On the heels of fallout over the “Civil Serf” affair, the UK Cabinet Office is putting together a new set of guidelines on how civil servants should interacts in the Web 2.0 space, in particular with respect to blogging, social networks and Wikipedia.
The need for policy, regulation and in this case, limits as to whom can and cannot post, presents an interesting discussion for government organizations unsure as to what path to follow in the realm of Web 2.0 communications. We’ve had several conversations over the past couple of weeks that speak to this uncertainty. Perhaps the most interesting was with a government official who noted, “We’ve opened up and we’ve done away with the spin and communicate only facts. But people still don’t believe it’s real.”
One way to recreate that trust is by having employees throughout the hierarchy blog. But evidently that means trusting them…
This issue of trust is evidently a two-way street. For those who haven’t heard of the “Civil Serf” blogging story, here’s the rundown: The Civil Serf blogger was a 33-year-old Londoner who many believed worked for the UK Department for Work and Pensions – she described herself as being “just senior enough in my department to really know what’s going on.” Over the course of four months she regularly posted anecdotes from her experiences, including embarrassing revelations about officials and ministers, and scathing critiques of her employer’s lack of innovation – “There is a strong sense of deja vu in the land of surfdom.”
About a week ago her blog started to get major media attention, and promptly disappeared.
The ensuing conversation about who can blog, and what they can disclose in those blogs, highlights the challenges for public sector communications. And as Tom Watson points out here, what starts as a casual discussion can quickly be interpreted as official policy. And while there’s evidently no easy fix to those challenges, sticking with the status quo of top-down, vetted releases will do nothing to re-engage people with their governments, let alone rebuild trust between citizen and their elected representatives.
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