Here's a recent Government Computing News (GCN) article quoting Ted McLaughlan regarding how, though the Federal Government has embraced social media, hard realities of information management and security requirements may be slowing the love affair.... Contact Ted McLaughlan via LinkedIn for more information.

As an employee, it can be really invigorating to discover that your employer is a trend-setting (or following) participant in Web 2.0 practices. Your employer may actually market this, its "Web 2.0 expertise". This seems to suggest your employer is current, relevant, amenable to open standards generated by a global community of open source evangelists, engaged in online social discussion, promoting its brand (and your good work) around the Internet and basically joining the fun. But is it really? The "2.0" in phrases preceded by labels including "Web", "Enterprise", "Government" basically indicates the use of web-enabled technologies that foster online community dialogue (vs. a one-way information "push"), the use and support of network-discoverable data sharing tools created with entirely open standards, and the actual participation in online dialogue and information-sharing. In other words: 1) Find and install a tool that al...

This group of Loudoun Blogs represents a wonderful and unique cross-section of the life and business of Loudoun County, VA, and is a very straightforward means for residents and business owners to participate in local community dialogue through “social media”. Like other communities, there are also lots of other Loudoun-centric online forums out there – on individual blogs, bulletin boards , on Facebook and LinkedIn , in Twitter streams and Wikis; thousands of Loudouners discussing topics from pizza to economic development. It’s growing consensus that identifying yourself (vs. anonymity) is much more helpful in achieving respect and social prominence on the web – but revealing your “personally identifiable information” (PII) is a two-edged sword. Hopefully, most of us using social media (or any other communication method on the Internet) understand how and why PII should be protected. The spammers, criminal elements and virus distributors don’t need much of it to make your life mis...

Last week’s “Meeting the Open Government Directive ” (OGD) conference hosted by GovDelivery (new owners of the popular GovLoop.com public/private social media forum) showcased a number of very important, relevant initiatives and ideas to help Federal Agencies comply with this important White House mandate. The directive comes from a memorandum signed by President Obama on his very first day in office, to all federal agencies directing them to break down barriers to transparency, participation, and collaboration between the federal government and the people it is to serve. Most agencies have already started their compliance initiatives, creating “Open Government” pages (for example at DHS ) to highlight shared data sources and programs, and all agencies are required to present their holistic strategies (i.e. their “Open Government Plan”) by April 7th of this year. Ideas from the public regarding how agencies should approach their Open Government Plans are currently being accepted throu...

All well-known systems engineering methodologies and enterprise system development programs leverage testing environments. Testing environments can be built and operated for very different purposes, ranging from prototyping and simulation, to pre-production load testing and usability or “Section 508 Accessibility” checks. Specialized SOA testing frameworks are sometimes required, for difficult infrastructure integration challenges. Most major systems that get deployed to large numbers of users also feature a training environment. This working copy of the “real” or “production” environment affords the user and company a lot of protection against mistakes, mis-operation of system functions, and basically allows you to test-drive a system, but reset and try again if something doesn’t work right or mistakes are made. Play around, learn and mess up - no harm, no foul, and the system assets, data and reputation of you, the system owner and others are all protected. That’s one very difficult...

Experimenting a bit with Pipes, Twitter, RSS feeds to LinkedIn, etc....follow a nicely "curated" Internet Media collection of Homeland Security/DHS information and tweeting at @dhsinfosharing - and find it under news in the similarly-named Homeland Security Information Sharing and Social Media LinkedIn group.

Social Media’s a scary animal, especially for companies or organizations that are accountable to stakeholders, policy, law or any other governing entity that exists to mitigate risk. Also, social media is an online collaboration channel and tools domain that’s most appropriately and effectively utilized by humans, i.e. individual personalities (preferably employees) – vs. corporate personas or third-party services. So how does a company begin to use social media, break into and contribute to the online dialogue, and avoid reputation issues while maintaining appropriate accountability? Find, identify, nurture, coach and ultimately unleash your employee social media stars – they’ll be the face of the company, the purveyors of online dialogue, and will most likely do a great job at it. Why and how? First of all, the social media platforms and tools are the dominion of the Internet-literate, the digerati, typically those more inclined and interested to communicate online at least as often...

Secretary Napolitano requested that this sidebar, from an article PARADE Magazine published about the department in the Sunday, May 24, 2009 issue titled “We Are Prepared and Resilient,” be sent to all employees. In it, she describes the department’s top priority: to “help keep the nation in a state of readiness and help assure the American people that we are prepared and resilient.” The sidebar is available on PARADE’s Web site at http://www.parade.com/news/2009/05/10-ways-homeland-security-is-keeping-you-safe.html . The full article is available at http://www.parade.com/news/2009/05/we-are-prepared-and-resilient.html . TOP TEN WAYS HOMELAND SECURITY KEEPS YOU SAFE - within this list, are these two social media nuggets: 1) In a sign that they are keeping up with the times, DHS and FEMA now have their own Twitter pages. The agencies post important updates including travel alerts, security threats, weather warnings and other alerts. 2) The U.S. Coast Guard, whose expanding role in nati...

With the proliferation of Internet-based tools and forums to share information, deliver announcements or warnings and create collaborative networks, it’s become apparent that “self-policing” strategies for controlling and managing the risks involved in delivering content through the corporate firewall can’t mitigate most risks. Most corporations and government agencies do indeed require, as terms of employment and various legislation, that care be taken and policies or procedures followed when engaging in online public discourse or otherwise moving content from the corporate-controlled environment to the public Internet. Over the past years, many good tools and governance frameworks have been developed as a routine matter of enabling Internet content posting, distribution and syndication – but these have mostly focused on automation, protection and monitoring procedures associated with corporate-managed content. “Corporate-managed content” is defined as information products or artifact...

(As also published this month in the Loudoun Chamber of Commerce Biz Connect newsletter). As the Obama administration settles into office this year, what’s described as the “most connected ever” group of leaders are quickly focusing on how to leverage the groundswell of “social media” use and expertise demonstrated by the campaigns. Social media, proven useful in politics, is rapidly being adopted by students and families, and is dramatically changing the landscape of traditional news reporting. But is it good for business, here in Loudoun and Northern Virginia? Social media may be difficult to define, but you’ll know it when you see it. It’s about talking back to the web, sharing your opinion, and participating in a multimedia dialogue among interested people in public – anonymously or not. There are many styles of online conversation and tools – from those focusing on photos or videos (like “Flickr” and “YouTube”), to reviews (like Yelp”), to those focusing on profiles, expertise o...

I had the privilege of spending many hours over the past several days immersed in expert discussion about Information Sharing, from several different perspectives. In the "open source" Web 2.0 community (at last week's Potomac Techwire Internet Outlook 2009 event), the consensus seems to be that there's a short period of "wait and see" ahead of us, to find out which online information-sharing social media capabilities will become the next big thing...Twitter's very much wait and see, Facebook has excellent fundamentals and a strong core framework, and 20-somethings on Myspace are increasingly "icked out" by the quickly growing population of 40-somethings. Everyone in the room raised their hands when asked if they were on LinkedIn . Regardless of the platform and tool, one thing was certain; online information-sharing and user-defined data aggregation (i.e. mashups) is in full-blown growth mode, and privacy is dead. That's right, according t...

Great post recently about the Government 2.0 " Brand Ambassador ", in FCW by Mark Drapeau. "It’s easy to see governments and their agencies as nameless, faceless monoliths, something impersonal or, even worse, untrustworthy. But that notion only prevails because government culture remains steeped in traditional ideas about public relations and outreach work, notions that have become archaic in an Internet-enabled, hyperconnected world. As private companies are learning to embrace social media to manage brand reputations, governments also must adapt if they wish to communicate more effectively with their citizens and stakeholders — their customers. Just like private companies, agencies need to manage their public identity — their brands — to create trust and loyalty. " This is great insight, as organizations such as DHS are stepping up their efforts and awareness around leveraging Social Media, both from a "push" perspective (i.e. communicating and engaging...

In recent weeks my Facebook "wall" has started to yield a treasure-trove of high-school era picture, stories and flashbacks, including associations of names to groups, events and interests I never then fully appreciated - but do now. A few years back, I was addressing a US National Archives program called the " Electronic Records Archives " (ERA), a program aimed at improving the nation's ability to "indefinitely" (i.e. even after Google and Microsoft go out of business in the year 3000) preserve government electronic records - including emails, online chat, digital photos, video and other data. One of the key challenges was promoting this program to users and organizations, and coming up with ways to encourage authors and managers of electronic records to identify, tag and contribute items to the records management system (to ultimately be assessed and possibly saved "forever" in the ERA system). Facebook is apparently the new "National...

Had a conundrum the past few days with Twitter - among several IDs, one was being populated with a mix of "business" and "community" news. With twitter, there's no clear way of categorizing tweets or conversations by tags or categories; the conversations are aggregated but reflect not necessarily a single topic, but either (1) a non-purpose-driven dialogue, either instance-based or continuing, or (2) or purpose-driven dialogue, where the communicators intend to resolve a question, promote something or provide alerts/updates. In traditional knowledge management terms, communities typically exist as (a) communities of interest (COIs), (b) communities of practice (COPs), or communities of purpose (COPRs). Since the ultimate outcome of these sorts of communities was to add to and share elements of a knowledgebase, the concept of "communicating for communications or simply socializing's sake" isn't really included in these three community-type defi...