In build­ing open gov­ern­ment ser­vices, we often focus on work that deliv­ers fan­tas­tic value to the pub­lic. But what comes before that? We need to decide who we’re talk­ing to. How we’re doing it. Why we’re doing it. What our expec­ta­tions are.

The slides below accom­pany my talk at the Social Media in Gov­ern­ment con­fer­ence in Can­berra on 13 – 14 Decem­ber 2011. The text below the slides is the “offi­cial” ver­sion, but is unlikely to resem­ble the talk as delivered.

For the past 15 months, I’ve been work­ing with a small gov­ern­ment organ­i­sa­tion with the most for­get­table name, but per­haps one of the most inter­est­ing mis­sions of any organ­i­sa­tion with a .gov​.au domain name.

It’s mis­sion, as stated, is to “improve Australia’s effec­tive­ness in civil-​​military col­lab­o­ra­tion for con­flict and dis­as­ter man­age­ment overseas”.

The Asia Pacific Civil-​​Military Cen­tre of Excel­lence is a multi-​​agency col­lec­tion of peo­ple sec­onded from the uni­formed mil­i­tary, civil­ian Depart­ment of Defence, DFAT, AusAID, Attorney-General’s and Emer­gency Man­age­ment Aus­tralia, the Aus­tralian Fed­eral Police and the NGO sec­tor. The Deputy Direc­tor is a sec­ondee from the New Zealand Government.

It’s a fairly top-​​heavy organ­i­sa­tion. Every­one there is an expert of sig­nif­i­cant stand­ing in their area of exper­tise, from the for­mer AFP rep­re­sen­ta­tive to Afghanistan, an Ambas­sador or Deputy Head of Mis­sion in sev­eral coun­tries, experts on inter­na­tional rela­tions, women in con­flict, dis­as­ter man­age­ment, and their just retired Exec­u­tive Direc­tor, Mike Smith, who was a senior Gen­eral in East Timor and for­mer CEO of Aust­care Aus­tralia (now ActionAID).

On any given day, the Cen­tre can be deliv­er­ing train­ing to the civil­ian, police or mil­i­tary staff bound for over­seas peace­keep­ing or dis­as­ter recov­ery deploy­ments, con­duct­ing and fund­ing research into strate­gic pol­icy on civilian-​​police-​​military col­lab­o­ra­tion in con­flict and dis­as­ter zones or host­ing Ambas­sadors, inter-​​governmental del­e­ga­tions, senior UN and 3rd sec­tor staff on vis­its to their salu­bri­ous Quean­beyan headquarters.

These peo­ple are great at work­ing with each other when deployed and liv­ing in demount­a­bles in Oruz­gan or sub-​​Saharan Africa, and they’re great at get­ting together in for­mal sit­u­a­tions such as con­fer­ences and high-​​level meet­ings — and believe me, these peo­ple live for that stuff. What they’re not so good at, and what they pretty much had no idea about when I got there a year ago was open government.

These peo­ple are used to deal­ing in the Chatham House Rule. In diplo­matic nego­ti­a­tion. In strate­gic talks. In their every day work.

And, for that rea­son, they weren’t good at get­ting the mes­sage out. My mis­sion, in my time at the Cen­tre, has been as part of a two per­son strate­gic com­mu­ni­ca­tions team, to focus on online com­mu­ni­ca­tions, on stake­holder out­reach, on knowl­edge shar­ing and on bring­ing these peo­ple slowly and gen­tly into a world where open gov­ern­ment and 21st Cen­tury com­mu­ni­ca­tions exists.

Let’s say from the start, this hasn’t been easy. And there’s a long way to go.

So, to set the scene… when I arrived at the Cen­tre, not includ­ing me (I’m a lit­tle dif­fer­ent to the norm) there were, from a 35 per­son staff:

  • two Twit­ter accounts
  • four Face­book accounts
  • five peo­ple on LinkedIn
  • no Flickr users

Today, it’s a lit­tle bit dif­fer­ent. There are a few more Twit­ter users, sev­eral more on Face­book and so on. But these peo­ple are so busy with their reg­u­lar work­load it’s unrea­son­able to expect them to be rapid adopters of social tools for their day-​​to-​​day work. That stuff just doesn’t fit in with their reg­u­lar way of oper­at­ing, and it’s unrea­son­able (no mat­ter how much the Chief of Staff, the Strat Comms Man­ager and I want it to be dif­fer­ent) to expect otherwise.

So, in a place like this, where get­ting the mes­sage out about what you do and why it’s impor­tant is your key task, what do you do? Espe­cially if you’re the only resource with the nec­es­sary knowl­edge and skills?

At the Cen­tre, we took a look at a num­ber of elements:

  • What is the over­ar­ch­ing strate­gic com­mu­ni­ca­tions goal for the Cen­tre? Who do we need to influ­ence? How? And why?
  • Where are we already achiev­ing those goals? Where are the gaps?
  • Who might we be miss­ing? Who were the “known unknowns”?

What this all led to were a num­ber of short and long term goals, tied into the Centre’s strate­gic com­mu­ni­ca­tions plan, that had open gov­ern­ment ele­ments attached to them. I have strong man­age­ment sup­port, all the way to the top of the Cen­tre, and, even though we belong to the oth­er­wise con­ser­v­a­tive VCDF Group within the Depart­ment of Defence, and we need to man­age that rela­tion­ship care­fully, there is sup­port there as well.

So, what did we do at the Cen­tre to make open gov­ern­ment and social media a part of how the Cen­tre does busi­ness? We did a num­ber of things:

  • we reserved Cen­tre iden­ti­ties on a num­ber of social networks
  • we wrote a short, clear, staff social media guid­ance and had it approved by VCDF and the Min­is­ter for Defence
  • we began using Twit­ter to put out notices about things the Cen­tre was doing and also use Face­book to sup­ple­ment those messages
  • we started doing project man­age­ment using Base­camp, allow­ing us to track project activ­i­ties and to bring in the fre­quent exter­nal col­lab­o­ra­tors we work with
  • we rede­vel­oped what was a pretty ter­ri­ble web site into some­thing more flex­i­ble, rebuild­ing using Word­Press. We’re still the only Defence-​​based organ­i­sa­tion with a blog that allows open comments
  • we made a delib­er­ate deci­sion that all future pub­li­ca­tions released by the Cen­tre would be licensed CC-​​BY. We’re also pub­lish­ing all papers pro­duced by Cen­tre staff and our funded researchers online as HTML and PDF on our site as well as on SlideShare
  • we started post­ing Cen­tre imagery to Flickr. Sure, it’s mostly peo­ple at meet­ings in suits, but it’s a record worth having
  • we started a YouTube chan­nel off the back of our major event last year. It now includes video inter­views with a num­ber of lead­ing author­i­ties on civil-​​military inter­ac­tion and will shortly be get­ting sev­eral new additions
  • we refreshed the Centre’s newslet­ter, for­merly an email-​​attached PDF to a cou­ple of hun­dred peo­ple, to be a Cam­paign Mon­i­tor dri­ven email newslet­ter to over 1000 opt-​​in sub­scribers. It largely directs read­ers to full length con­tent on our site, but also includes newsletter-​​only con­tent to keep peo­ple interested

Now, none of this is ter­ri­bly dif­fer­ent to any­thing many organ­i­sa­tions have done. How­ever, I like to think we’ve done one thing a lit­tle dif­fer­ently, and that’s audi­ence tar­get­ing.

The Cen­tre has a fairly small, highly spe­cialised audi­ence. It’s mostly very senior peo­ple. They’re often not ter­ri­bly famil­iar with open gov­ern­ment or social tools. They work all over the world and usu­ally have on the ground, “dirty boots” expe­ri­ence. They work for the UN, the African Union, or 3rd sec­tor organ­i­sa­tions like the ICRC, or Aus­tralian Gov­ern­ment agen­cies, or one of the sev­eral near-​​equivalents to the Cen­tre based in other coun­tries such as the UK Government’s Sta­bil­i­sa­tion Task Force, Sweden’s Folke Bernadotte Acad­emy, Canada’s START or the US’s Cen­tre for Excel­lence in Dis­as­ter Man­age­ment and Human­i­tar­ian Affairs.

We also have a grow­ing group of peo­ple inter­ested in our work from the aca­d­e­mic sec­tor, espe­cially the secu­rity and defence col­leges, and from pol­icy and secu­rity think-​​tanks like the Lowy Institute.

We decided pretty early on that these were the peo­ple we most needed to focus on in our open gov­ern­ment and strate­gic com­mu­ni­ca­tions efforts. Unlike a lot of the open gov­ern­ment case stud­ies about public-​​facing efforts we see at the gazil­lion con­fer­ences that now cover the sub­ject, the deci­sion to focus on “peo­ple like us” has paid real dividends.

We’re mea­sur­ing as much as we can as effi­ciently as we can (and it needs some improve­ment, no ques­tion) but here’s what we’ve noticed (qual­i­fy­ing all this with the fact that our audi­ence is small and highly focussed):

  • our web site receives more than twice the traf­fic the old site did. We don’t get too many com­ments yet, but as with every­thing, it’s a work in progress
  • we have sev­eral peo­ple who now chat to us on Twit­ter and Face­book (and we chat back)
  • we’ve improved aware­ness of our work with all our “par­ent” stake­hold­ers with Aus­tralian Gov­ern­ment and with those stake­hold­ers else­where who care about our sub­ject matter
  • we’ve begun to pay atten­tion to a raft of new and emer­gent activ­ity in the civil-​​military sec­tor that wasn’t even on the radar before we began look­ing online. In par­tic­u­lar, the capac­ity for online vol­un­teer com­mu­ni­ties and social media to be a part of the con­flict and dis­as­ter man­age­ment first response is an emer­gent and grow­ing part of the work the Cen­tre is look­ing at

We’re still not quite a year in to our open gov­ern­ment efforts. We have a very long way to go to be any­where near where I think we could and should be. But, for an organ­i­sa­tion that had no idea what was pos­si­ble a year ago, the fact that we’re doing all this is a big step. Not to men­tion (and I haven’t men­tioned this before now) that we now have a deployed and richly devel­op­ing wiki-​​based social intranet that all staff are using.