Posts By Kelly O'Brien

Yammering away at NIST

Have you tried Yammer in your agency? Yammer is like an inside-the-firewall version of Twitter, enabling you to create a members-only social network inside your agency – instantly and for free. It operates a lot like Twitter, but with some nice extras. You can create private groups, add RSS feeds and the update field isn’tRead… Read more »

Social Media for Gov’t conference: vibe in the room last year vs. this year

Chatting with fellow ALI conference attendees Andy Krzmarzick, Ari Herzog, Maxine Teller and John Stauffer after today’s sessions, I made an observation about this same event one year ago vs. today, plus a hypothesis about why this difference might be. Observation: last year’s conference had an excited – almost giddy – optimistic energy about socialRead… Read more »

Social Media for Gov’t conference: tweets from pre-conf. workshop

The ALI Social Media for Gov’t conference kicked off today with a couple of pre-conf. workshops. Thanks to Maxine Teller and Ken Fischer for a great morning! I’ll try to post the #ali tweetstream here over the next three days. Here’s what we tweeted this morning: #gov20 #ali @mixtmedia: conventional metrics don’t apply; start withRead… Read more »

Today’s Google Federal talk at Reston Chamber

At today’s talk by Google Federal Director Mike Bradshaw, my table mate and I sent the following tweets. Worth checking out: Google’s public policy blog. Thanks to Steve Ressler for reminding me of this format, originally from David Tallan (Twitter to blog). #wattsyourplan: RT @jonmikelbailey: @wattsyourplan #restongoogle google has 1.6 megawatts of solar photovoltaic panelsRead… Read more »

Web 2.0 for government: a unique opportunity?

At a govie staff meeting yesterday, the interesting point was made that there’s potentially a huge advantage to innovating via social media in government because government is more willing to share with government. In other words, there are not the inherent barriers to sharing best practices that crop up in the private sector, where CompanyRead… Read more »

Web 2.0 in Gov’t: don’t ask/don’t tell?

Joking around with a client today, we acknowledged that in many ways, the approach to social media in government has been a “don’t ask/don’t tell” policy – launch something under the radar without official approvals or face obstacles and roadblocks that deter all but the most determined. We also acknowledged that things are starting toRead… Read more »

Best practices for government websites

Five federal websites have been chosen as good examples of best practices in government websites. What jumps out at me is that, aside from it not being all about Web 2.0, is that each of these agencies are strong examples of making their site about the user, not all about the agency. Clearly, Web 2.0Read… Read more »