(Fine, fine, you’re a contracting company. The “bottom line” is money for you. I get it. At least TRY to ACT sincere. You’ll get more clients that way. But this my own naive personal problem.)

The real, professional problem is what you touched on in the beginning: the Tech community adopts first. The MarCom community (which I am a member of) adopts next. The same thing happened with Web “1.0,” and some of us, especially in the government, are still in that battle. Who owns the Web site – the infrastructure dudes, or the guys with lots of stuff to say?

Right now about half of us MarCom-ers are obsessed with the “2.0.” But the real interesting thing about these “new” tools is that they can be used anywhere! They’re for everyone! These tools can improve almost anyone’s job, I believe/hope.

I propose that instead of us Web/Tech/MarCom people trying to “own” “2.0″ (and/or sell it to others who are slower to buy-in), we slowly educate everyone (especially non-Tech/MarCom professionals) about being open to trying new, more efficient tools. People in my offices still look at me wide-eyed and jaw-dropped when I mention RSS feeds for goodnessake. Make your lives easier people!

Let’s evangelize like the good obsessed MarCom-ers we are. But we have to communicate with strategy: how can we help our audience help themselves? What are they trying to accomplish? And let’s not box ourselves into a narrow world of Tech and MarCom. Let’s open our conferences up. Let’s all be friends!

Maybe I’m wrong, but everything I read that compares the U.S. to other countries says I’m right.

Web 2.0, or government 2.0… The sad truth is that democracy has become a gold plated strawberry that has rotted out from under its shiny shell and they will never listen to the people, unless the people have billions to leverage against them. The current climate assures the people have less than ever, to use as leverage. Government 2.0, however seems like a great way for politicians to spend taxpayer dollars, at corporations that fuel their campaigns and line their pockets.

I recently met an Austin City Councilman who is running for mayor about this very issue. His staffers wanted to build a 2.0 community for people to submit ideas for the city. Hi, that’s called the internet. I told him that the best way to BUILD a community is to start by SUPPORTING it.

Marketing, including social media marketing, isn’t always blathering on to customers. It’s LISTENING. It’s knowing what to anticipate based on what you hear. I would love if the government stopped listening to Exxon and Monsanto lobbyists and started listening to the people. We cannot afford to have our government hijacked by corporate interests that hurt the general welfare of our nation. If it costs them a little money in the form of salaries to actually have people listen to the general public for once by engaging with people online, I’ll help pay it.

In all, I think that the Intelligence Community is one of the leaders in Government in embracing open source technologies and Enterprise 2.0 as a best practice, but this was the first I had heard the term Intelligence 2.0 in the last 4 years in which wikis and blogs have been introduced as a better way to collaborate. Thank goodness no one suggested it or I am sure it would have stuck.

Its more like replacing existing processes and not improving on the old throwing good money after bad. A core value that we are still learning, but since most of the community is shielded from the “Web 2.0 world”, we can focus on the mission and not the buzz words.

– Policy barriers prevent deliberative, but non-authoritative conversations between govt and public groups (be it govt to citizen, govt to supplier base, etc.). We have these conversations all the time on the phone, email and F2F, but can’t have them online.
– The Paperwork Reduction Act was written in 1980 (updated in 1995 by Newt, which included the really edgy dewey decimal system called GILS), and creates a 4-6 month delay at best for doing the simplest participatory approach on the web.
– Nobody agrees upon what to do about records management policies for wikis, blogs, etc. How do you determine your disposal schedule for a wiki page or blog post? A wiki page is never final, for instance (my contention is that these are both work products, and thus should not be considered “essential transactions of the agency” and thus, not records).
– privacy concerns are magnified in looking at a participatory web. For the agency, this means they potentially need to conduct a privacy impact assessment for each site, adhere to higher level information assurance certs for the server, etc. Bottom line, the barrier to entry currently blocks many potentially valuable efforts.
– Information Assurance policies (which are often valuable and necessary) have significantly impacted options for operational performance when looking at interactions with the public. Waivers are often necessary, but hard to get granted.

I could go on with the barriers, but suffice to say that even if an agency finds a very valuable need that could be addressed with a social software solution, currently they most often are unable to implement it. But regarding the goals set forth in the transparency and open govt memo, we can debate the merits of this, but I think a very strong case can be made that these type things are necessary. As a for instance, citizen involvement in the policy making process is currently both codified and not very well understood or implemented. Clearly some changes are required here.

Bottom line, while I absolutely agree that there’s lots of noise, the goal should be to craft a directive that removes the barriers, sets the vision and responsibilities, and allows for agencies to take advantage of the tools that most help them while opening up the process of governing to allow mass collaboration-style imput.