Communications

Social Media and FOIA implications

It seems to me that using 3rd party social applications can be a great boon for government in communicating and collaborating with its constituents. However, when a government entity uses Facebook, Twitter, blogs or other (free or hosted) applications, at what point does the agency become responsible to fulfill FOIA requests to posted comments, images,Read… Read more »

The Military and Web 2.0: Falling Behind and Thriving?

In two separate articles last week, our Armed Forces received a mixed review on their use of Web 2.0 tools: The first article, Army Secretary: We’re Falling Behind, declares: “Senior Army leaders have fallen behind the breakneck development of cheap digital communications including cell phones, digital cameras and Web 2.0 Internet sites such as blogsRead… Read more »

Social Media for Government

Just spent a couple days in conf. sessions learning how a few gov entities are using social media to communicate with public, press and intra/inter-agency. I was surprised that so few in the audience were aware of the collaboration tools, let alone using them to carry out mission communications. A hopeful note: transparancy and informationRead… Read more »

Cash-for-clunkers has a major form usability #fail

Image by Getty Images via Daylife Jakob Nielsen points me to an astonishing statistic from the cash-for-clunkers programme currently being hailed as a great success by the White House. From the New York Times: The government is tripling the size of the work force assigned to handle the applications. In many cases, the administration saysRead… Read more »

Lessons from the great 2009 Birmingham City Council website disaster

The night before last – and in the night – Birmingham City Council without much fanfare switched over to its rejigged website. Within moments the twittersphere was alight. It was crashing, it had obvious faults and it looked terrible. Over the next 36 hours reviewer after reviewer found fault after fault. This would not beRead… Read more »

Lessons from the great 2009 Birmingham City Council website disaster

The night before last – and in the night – Birmingham City Council without much fanfare switched over to its rejigged website. Within moments the twittersphere was alight. It was crashing, it had obvious faults and it looked terrible. Over the next 36 hours reviewer after reviewer found fault after fault. This would not beRead… Read more »