• Why Don’t We Read About Architecture?
  ‘Architecture, writes Lange, “is the art you cannot avoid” and it carries a burden that the other arts don’t — it must reconcile aesthetics and ideas with user functionality. A painting or a novel need only please or provoke its audience; it doesn’t then also require setbacks, parking minimums and LEED certification. Fewer of us are affected — or even in regular contact with the other arts — while all of us are inextricably connected to the built environment.’

• How to create and edit articles for Wikipedia
  ‘Ironically for a user-generated content site, Wikipedia looks down on user-generated content. Blogs can be a reliable source if the blogger is notable for something other than blogging.’

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Ottawa’s lengthy social media rulebook for civil servants may be counter to the spirit of Web 2.0, but at least it’s a start

BY MARTIN HOFMANN

[A version of this article appeared in the print edition of Marketing Magazine on January 16, 2012]

Jesus has been on Twitter since December 2009 and his earthly father Joseph of Nazareth joined this holiday season to narrate the entire Nativity story through 140 characters in German and English. Clearly, if you’re associated with heavenly power, you can tweet pretty much what you like. Yet it’s not so simple for mortals in the service of that other, more earthly power: the Canadian federal government. And so it was that Ottawa recently published its first overarching “guideline for external use of Web 2.0“.

Before government workers can interact through social networks and collaboration tools, they have a lot of reading to do. The federal guideline is 12,000 words long. That’s roughly four times the size of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. If someone were to tweet the document in its entirety, it would take 570 tweets or more. And that’s not including the Policy Framework for Information and Technology and the Communications Policy of the Government of Canada, which, the guideline says, should be read in conjunction.

One of the guideline’s key points is that “governance of Web 2.0 initiatives should be clear, succinct and well communicated.” Apparently, the guideline doesn’t have to adhere to its own principles. The document makes readers yearn for the early, simpler days of social media, when organizations like Microsoft informally steered employee bloggers with three simple words: “Don’t be stupid“.

It’s not just the document’s length that’s attracted attention, however. Gartner analyst Andrea Di Maio was quick to criticize it for being “all about obligations and risks”, noting that “there is nothing about how to encourage, assess [and] reward the use of web 2.0 tools to improve individual contributions to department’s outcomes.”

The guideline does indeed aim to cover every possible consideration, from accessibility and official languages to privacy, procurement and security. But it tries to make clear that it was written primarily to empower government departments, not employees. So there’s hope for Microsoft-style CliffsNotes versions of the thing, which will help Ottawa’s civil servants put social media to good use. And it encourages the principle that “personnel are trusted in their use of Web 2.0 tools and services just as they are trusted in every other aspect of their work.”

Di Maio also thinks the guideline doesn’t go far enough down to the individual level. That’s true, but there’s an even bigger miss. In recent years we’ve seen growing political will to empower government through social media, and this is entirely absent from the document. South of the border, President Obama has been reaching out directly to Americans through Twitter, Facebook and YouTube for years. His online presence has become so strong that some reporters in the White House press corps have voiced concerns that they are being turned into a sideshow.

In 2009 Obama also directed his government departments and agencies to establish “a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration,” which has resulted in a multitude of initiatives, many of the integrating social media. In Canada, federal Treasury Board minister Tony Clement just ordered the overhaul of government websites to include some social media functionality (the guideline page could have been a good starting point). In general, however, Canadian political leaders have yet to catch up with a powerful, overarching approach comparable to the United States.

Lengthy as it is, the new Web 2.0 guideline is as an encouraging sign that slowly but surely, social media will creep into the Canadian public sector. They may not have the leeway of Jesus or Joseph, but until change is driven in full force from the top, here’s hoping that some of Ottawa’s public servants accept the guideline as fine print on a ticket that gives access to meaningful engagement with Canadians.

Martin Hofmann (@martinhofmann) has worked in the public sector and agency world in Europe and North America. He currently is senior VP, social and digital, at Veritas Communications.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Source: InformatioIsBeautiful.net

I am wondering what linguistics experts could contribute to it. For example, I am wondering if “brilliant idea” can be categorized in one way only because different people use “brilliant” in different ways at different times. McCandless addresses this in the comment section: “I guess my criteria is responses that you give as ideas are emerging live, before moral and ethical considerations kick in. When you’re just being struck by the structural quality and functional fit of a concept. Before you’ve had time to fully think it through.” But I would argue that “brilliant” already means different things to different people before they had time to think it through.

He is currently inviting feedback and thoughts. I am looking forward to seeing the next iteration.

Stop metrics that cause the wrong behavior: “You have metrics in place that guide certain behaviors within the organization. Periodically, you will find these metrics are not creating the behavior you wanted, or you may decide that the behavior you wanted isn’t providing the best customer experience. Change the metrics.”

Read the full article here.

Today, most businesses wishing to take advantage of the social-digital revolution are in the “crawling-walking” phase of their transformation; they are focused on building numbers measured by likes, followers, and the amplification of their messages. Tomorrow, many companies will be in the “running-flying” stages of social digital; they will connect effortlessly with multiple stakeholders who make their businesses smarter and better positioned for the future. Tomorrow’s metrics will be new efficiencies, ideas, products, and services as well as better business intelligence.

Source: David Armano in Harvard Business Review

In yesterday’s article from the Harvard Business Review blog, Edelman’s David Armano asks How Social Digital Is Your Company?. “Social Digital” sounds a bit like catchphrasification of the obvious to me. But Armano has it right. Social and digital are separate but go hand in hand.

The thing is, though, one can’t understand what he calls the social-digital revolution without also understanding how the “infrastructure, the plumbing and wiring”, actually works and how marketing and communications can benefit from it. Too often, this part gets glossed over, because people love to talk about the “social” part of the equation. For businesses, this is as much a social revolution as it is a data-driven revolution.

Long-term, it breaks down the traditional marketing barriers and brings change to many jobs, departments and industry (like communications). “Social digital” done right transforms the way companies do business. Exciting times!

“To me, marketing is about values,” [Steve Jobs] said. “This is a very complicated world, a very noisy world and we’re not going to get the chance to get people to remember us. No company is. So we have to be very clear about what we want people to know about us.”

Source: AdAge – The 1997 Video That Explains the Marketing Genius of Steve Jobs

Open Government from The Academy on Vimeo.