Lee Bryant has an interesting post on the use of social tools in local government. His main points are these:

1. Use social tools to humanise the workplace.
Many public IT systems have evolved into centralised, process-driven monsters that inhibit rather than augment normal, human communication and interaction.

Social tools allow for much better social and collaborative communication within an organisation than the heavily-centralised IT-systems currently in use across the public sector. Social tools can support cross-departmental awareness and collaboration, enabling knowledge sharing in new ways. What Bryant calls “an organisational immune system”.

2. Use social tools to engage stakeholders in difficult but necessary conversations about government processes, means, and goals.
Today, government tends to have an adversarial approach to engaging with citizens, using conventional PR to present initiatives, and turning defensive when these initiatives fail to live up to expectations. Similarly, citizens are continually disappointed by government, partly due to the unrealistic expectations of fulfilment by ‘the government’ created by the typical government PR. Government can use social tools to create platforms for genuine dialogue and balancing of expectations between government and citizens regarding central issues – for instance through idea platforms like the ones we have developed for several Danish municipalities.

3. Use social tools to open up public data to allow for wider collaboration with citizens.

Government institutions gather and maintain huge databases of non-sensitive data, which are currently only being used for very limited purposes. Opening up all of this data to the public would allow citizens to use and mash-up the data, creating new avenues of innovation and public collaboration between citizens and government. A great example of this is the American Peer To Patent project, which opens up the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) patent examination process for online public participation, allowing the public to submit prior art and commentary relevant to the claims of pending patent applications. In effect, crowdsourcing part of public sector case work.

There is plenty of potential for using social tools in local government and in the public sector in general. So what’s holding it back? Well, I’ll post some thoughts on that next week. Until then, have a great weekend.