Terrific piece by Hilton Collins in GOVERNMENT TECHNOLOGY, “Emergency Managers and First Responders Use Twitter and Facebook to Update Communities.” Excellent examples of agencies embracing the Big Network, engaging with the public in the community space, practitioners. This is very very encouraging. Blogging on GovLoop about a piece I found on Twitter in a GovZineRead… Read more »
Keith McDonald raises an excellent point in a comment on the previous post. “We are having a real fear on missing an offensive post on a wall for example….Hypotheticaly someone could post something that stays up for a while that we simply miss because we didn’t check it out fast enough or our one FBRead… Read more »
There are around two dozen state Departments of Transportation on Facebook. Facebook’s newsfeed-style user homepage is apparently still somewhat contentious among the site’s users (I wasn’t around before the switch), but it’s the standard presentation template for most online communities, and it’s ideally suited to the kind of public outreach required of most DOTs. AnRead… Read more »
I’ve been tasked with learning about Google Sites. Google is of course ubiquitous in this business, and we’ve used Google Calendar for the Kansas Transportation Calendar on K-TOC from the beginning. Now I’m learning how the various Google apps—Calendar, Documents, Video etc.—fit together. We’re providing comms support for a fact-finding committee with members scattered acrossRead… Read more »
We’re exploring Twitter. KDOT has issued area-specific road/traffic/weather tweets for several months, thanks to the foresight of Tom Hein, our Wichita public affairs manager. Tom was hip to Twitter early on, way before me, and was issuing road update tweets even before K-TOC launched. Kim Qualls started doing the same thing for Kansas City andRead… Read more »
No one can say how all this will turn out, but I’m an optimist. I think social media can change the world, that connecting together large populations renders dictatorial government nearly impossible. Once everyone’s hooked up it will become clear that the sane outnumber the mad. I think it’s reasonable to believe that Twitter, orRead… Read more »
Our open-to-the-public online community, K-TOC, now has almost 700 members, most of them transportation professionals. Seven hundred members is considerably more than we anticipated when we launched in January, but in the past month enrollment rate has dropped substantially. I think we’re approaching the natural membership limit for a community devoted to transportation in Kansas.Read… Read more »
Live KDOT coverage of the Vice President’s visit.
Kansas Transportation Secretary Deb Miller used her first blog post on K-TOC to explain her no-earmarks policy. I’m not competent to assess how innovative this is; maybe these days there are all sorts of state cabinet officials out there blogging the whys and wherefores of their policy thinking. But I’m thinking probably not. There’s beenRead… Read more »
I’ve been thinking about Dennis McDonald‘s thoughts about K-TOC. He wrote: “I guess I see an advantage to being able to easily differentiate between a web site that serves as an official portal, and a web service that facilitates a mix of formal and informal communication. The question is, how realistic is it to combineRead… Read more »