5 Tips For Public Servants Using Social Media

Here are five quick tips on how to manage your social graph as a public servant:

1. Pro-actively disclose

Generally speaking it is good practice to tell your employer (or prospective employer) of any activity that is at the periphery of but related to your official activities. For public servants I think that runs the gamut from blogging about related issues on sites like this one, to sharing links with colleagues on Twitter, or participating in discussion groups on Govloop or LinkedIn.

I am of the opinion that proactive disclosure of online activities is less important when those activities are far removed from your professional life. I doubt the powers that oversee the machinery of government care if in addition to your day job you happen to run a local food, exercise, lolcat blog.

Finally, don't go running to the very top of the organization to disclose your activities, simply disclose them to the closest logical individual up the food chain from yourself.

2. Be careful what you link to

This is where I see the most confusion. I've seen a number of people on Twitter link to their department or agency right under a bio that reads "all views my own".

My advice is to not link to any official government website on any of your social media unless you are acting as an official spokesperson for the organization.

Also, and this one is overlooked often, don't provide a link to your social media (e.g. your Twitter) in your official organizational email footer. The implication is that your use of the service is as official as the position you occupy, your phone number and mailing address, when in fact you cannot conduct official business in that channel (especially with external stakeholders).

The same goes for your avatar, don't use anything with government logos in it (like a photo of your ID badge) it conflates you with the department or agency for whom you work.

3. Have a disclaimer, but don't hide behind it

There was a number of blog posts and Twitter chatter in the last few weeks about the subject of disclaimers. Here's my take: a disclaimer doesn't absolve you from being an idiot. Much like you can't claim ignorance if you break the law an online disclaimer isn't a shield. It doesn't protect you or your employer, it only creates a small modicum of distance between the two by telling people that you are not authorized to act as an official spokesperson for your organization.

4. Excuse yourself from conversations that you feel uncomfortable about

During the last election one of the federal political parties responded to one of my tweets about open data. The conversation quickly turned partisan. My reaction was to simply tweet that given my role and responsibilities as a professional and non-partisan public servant I was unwilling to engage any further; an explanation that was readily accepted by the party in question.

If you are pressed even after you excuse yourself, just stay silent, let anyone watching it play out draw their own conclusions. I

5. Don't bitch about work

Venting may feel good now, and a status update is so easy that its often we get caught up in the moment, but there aren't any private places online where you can complain about your employer.

Good rule of thumb: don't say anything online that you don't have the wherewithal to say in person because you will be held accountable by someone somewhere down the line.

Like mom said, it's always better to be safe than sorry.

Originally published by Nick Charney at cpsrenewal.casubscribe/connect
[image credit fisserman]

The Changing Relationship Between Accountability and Responsibility

Collaborative technologies apply flattening pressure to hierarchical organizational structures by diffusing the ability to publish, share and disseminate information. For example consider the action of publishing something to the corporate intranet compared to an enterprise wiki.


Intranet Publishing is a Linear Process

This linear process is designed to ensure compliance with a broad set of interrelated policy frameworks, such as official languages, access to information and privacy, information management directives, values and ethics, etc. It does so by making people along the chain responsible for formally approving the content. These people are gatekeepers, key decision making nodes along the pipeline. While this type of system may ultimately produce compliance, it does so at the cost of expediency and thus perhaps even relevancy. In short, when it comes to internal communication models, many hands don’t always make light work, sometimes they make long work.


Wikis are Different (or at least they can be)

In an open enterprise wiki environment, publishing is unfettered. It can be instantly achieved by anyone in the organization. This means that formalized structures (e.g. linear approval processes) are incredibly difficult to maintain. Since there is no formal chain of command that ensures policy compliance, there are no nodes of decision-making that act as gatekeepers. In this model publishers are not only responsible for production but for policy-compliant production. In short, wikis make for quick publication but at the cost of ensured policy compliance.


How Does This Affect the Relationship Between Accountability And Responsibility?

In an enterprise wiki, publishers may have new found responsibility but the traditional accountability chain (i.e. the hierarchy) remains intact. I can't say for certain what the exact impact of this is on the organization other than it is largely seen as an erosion of power of gatekeepers. Gatekeepers rely on the bureaucratic tradition of:

Power = Knowledge

Where:

Knowledge = Position within the hierarchy x # of direct reports x Information / relative importance vis-a-vis other areas

The reason this equation works is simple: the information/action/work must be routed through the established process. The minute that process changes, say by implementing an enterprise wiki in parallel to a corporate intranet, the power structure implodes. Ask anyone working in these spaces right now and they will tell you that corporate intranets are losing ground quickly to enterprise wikis.


These will be difficult times

This shift – enabled by changes to the relationship between responsibility and accountability – is playing out in the culture right now. It is creating confusion inside organizations, people are unsure where to put information, where to find it, and in some cases which source of competing information is the most accurate.

The underlying question isn't really whether or not we should replace our intranets with wikis but rather what type of culture do we want our institutions to support? The reason there is so much tension around these issues is that the institution isn't designed to work in the ways that new collaborative technologies now enable us to.

We are slowly moving into a way of working, a way of thinking – perhaps even a way of being – that is not conducive with our way of managing, how we create incentives and/or how we create disincentives.

Maybe it is time for a redesign.


[Image credit: chelseagirl]