Written by: Gustav Plato

Greenversations is a blog that can be found on EPA’s front page. It is written by EPA employees as well as guests who want to share their thoughts with EPA.
It is an enterprise wide blog. It is not considered official policy, nor does EPA verify the accuracy of the posts. Nevertheless, it is about the work the agency does, the interests of its employees, and shared interests with the public at large.

The blog covers a variety of relevant and interesting environmental issues. For example recent posts include the following:

• The use of canvas (reusable) versus plastic (throwaway) bags with a link to where you can get canvas bags
• A question that has been posted to find out if people use plastic water bottles and why?
• An informational post about community involvement in environmental decision making
• A question about what it would take to change your driving habits (this received a lot of comments – are you surprised?)

This blog certainly looks like a step in the right direction.  It could be even more powerful with a community type forum built around it.

Creating a community type forum raises the level of participation and citizen democracy to a higher level. The forum offers the venue to move from the discussion/awareness phase to the action/implementation phase. Forums, can include a variety of tools that offer the ability to bring together citizens and public officials to work on problems and achieve results.

Written by: Gustav Plato

It seems inevitable that social networking and new media will permeate government.  None of us can predict how, but there is a way to speed this up.

In order to accellerate the process government departments and agencies should look to enabling a hybrid networking strategy.  A hybrid strategy is one where leadership sets the strategic intent and direction, top-down,  for the use of new media and support of social networking to enable the mission of the department.  This includes allowing for a groundswell of grassroots efforts by encouraging this.

The other part of the hybrid approach is for individuals to drive the participation (encouraged by the leadership) from a bottom-up perspective.  Hundreds or thousands of grass roots initiatives can be formed by individuals at all levels of government.  People who are interested in global warming, or health care, or technology can easily form social neworks on platforms such as Ning, Facebook, or LinkedIn.  These networks can use a variety of communications tools such as WIKIs, Blogs, instant messaging, etc. to enable and foster communications.  They already do and the numbers are growing.  Here a a few examples.

• NAPA for example along with Mind and Media have created a site for collaboration (www.collaborationproject.org).
• For example in the intelligence community, Intelink, includes document storage, bookmarking, photo sharing, instant messaging, video sharing, wiki (Intellipedia) and email all operating inside a secure fireweall.
• LacCarling.ca is a social networking platform for government and industry to work together to communicate and advance the government’s service delivery. It has both a public and private view.

The point is that we do not need to micro-architect the outcomes, but allow for certain conditions and encourage certain behaviours.
Over the coming months, iiGrowth will look for examples of social networks and new media in government.  If you come across this blog, post what you have seen on the growth of collaborative government.