Gadi Ben-Yehuda The Necessity of Government Digital Service. From across the pond comes this blog post by Carl Haggerty, “Does local government need a local government digital service?” Though the post (as its name implies) focuses squarely on local government, the lessons are applicable to all levels of government, and the answer to the title’sRead… Read more »
Two online articles, a Twitter exchange, and my own musings in the past few days have centered around the roles that “ordinary” citizens are adopting with the help of sensors and connectivity technology. The two articles that I noticed were Matthew Hall’s “Citizens as a Platform for Civic Improvement” and Robert Krulwich’s “The Three LittleRead… Read more »
Gadi Ben-Yehuda It’s spring (meteorologically), when many people are thinking about getting engaged. By which I mean: citizen engagement, employee engagement, and engagement in and through social media. A Ladder or a Continuum. On the blog Bang the Table, Cripsin Butteriss dusts off his papers on citizen participation and shares Sherry R Arnstein’s “Ladder ofRead… Read more »
This week, we read Farhad Manjoo’s True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society Why I assigned this reading This is the first book we’ve read that throws some cold water on social media in government. The central thesis–to which we’ve all been exposed–is that people have pretty much made up their minds aboutRead… Read more »
This week we read Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. Why I assigned this text Every medium creates its own orthodoxy. You can tweet that. And the reason you can tweet that is because the technical strictures of Twitter push effective tweets to the limits of the sense:syllable ratio,Read… Read more »
Gadi Ben-Yehuda On Twitter and NPR: The State Department’s use of social media was featured in an extended piece broadcast on NPR. Is that kind of coverage a metric of social media impact? From the Cloud to Your Pocket. This week, Gov.AOL published two pieces on the federal government’s movement toward mobile. The first, aboutRead… Read more »
Gadi Ben-Yehuda This week was Social Media Week around the world, and here in DC we participated in Gov 2.0 style. To start things off: Agencies +1 new social media platforms. The State Department has joined Google+ and the Army, Navy, and Coast Guard are now on Pinterest. (Read this great primer on what, exactly,Read… Read more »
This week, we read selections from Connected, by Nicholas Christakis. Why I Assigned This Text This is the second of two texts that focus exclusively on how social media/social networks function and the relationship between people’s online social behavior and their offline activities. There are a few key concepts that this text brings into sharpRead… Read more »
Gadi Ben-Yehuda Gov in (cyber)space! edition. From Cables to Wireless. Three senior State Department officials will sit down with Alex Howard to talk about the evolution of 21st Century Statecraft: what it means, how it is progressing, and what the future holds. Alex writes about how you can submit a question, attend the panel, orRead… Read more »
The Web Manager University launched a pilot 12-week class this week that explores in-depth, the issues pertaining to social media in government. In each class meeting, we read excerpts from one book, listen to (and ask questions of) one expert in a field related the reading and the topic of the day, and then movesRead… Read more »