The highly anticipated Reboot Britain took place last Monday. The conference, organised by NESTA, was created to set the agenda for how governments use social media to engage, provide services and engage with people. From what I could see the conference was populated by consultants, civil servants, local governments officers, the odd politician (including the ubiquitous Tom Watson) and social media activists who were doing their best to amplify the event in the face of a decidedly flaky wi-fi service.
While the aim of the conference is ambitious and to be encouraged (especially for those who wouldn't mind making a bob or two) there does seem to a discernible gap between what public servants want to do and what they can do. Last week I made
some remarks on the gov2gov (
#g2g) meeting organised by
Futuregov at Canada House. I suggested that part of the reason why Social Media may struggle to find a foothold in Government was a lack of access to the tools needed to make Social Media happen. My concerns about this were increased after attending the session
Towards An Interactive Charter. At the beginning we were each handed an A4 peice of paper with
"50 Barriers To Open Government". I won't list them all however, the first four from the sub category '
Access' should give you an idea:
Access to Web 2.0 sites is blocked or filtered.
Requesting that a website is unblocked requires a form to be filled in and the request may not be actioned for 24 hours or more.
A site that has previously been unblocked is suddenly blocked again.
A site is only unblocked for the computer a staff member usually sits at - and they are unable to access Web 2.0 Sites from another part of the office or another desk.
It doesn't end there of course. Other sub headings are
Staff and
Skill,
Structure,
Policy and I suspect most importantly
Strategy. The feeling during the session seemed to be that the people at the top either don't trust Social Media, demand unnecessary and expensive levels of control or they simply don't get them. As
Helen Milner (CEO of UK Online Centres) said, many of her colleagues on her grade believe that her enthusiasm for Social Media is a phase or some sort of fad.
After a while we left the room to catch Alan Moore's address called 'Straight Line Thinking Stops Here - The True Promise Of The Networked Society'. Once I'd got over the disappointment of discovering that it was the philosopher rather than the guy who wrote The Watchmen I settled down to a blue sky, unremittingly optimistic and positively utopian vision of a networked of society where lateral thinking was key and the future was social. All good stuff but unfortunately it sounded a million miles away from the civil servants upstairs who could not convince their IT departments to upgrade their browser to IE7.
For me the two sessions acted as marker posts for a large gap. On one side there is the desire and ambition to go forward to digital future where Government and people engage in a networked society. On the other are the people who want to make it happen but can't because they don't have the tools and their bosses don't have the inclination to push their network admins to supply them with the tools. Essentially what we are looking at is an Initiative Gap.
On a positive note,
Interactive Charter are working toward bridging that gap. Their work and the work of similar agencies is as essential as Martha Lane Fox's
commitment to providing broadband access for everyone in the UK. Providing universal Digital Enfranchisement is hard enough especially when Government is not fully enfranchised themselves.
Posted via email from redduffman
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