New study from Ipsos pegs home Internet access among Canadians at 82%, a 6% increase from the second quarter of 2008. Frankly I am surprised that it is that low, given the importance of being able to get online. The digital divide lives. I wonder how this compares internationally?

Anyhow, here’s an interesting tidbit on the ways we use to access the Internet:

Dial-up access is in the last stages of use as only 8% of Internet-enabled Canadians access the Internet through this method, while about eight in ten are using some form of high speed access. Interestingly, there has also been a rise in the last 18 months of an ‘other’ category – widely suspected to be Mobile Broadband Sticks, Netbooks and Smartphone users.

via Internet Access in Canada Reaches All Time High.

So if dial-up is at 8% and broadband use at about 80%, this means that access via smartphone/netbook/Internet stick must be over 10%. In Canada, it looks like mobile internet access has surpassed dial-up.

Just checking something out. Ignore pls.

Posted via web from Peter Smith’s Posterous

Posted via web from Peter Smith’s Posterous

A bit late on blogging this, but anyhow.

Last week there were a couple of stories in the Ottawa Citizen (on Thursday and Friday) that touched on impartiality in the federal public service.

From the Friday story, titled Internet age a challenge to impartial public service:

The commission [ie, the PSC] concluded the young PCO analyst who posted his support for the Liberal party had crossed the line with “improper political activity,” but found no evidence that this affected his ability to do his job.

The employee wasn’t disciplined for his Facebook entry other than receiving a letter from the commission warning against “political activities” that could undermine his ability to do his job impartially — or leave that impression.

The unnamed bureaucrat wasn’t a senior executive but he did work for PCO, which has a more politically sensitive mandate than other departments.

Some thoughts:

1. Tempting to write this off as a PCO thing, since life is different at “the centre.” But that would be a mistake — especially for people working in communications and marketing, as we routinely bump up against the political/administrative divide in government. Impartiality is important throughout the bureaucracy.

2. Nor is it an age thing — leaving aside the fact that “young PCO analyst” is pretty ambigous, it is clear that social networking is increasingly popular among all workplace demographics.

3. In one sense, nothing has changed. Listing your political affiliation on a social networking site is analogous to wearing a party badge or political button on your coat. If you want to be seen as impartial, don’t do it.

4. Social networks like make it all too easy for this kind of thing to happen. When I signed up for Facebook, I remember that the “political affiliation” question was part of the registration process. Incredibly easy for an inattentive user to pick something that they will later regret since their focus is on getting signed up.

5. Yes social networking is redrawing the line between public/private. My rule of thumb – err on the side of caution and treat online participation as more public than private. I assume that how I present yourself online always has a an impact on my personal reputation and the reputation of my employer. (Writing this, it occurs to me that it’s probably no different in the private sector.) By the by, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner has been doing great work on privacy issues around social networking.

6. As cases like these start to pile up, it will be tempting to simply block off the social web in government workplaces. This would be a mistake, as not only would business value be lost, but it would just drive the activity “underground.” People will find a way regardless — so better to encourage responsible use than to make people do it behind your back. The recently reanimated StopBlocking.org has great info on why it’s better to allow your people access.

7. On policy: I don’t feel that new rules need to be invented. There’s enough policy out there already. I am in favour of education and guidance though — to help us navigate through this new and unfamiliar terrain. Whether in terms of reminding employees of their responsibilities as public servants or by having early adopters and leaders showing us how it’s done. Or creating a touchstone of some sort that interprets existing rules in the light of new realities presented by the social web (for this last one, I’m looking at you TBS).

Last week, the Government of Canada’s new “Language Portal of Canada” website popped up. It’s a site aimed at providing Canadians with “free access to the language tools that will enable them to use and understand both official languages more easily.”

What’s most interesting about this is that Termium Plus, the government’s gigantic translation dataset, is now freely accessible. Termium has long been a resource for public servants who couldn’t remember the official translations for program, agency or committee names, or who needed to know the other-language equivalents for technical terminology, or wanted to find out what obscure bureaucratic acronyms stood for.

How huge is this resource? Four million terms in English, French and, more recently, Spanish — that’s a gigantic pile of info. And it’s constantly being updated, with 50,000 modifications to the database annually.

Until last week, if you weren’t a GoC employee, you could only access Termium via an annual subscription that (if memory serves) was in the hundreds of dollars. This pretty much limited it’s use to professional translators and editors who could write it off as an expense. But now, anyone can get at it for free.

And if you’ve already paid your subscription for this year? You’ll get a refund:

Have you paid a subscription fee for TERMIUM Plus® this year?
If so, read this message.

If you paid to subscribe to TERMIUM Plus® and are eligible for a refund, you will receive a cheque in the mail by December 31, 2009. You do not need to contact the Translation Bureau: we know how to get in touch with you.

Thank you for your loyalty throughout the years.

So it’s great that such a huge government resource is now freely accessible to everyone. But why not take it further?

Here’s some ideas for future development:

• offer up access to the database in machine-readable form so that third party developers can build interesting and possibly useful things from the dataset.
• allow public contributions to the data set, so that it can be expanded and improved in an efficient way.
• loosen licensing restrictions to maximize how far and wide the data can be reproduced and re-used.

(h/t David Eaves, who’s three laws of open data provide a convenient framework for thinking about how to develop government databases like Termium.)

Aside: Termium records are presented in a rather highly evolved interface, with URLs that are full of parameters. I wonder if the records can be spidered or indexed by search enginges?

Finally, some more info on Termium from around the web:

• The press release, from October 8th.
• Blog post from technical writer Diane Harms, pointing out that this also means that The Canadian Style is now freely available in searchable form.
• Quickie story from ITBusiness.ca. Dunno about that $1.1B dollar figure, seems more than a tad high — I’ll bet that amount is for some larger pot of money out of which came the funding for this project.
• Item on Digg.com from earlier this morning.

http://www.nextgov.com/nextgov/ng_20091001_8431.php?oref=rss?zone=NGtoday

Article from NextGov on web 2.0 tools in government. Among other things, it looks at how US intelligence community adopted Intellipedia.

Awesome quote:

[Intellipedia doyen Don] Burke likens the strategy to throwing spaghetti against the wall until something sticks.

Agencies need to give individuals the clearance to fail, he says, knowing it might actually lead to some big successes instead.

Love the analogy :+)

About a year ago, I blogged about the Working in Canada initiative as a great example of the Government of Canada doing government 2.0 — it’s a mashup that pulls together info trapped in widely spread out databases and delivers it in a way that helps prospective or new Canadians make informed decisions about where to live and work within the country.

Well since that time, the Working in Canada gang has also jumped into social media, with presences on Twitter (in the usual English and French, but also Mandarin) and Facebook.

One of the coolest things about their Facebook presence? They are interacting rather than just broadcasting. Here’s a screencap:

Example of interaction on Facebook

From what I see, the Working in Canada Facebook page is developing into a hub where people are asking questions not just about the Working in Canada tool, but wider questions about coming to Canada as well. And they are getting answers — the Working in Canada folks are pointing these people to relevant information sources, regardless of whether they specifically pertain to the Working in Canada program or not. Nice work!

During yesterday’s GTEC session on the Public Sector Social Workplace, I tweeted:

#gtec John Myers: social media in the org. No training needed. We,ve all learned how to use these on the public internet 11:41 AM Oct 7th from UberTwitter

At the time, this sounded like a good tactic to keep in mind when selling social media adoption in the workplace. After all, not needing training means lower costs associated with the roll-out of social tools in the org.

But then I opened up the paper (yes the print kind – gasp!) this morning to the following headline: “27% blind to online legalities – Many Canadians don’t know they’re liable for comments: Poll.”

A new survey released yesterday shows that while more Canadians are conversing online, over one-quarter of people believe they aren’t legally accountable for their online comments.

Twenty-seven per cent told a TD Insurance poll they believe they aren’t legally accountable for their comments on blogs, message boards and social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook.

An alarming number of people are ignorant of the responsibility and legal liability, said Klaus Pohle, a professor of journalism specializing in media law at Carleton University.

So, a good reminder — at least some of us haven’t really learned how to use social media after all.

I’d say that this is due to the mental models we bring to participating online. Often we approach it the same way as if we were having a face to face conversation. To wit:

“Most people approach online commenting as though they were chatting in person, completely unaware of the risks they’re taking,” says Henry Blumenthal , Vice President and Chief Underwriter, TD Insurance. “A good rule of thumb when you’re posting online is to ask yourself, how would I feel if this was printed in the newspaper with my name next to it?”

But sometimes we use online mediation as a shield, thinking we can get away with being more outspoken online:

When asked if they behave the same online as they do in person, the majority of Canadians (75%) said yes, but 9% did admit to being more opinionated behind the keyboard. Younger Canadians (18 – 34) are more likely to say they are more opinionated in person than online – 25% compared to 14% of 35 – 54 year olds and 7% of 55+ year olds. Yet, they’re most likely to regret something they posted online (29% vs. 16% of 35 – 54 year olds and 5% of 55+ year olds).

I’d wager that it’s a rare person who hasn’t tweeted something they never would have said out loud to another.

Bottom line: social media is not the same as face-to-face conversation. When you comment online, your words can have real-world consequences. People will still need to be reminded of this as the org goes social.

Getting back to the question of training: while it might be true in a strict sense that people won’t necessarily need training on how to use social media (with most social software, it’s blindingly obvious where you are supposed to click or type), it’s still pretty key to educate users on the norms and risks associated with participating online.

OK so the frist day of the GTEC conference is over and the second one is getting underway.

I just checked out the GTEC blog to see if there were any posts outlining highlights from yesterday. Nothing. Last post is from Oct 5, and was a primer for one of sessions from yesterday. To keep momentum up, why not a post about what took place?

I fully understand that in the midst of putting on a big conference, it’s hard to sit down and pull together some coherent copy about the day’s highlights. There’s a lot of other stuff going on, and resources are usually stretched thin in the heat of an unfolding event. So why not take advantage of the steady stream of tweets about the event?

A quick search reveals lots and lots of relevant content in the Twittersphere.

And best part is that this can be automated. I’m thinking here about a blog post with an embeddable widget — like ScribbleLive or CoverItLive, for example — to pull in tweets about GTEC that hit the right keywords or hashtags.

While not as coherent as a well-written blog post, grabbing tweets about the event would help to show the level of action happening. Even better, it allows the blog’s readers to make connections with others who are at the event or interested in it. And having something fresh on the blog as your event is occurring is far better than nothing at all.