Not my expert opinion, however...
I was fortunate to attend a presentation by Andrea Di Maio, VP and Distinguished Analyst with Gartner specialising in the Web 2.0 world in Government. He spoke in Darwin for over an hour and although in Education we face a variant on the challenges of Web 2.0 policy in the classroom, it was interesting and refreshing to hear what he had to say.
He initially expressed some concern, as many do that we hand over a lot of information to social media services that we were reluctant to a few years ago. What is more the line between work and personal communication becomes blurred.
Andrea presented a view on identities that we use on the internet saying that multiple identities could contravene the terms and conditions of service for a number of social media sites. In the same way that Facebook requires subscribers to be 13 years old and YouTube expects users of its service to embed rather than download their videos, we as an agency, as a government need to always comply with the terms and conditions of the social media site we are using unless it contravenes our own code of conduct within our organisation - whereupon we simply don't use the service.
In presenting the three options of banning use of social media sites within the government work context, having another identity - a "work identity" or the preferred approach which was where the employee gave permission for the employer to use their private social identity in work related interactions in the social media environments that the employer was also interested in.
You may have guessed that I support the third option. I like where I work and where I have worked. This blog is an ongoing conversation about eLearning and all the things that are intertwined with it which include my professional work life and that of my nine year old son who is using the very elearning tools that our teachers and students use to learn more and be better than what we are.
Of course we have corporate staff who operate within a departmental and whole of government body and this was where the thrust of Andrea's talk was directed.
The value of socialising ideas before they become policy, the value of crowdsourcing information and repurposing that into interesting content can only really be done where there is a common problem to solve and participants or communities willing to support making that effort for the entity or person making the request.
Apparently the notion of transparent government through the embracing of web 2.0 leading to reduced freedom of information requests has been incorrect. With all of the information available the challenge is in the interpretation and the Australian example cited was the use of the Myschool website data.
Another interesting tip was placing a time limit on the facebook page or ning site so that people within a department were not struggling to find a reason for it once the reason for establishing the site had passed. Possibly in the same way a project site in Sharepoint starts and ends with the resulting output transferred to a steady state website location, we could possibly use a similar model for some of the initiatives and emergency responses.
An example cited was the use of social media during times of emergency... I am not sure if emergency services exercises train using social media with caveats or hashtags #exerciseonly plastered all over the tweets, but we will need to be able to tweet, fb emergency messages out otherwise we may miss a large swathe of folk not connected to our media forms.
I was extremely impressed with Andrea's presentation and I am sure I took something different away from the presentation than some of my other government colleagues so I will finish with another tip which was placing a disclaimer on every social media site where there might be some ambiguity over whether you are professionally or personally making a statement.
So my disclaimer is that the views expressed here are my own or the interpretation of other folks view and my intentions are always to try and share information where it may be of some use to folks in the hope that we build a better understanding.
Thank you to IPAA, Gartner and of course Andrea Di Maio
