GovTwit Week in Review: 8/02 – 8/08 » Community

Interesting Gov 2.0 tweets and stories from August 2-8, 2009

Gov20Radio discussed the challenges of turning from strict hierarchies to collaborative culture with Gwynne Kostin, a federal new media practitioner at DHS and publisher of the blog “On Dot-Gov.”

Listen here.

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Last week, Wired’s Danger Room reported that the U.S. DoD is considering banning many social media platforms. In response, the DoD kicked off a “Web 2.0 Guidance Forum” to crowdsource input on any decision, and the Pentagon’s “Social Media Czar” Price Floyd said “…we can’t…let security concerns trump doing business. We have to do business… We need to be everywhere men and women in uniform are and the public is. If that’s MySpace and YouTube, that’s where we need to be, too.”

Despite Floyd’s opinion, on Monday the U.S. Marine Corps banned all social media use effective immediately. You can read the Marine Corps order in full here. Chatter about the Corp’s decision went beyond the government crowd, and according to one blog post, the move is one of the Top Five Social Media Bans in the U.S. (others include ESPN, which banned Twitter this week, and the image-obsessed NFL, which is working on its Twitter policy).

Meanwhile, over in the UK, British troops are being encouraged by the Ministry of Defence to use Twitter and Facebook to keep in touch with family and friends. But that doesn’t necessarily mean the Brit’s are more enlightened than we are in the U.S. InformationWeek reported this week that two city council members in Swansea, Wales, are coming under fire for Twittering during council meetings. All of this back and forth only goes to show that defining social media “rules” is a topic that is still confusing to many organizations around the globe.

[UPDATE: Thanks to KC Wood’s comment, which pointed out that the Marine Corps issued a clarifying statement later in the week that it “does not limit Marines’ access to social networking sites.” I would note, however that the statement doesn’t address why the order, MARADMIN Active Number: 0458/09 remains titled “Immediate Ban of Internet Social Networking Sites…” The statement did point out their social media page, where official Marine Corps account IDs are listed for various sites including Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and Twitter. ]

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We had the first tweet from space from astronaut Michael J. Massimino back on May 12. On August 4th, NASA astronaut and U.S. Army Col. Tim Kopra became the first International Space Station crew member to use Twitter to discuss living and working in orbit.

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What do you get when you mix 4,423 tweets (150+ pages of data) from 629 contributors at 35 conference sessions, eight volunteers and five days? The Open Gov and Innovations Conference Tweet Book, produced on GovLoop in partnership with the 1105 Group. Props to Andy Krzmarzick for leading this effort!

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If you missed it, federal CTO Aneesh Chopra was out in California this week and stopped by CNet to talk with the Buzz Out Loud team. You can check out the video below and read the write up over at BOL’s site.

Watch here.
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Twitter went down due to some Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, that continue as of Sunday and is still throwing some third-party apps for a loop.

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Caught some tweets about a lobbying group that has been launched by more than 70 companies, academic institutions and communities to promote open source software as a “transparent and cost-effective” option for U.S. government agencies.

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ResearchBuzz, a site delivering news about “search engines, databases and other information collections” posted a review of GovTwit titled “Watching the Government Go Tweet Tweet Tweet.”

The Examiner also ran a story about GovTwit titled: “Government technology 101.”

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Interesting Additions to GovTwit Directory Tweeted This Week:

Tweets from the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies

Added @hometownnews1 (official link between Military & American public)

Added @afri09 @afsymposiums @afspace @mobilityairmen @ USAFBand @nellisafb @45SpaceWingPA @usafthunderbird

Added UT IDs: @centervilleut @salemcity @HerrimanCity @SouthJordanUT @CedarCityUtah @UtahCountyGov @ironcounty #gov20 (HT @fasttrackgov)