Open City Workshop
The Open Government force is strong here in Edmonton, Alberta. This Saturday March 6th, 2010 the City of Edmonton will be hosting the next Open Data related event to help citizens understand why this is so important. Whether, you’re in government, a business person or private citizen, I recommend attending or participating online. Your voice is important.
Live!
Here’s a special twist. fusedlogic is proud to announce that we’ve been hired by the City of Edmonton to provide a live bilingual webcast of the event. We’ve twisted the City’s arm (it didn’t take much) and asked if we could provide the live stream to others who may want to share it. They said yes.
Hello embed code! If you’d like to generate traffic and attention to your Government 2.0 focused blog, website or community this is a terrific opportunity to provide content to your online community. If you’re in the media and would like to have the stream on your site, let a thousand flowers bloom.
The City of Edmonton is listening to your Open Data ideas and they’re acting on it.
The spirit of this event is to share ideas and thoughts, learn and collaborate on the way forward. It’s events like this that help to shape a city, everyone’s job is to come out and contribute directly or online.
Trust
One of the fundamental elements of an Open Government is trust. The City of Edmonton said it would open its’ data, it has. The City of Edmonton said it would expand this Open Data movement to the entire region so as to benefit all citizens, it is. Citizens are often skeptical of government for many reasons not the least of which is they don’t feel their voice will be heard. The City of Edmonton’s IT Branch is listening and led by Councillor Don Iveson, CIO Chris Moore, and the team in the IT Branch they’re acting on it. Look out folks, this is only the beginning.
Special Guests: 3 impressive Open Government minds are flying in to Edmonton to participate on a Open Government panel. David Eaves, Mark Kuznicki and Nicholas Charney I expect this to be great fun, and a tremendous learning experience.
See you on Saturday and follow along on Twitter using the Twitter hashtag – “yegdata”
Embed code will be provided for you on our site here: http://fusedlogic.tv/events/yegdata/
More information on the event itself is on the City of Edmonton’s website
Register here to attend the FREE Open City Workshop
Social Media for Government Presentation Elements
Here are all the parts and other info from the Pre-Conference Workshop, Social Media for Government Edmonton on January 25th
Thanks to all the organizations who participated:
Service Canada
Alberta Agriculture & Rural Dev.
Alberta Environment
Alberta Energy/information Tech.
Town of High River, AB
Metrolinx Ulistic Inc.
Royal Alberta Museum
Alberta Education
Red Deer County, Alberta
City of Red Deer, Alberta
Alberta Geological Society
National Energy Board
Edmonton International Airport
APEGGA
Govt. of the Northwest Territories
Town of High River, AB
AB School Empl. Benefit Plan
Strathcona County, AB
Alberta Utilities Commission
Alberta Education
Government of Alberta Office of the Auditor General
City of Fort Saskatchewan
WMS Communications
City of Kelowna, BC
Social Media for Government
Coming up next week (Jan 25th to the 28th), Walter is going to be chairing and presenting at the ALI Social Media for Government Conference. The conference is being held at the Delta Downtown Edmonton. Here’s the agenda:
The future of your city
One of the greatest things about social media is that there are tremendous amounts of conversations to learn from, but what about the conversations at the kitchen table? Many a great idea has been discussed there. What if Edmontonians, folks in Red Deer and Calgary decided to communicate their ideas in a more public sense? In this case, at futureedmonton.ca or futurereddeer.ca or futurecalgary.ca.
Frankly, this is not a new concept. Communicating ideas online has been happening for years in all sorts of ways. What we’re suggesting is that this process can be chaotic and unorganized. Our solution is to provide a very simple series of websites that empowers the everyday citizen. There are so many citizens who may currently make limited use of the Internet in their lives. We hope this very focused concept that’s easy to use will inspire them to contribute their great idea for their local city or town in just a click or two.
These sites will be providing the ability for local citizens to participate at their local level and potentially affect change on a macro-level.
Every time there is a new idea posted, the Twitter accounts for each site are updated. If you’d like to follow from Twitter, the usernames are @futureedmonton, @futurecalgary and @futurereddeer.
Here’s the twist:
We’re loosely tying these sites together to provide a macro perspective on the ideas of what Albertans are contemplating. Everything will be crowd-sourced, right down to “functionality requests” of the sites themselves and how they evolve. We believe the elegance of this concept is in it’s simplicity and we encourage you to participate by voting, commenting or submitting your own idea for your city.
We’re also launching a special offer for towns and cities in Alberta today so tune into Global Edmonton at 5pm.
Government 2.0, or transparency, bravery 1.0?
As the social media bug spreads within government it will open up serious and in many cases heated discussions, push boundaries and comfort levels and generally make people feel really uncomfortable deep down in places they don’t talk about at parties. The non-social web savvy bureaucrat is about to be in a world of hurt.
I believe that your perception of a given situation is reality for you. In other words, if you perceive that the government isn’t transparent, then that’s your reality.
Here’s my perception based on what I’ve witnessed after having worked with government and advised government affiliated organizations on social media. Two internal cultural segments exist within government surrounding the discussion about the social web.
I designate those two segments as “the brave and the fearful.” The “brave” are those who read Groundswell and then attend conferences similar to the Advanced Learning Institute’s Social Media for Government event that’s wrapping up in Ottawa.
By the way, should you like to observe the conversation on twitter the hashtag is #ALI. Or, try the conversation by links like this PDF by @mikesgene which shows chatter about the usual suspects such as, YouTube, Facebook, Flickr, Second Life, wikis…etc. The undertone of these tweets is that many are focused on implementing the technology as soon as possible, which is where many begin their social media learning journey.
Heading home to join the conversation
Excited delegates are now heading back to their respective bureaucratic worlds filled with visions of changing their particular corner of the world by inspiring colleagues to “join the conversation.” Many will suggest starting a blog, creating a wiki, shooting pictures, video and as many that attended #ALI did, they’ll encourage others to quickly join the twitter community as well. A sort of “citizen journalism meets public sector mashup” if you will.
People like @pameladawn state on twitter that she is “taking what I learned at #ALI and heading back to Saskatchewan.” Who am I to argue with that? I think that’s great AND I think Pamela and her colleagues are probably in for a surprise.
Why? Because over the next few days all across Canada, as everyone shows up to their respective government offices, so too will the second segment of government in this discussion: the “fearful.” And thus the uphill battle begins with the non-believer. If there’s one thing that makes people in government and especially decision-makers nervous, it’s citizens with an opinion who know how to voice it by way of the social web.
Resistance to social media
To a certain extent I understand the root of the resistance. Afterall, often political careers and/or elections are built and destroyed based on a few well-timed words in the media that the social web picks up and runs with, here’s a real gem- case in point.
Pamela may experience frustration while some of her colleagues defend their resistance as being prudent, careful or even risk averse. That said, many of these intelligent, hard working folks won’t come right out and call their feelings what they really are, which is “ignorance driving fear.”
Regardless of how you perceive the resistance factor, experience has shown that these “anti-change agents” are a large barrier to progress into the social web. Sure there are pockets across this great country of activity where the planets have aligned and progressive thinking and open creative minds prevail, yes, even in government there are creative minds. I just simply wouldn’t bet my entire business on waiting for, as one twitter user @jdarrah called it “moving the glacier,” to actually happen at the speed of social media business.
Essentially, this is the “newly initiated and willing evangelist” trying to convince the “resistant and fearful” that having a transparent and open dialogue with the average citizen in a highly effective communications environment with little control over the end message is a good thing. That within government, there are better ways to listen, learn, collaborate, communicate and share ideas with constituents.
Social web victory
Is there a way forward for the newly initiated brave? Absolutely! Here’s one example of a brave leader who has looked to tackle a very tough world issue and by being incredibly brave has generated this awesome social web victory via youtube. However, Her Majesty Queen Raina of Jordan, despite having initially built up a tremendous amount of “social capital” with the human web, she too has lost momentum and along with it possibly opportunity to continue to build her quest to the next level. Having said that, I suspect we haven’t heard that last from the Queen on this issue of equality.
What many of the delegates at the #ALI conference will likely communicate on the conference wiki in a few weeks is that beyond the technology. The real work is done on issues like cultural differences and understanding, commitment and sustainability. These are the factors the must be successfully navigated in order to build lasting results.
As brand new twitter user @doctornaud said in their second ever tweet which was directed to me in response to my tweet about the fact that our governments are so far behind. “@fusedlogic I totally agree but we need to start somewhere.” Exactly right doc, exactly right.
When asking the average private citizen about whether they feel their government is transparent, chances are you’ll likely get sneers, chuckles accompanied by looks that communicate – “are you kidding me?” Well, ladies and gentlemen there are definitely elements within government that really do want increased transparency and more open communication. They’re excited to share the new knowledge they’ve just learned and would like to implement social media solutions to accomplish that goal. That to me is highly cool and it needs to be supported.
ChangeCamp Edmonton
Those of you who consider yourself a part of this group are not out in the cold. Consider joining us at ChangeCamp Edmonton. I guarantee this journey will collectively test our will, patience, creativity and bravery. Further, I believe it will be incredibly fun and rewarding as well.
Chances are that many are about to learn what I perceive to be the most important thing about social media, beyond the technology, social media takes serious dedication and a long-term commitment coupled with brave and meaningful human interaction in order to be really successful.
Walter Schwabe
