Manager of digital engagement for the Department of Justice Victoria, Patrick McCormick, said the public sector could not be in control when collaborating with online audiences.
“I think crowd surfing is what engagement is looking like... this is the kind of thing that’s very hard for government – to trust the community, to admit some uncertainty and to go with the flow,” he told delegates at the Effective Community Engagement conference in Sydney this week.
The Victorian Justice Department has been an avid user of social media and online campaigning in recent years, particularly following the 2009 bushfires, but problem gambling, binge drinking and domestic violence have also been featured in videos and other online strategies.
Following the bushfires and the huge demand for emergency information, the department developed a widget to provide easy access to the latest news, information and pictures about the ongoing crisis.
About 130 people installed the widget on their social networking page, but that small base led to more than 80,000 unique views, and more than 26,000 people interacting with it.
Mr McCormick said that online collaboration had brought about huge changes in the status quo of the public sector and that more people were finding it easier to interact with previously ‘closed off’ government departments.
“The real value of this is in co-production – where citizens are not only being consulted more deeply, but we’re allowing them to help us produce services, deliver services and produce policy as well,” he told delegates.
“But that again can be a little scary for government; it’s as though we’re going from read-only to read-write – government has been a PDF document, now it is a wiki.”
Mr McCormick said that the department had learned to follow the crowds – or ‘crowd surf’ – online, and that social media, particularly Victorian police’s use of Twitter, had been used as a way of balancing traditional authority with authenticity.
“It’s a particularly good and a very difficult thing to do,” he said.
“It’s a new approach towards sharing power but maintaining authority the old way, and I would argue that we can only maintain authority in the old way if we start to get authority in the new way, which is persuasive, authentic and engagement.”
He said: “The key components [to developing online engagement], which are going to be hard, are around experimentation and collaboration, open access to public sector information and how do we in government – and this is a challenge to the private sector too – feel comfortable with a level of uncertainty.
“In many ways when you’re tinkering with social media, you’re adding it to a traditional campaign and you’re not sure how it’s going to work, but you actually learn a lot about the people you’re targeting.
He added that whether the public sector decided to engage with citizens online mattered not. “These conversations are happening with or without us."
Delegates were encouraged not to be risk averse but to test out social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook.
Mr McCormick said: “Fail small and fast, but tinker around and don’t ask for permission... unless you need to.”
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Rob O’Brien
Quelle/Source: Government News, 23.07.2010
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