet penetration also increases in the developing world, we will see more synergies being created between the traditional government systems and Social Media. As these governments step in, they will bring their own ideas about how this medium can be utilised for the benefit of government and citizens, which is the beauty of mass media that it can be moulded into any form that the user wishes to give it. Social Media is Not New It is strange but true that while Social Media has already started penetrating individual’s life in a big way, any mention of its usage for governance is always met with apprehension. This is perhaps because people at the helms of the affair see it as something ‘new’ and unfamiliar. However, people have always been using the Social Media of their time for a variety of purposes, including, to change in the way governments or society work. Paul, the Apostle wrote 13 epistles (letters) that substantially influenced Christianity throughout the Mediterranean and were included in the New Testaments. Martin Luther brought to light the abuses of the Church and initiated the Protestant Reformation by writing theses (updates) and posted them on the church of All Saints on 31 October 1517, which were quickly translated from Latin to German, printed and widely copied, making the controversy one of the first in history to
be aided by the printing press. Within two weeks, copies of these had spread throughout Germany and within two months throughout Europe. His w r i t i n g s , spreading wider, reached France, England and Italy as early as 1519 and students thronged to Wittenberg to hear Luther speak. Thomas Paine spread his printed pamphlets (blogs) about democracy to the masses titled, ‘Common Sense’ which immediately spread among the literate and in three months, 100,000 copies sold throughout the American British colonies making it the best-selling work in 18th century America and giving him the honour of being the Father of the American Revolution. However, while Social Media may not really be something new that has suddenly come up in our midst, the only difference between the usages has been the platform that the information has been spread through.Social and political change can still be brought about today using the same social networks that have been around us for centuries, the only difference is that today, thanks to the Internet our social network is much wider and information can spread far and wide at the speed of the Internet. The Hurdle Despite the Open Government Initiative and the increasing social media presence of the top government officials and offices and despite the increasing adoption of social media by the general public and their desire to be actively participate in the democratic process, social media usage in government is still fraught with several roadblocks. Even in the US, Governance 2.0 is not exactly smooth sailing. At the Gov 2.0 Expo convened at Washington D.C. between May 25-27, 2010 one could hear the same refrain that experts in the social media domain often encounter, including those like “we cannot do this”; “the management won’t accept it”; and “government regulations make it too hard to share information freely with the public”.
These are issues that these simple directives cannot and will not solve. Creating and implementing effective Social Media communications strategies can go a long way in solving these issues. Besides, there is a need to imbue the culture of openness within the people who make up these organisations and agencies and for them to see that the Internet and Social Media are not something alien to them. It is something that has always been around for generations. For governments the world over, social media can not only send and receive critical information instantaneously but also help build trust and relationships and share information at the same time by keeping both governments and citizens at an equal footing. To do this, social media usage doesn’t need to be creative, just being there and responding proactively to the queries received, clarification and information being requested and demonstrating that action is being taken based on what the citizens are saying is all that needs to be done to show people that the government agencies are indeed listening. \\ reference: 1.
2. 3. 4. 5.
Full text of the Memorandum is at: http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/ assets/memoranda_2010/m1006.pdf http://www.youtube.com/citizentube http://www.whitehouse.gov/photos-and-video/video/2010-stateunion-address h t t p : / / w w w. w h i t e h o u s e . g o v / blog/2010/01/28/your-responsestate-union www.futuregov.net/articles/2008/ sep/17/singapore-experimentssocial-media
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