One school of thought suggests that the use of social media should be carefully planned and controlled by government, and that having a sufficiently compelling purpose is strong enough a guarantee that communities will be sustainable and thrive.

Another school of thought says that – in the case of government – no planning is really possible or useful until when you have figured out what exists already. This means that, even if a government organization identifies a compelling purpose, it still needs to look for existing or emerging communities and assess whether to join them, complement them or do something different.

My colleague Anthony Bradley has recently posted about “Piloting Social Media Creates More Risks Than It Mitigates”, where he rightly points out that:

You may only get one shot at catalyzing community formulation. Don’t pilot, test, prototype, or experiment on the community. Don’t artificially restrict participation. The law of numbers is a critical factor in building a thriving and productive community. Why would you only go after a small subset of a target audience when mass adoption is a critical success factor? You will handicap success from the start.

I cannot but agree more with this. But my contention, and the reason why – unlike Anthony – I do like the term “pilot” is that for a government organization is very easy to believe its online presence is relevant just because it has a strong and recognized brand. But what is a compelling purpose for a government organization, may not be so for its target audience. So, before venturing into creating one’s own community, it is imperative to identify whether external communities already exist, possibly join them (as a group of individuals and not as a government organization) and “pilot” participation there.

Is this community valuable to our goals? Can we influence its behaviors? Is it able to generate knowledge that we could not aggregate on a government-branded community? Is there any indication that it can generate public value for our agency? These are some of the questions that employees who experiment with these communities should answer, before doing any planning for a government-driven community.

Over a year ago I published a research note (How Government Can Use Social Networks – access to clients only) that seems to be applicable to most of the cases I have seen, where people are struggling either with finding the compelling purpose to launch a community or with making sure it will be compelling to others and not just to them.

The note suggests a framework called SOCIAL to empower employees to

• Seek communities that are relevant for their job and purpose,
• For communities that seem interesting, Observe their behaviors;
• For communities that seem promising, Complement their content with public information where deemed fit;
• For communities that seem valuable, Involve in deeper discussions (with appropriate disclaimer).
• Up to this point, participation has been at the employee level. It is now time to Assess whether this community can have an enterprise value. If not, it will remain as an individual tool or be discontinued. If yes, then
• Leverage it as an enterprise one

This is the kind of process that government organizations should go through before considering the development of their own external social networks. Seeking, observing, complementing and involving is exactly what I mean by “piloting”. If the outcome of such a process is not satisfactory and the organization still believes it has a strongly compelling purpose, then it can well develop its own presence. However, if such a compelling purpose is difficult to find or to socialize, doing nothing and letting employees pilot new emerging communities is a perfectly legitimate option.

As I’ve said in a recent post, the path to success is from the bottom up, and from the outside in.

There does not seem to be a real sense of urgency. Engaging citizens remains a noble aspiration but few would consider doing it by reaching out to them on somebody else’s social network. With few exceptions, most seem to be banning access to social sites from the workplace, and there is very little done even in terms of social media strategies and policies, let alone any reflection on the pivotal role of employees.

Do not get me wrong here. European clients are as smart as North American ones, and they can be as articulate if not more. But they seem to be unwilling to challenge the status quo and to believe that anything can happen from the bottom-up and from the outside-in. Most feel comfortable in starting with tackling internal collaboration and – although they know very well that their employees are already using consumer social media – they’d rather ignore the impact that these media might have on internal collaboration goals. When it comes to external engagement, there is no room for individual employee’s initiatives, and any venture needs a political blessing. Unless the mayor, the minister, the governor say that government needs to use web 2.0 to engage people, they won’t.

Although I did not discuss this topic with any UK client yet, it is interesting to note how the fair amount of activity there is probably connected to the political push created by the Digital Britain plan and – earlier – by the Power of Information report. As usual, things take place in government when the hierarchy decides they do, but I’ve certainly noted in North America a greater propensity to explore new avenues, to trust knowledge workers, to step outside traditional boundaries.

So after two days in Cannes, my statement about North Americans being more likely than Europeans to get government 2.0 is even more valid. I hope my last day in Cannes tomorrow will give me hope, as I believe European citizens and government employees are using social media as much as their North American counterparts and denial will not help for long.

I have been reluctant to pick the number one factor, until when during a meeting last Friday, an executive from a federal Canadian agency used the term I had in mind but I had never put on paper. We were discussing how to make content more appealing to citizens using social media, and what the Smithsonian and others have been doing with Flickr, where they push content that can be tagged, classified, augmented by people on line. As I was going through this and other examples, I concluded with what I thought was the  common denominator in all success stories so far. Funnily enough, this government executive (a very smart lady, with a long experience in several large agencies, and an enviably open mind) and I used the same term at the same moment, so much so that it almost sounded like a duet: “You have to let go” we both said.

This is it. This is the key ingredient, the secret sauce for government 2.0 initiatives to succeed. Of course it is not the only one, and it won’t always guarantee success, but should be top of mind for all those who strategize about and lead government 2.0 projects.

“Let go” means that you cannot plan in advance, you cannot set a future state architecture, you cannot control your employees too tightly, you cannot make assumptions about where and how and when value will be generated.

Pretty scary, isn’t it?

In most cases I have delivered uncomfortable, controversial messages. The blurring boundaries between internal and external collaboration, the urgency of empowering employees besides (or rather than) citizens, the need for simple and enforceable social media policy that cover employee behaviors both on corporate network and elsewhere. For many, my examples of how consumer social media are creeping into internal processes were an eye-opener, and so were the calls for a bottom-up approach, where government agencies should let go control to facilitate engagement

What I noticed in every single meeting, also when people came from a completely different perspective, has been the willingness to challenge themselves, to consider alternative viewpoints, to use some of my intentionally provocative views to reflect about where they can improve. Once again, it has been a refreshing experience, with officials at all levels debating issues, bouncing back ideas, drafting roadmaps they had not considered possible before. It has been an exciting experience where I have got from our clients at least as much as I hope I have given them, if not more.

While a typical North American celebration such as Halloween approaches, I can’t but think about how different many Europeans are when challenged on the same topics. I do distinctly remember a guy who sat in a minister cabinet explaining to me why I was totally wrong about suggesting that government agencies open social media access to their employees: his view was one where employees are not an asset but a liability, where management tools are the same as those used in the fifties, where time seems to have frozen at the gates of his agency. He is not alone though. Several officials in European countries that I have been interacting with are relatively dismissive of any advice that runs contrary to their beliefs. I never assume I am right in what I say, but I love to provide alternative viewpoints for people to challenge their own ideas and possibly improve them. While most North American clients will engage and react, most European clients won’t.

Of course there are exceptions. People in Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands  or Ireland show similar characteristics as North Americans when it comes to debating issues. But in most other countries I have to be careful not to piss people off or to lower my expectations about the outcome of a debate.

Maybe the world is changing and I will find multiple counterexamples to this as soon as I start my next week at Cannes Symposium. I very much hope so, as I believe that in these turbulent times only those who are bold enough to accept that they may be wrong will thrive.

During our conversation, I pressed them on the usual subject of what is the compelling purpose that should make their clients use their toolset as opposed to commercial tools, and how the would manage the blurring boundaries between internal and external networking. In several meetings with some other agencies during the last two days, I had been discussing about how the use of consumer social software creeps into internal government processes and often meets some of the internal collaboration requirements.

When I asked quite bluntly what was their value proposition, a member of the team dismissed my view about blurring boundaries and stated quite clearly that government employees are looking for a secure environment for collaboration. He mentioned that young people, even when attracted by government thanks to the size and complexity of the problems it faces, tend to leave relatively early as they feel they are not given the right tools. As their agencies do not allow them to access external social media from the corporate network, a more secure environment that provides the ability to collaborate behind the firewall is a better value proposition. Further, they would not incur the risks that may be faced on external media, such as security and privacy breaches.

My bottom line for that conversation is that the single most powerful value proposition for an internally developed network is just fear. Threatening employees that they could harm the agency and themselves if they go “in the wild” should be enough to scare the hell out of them and make them embrace the internal platform “en masse”.

However the train has already left the station and people use whichever external tool they see fit from home or on their smartphones. Controlling or even policing this is just an illusion. Internal tools can add value to external ones, but not quite the other way around. Only looking at this from the outside in rather than from the inside out will give relevance and a decent lifespan to internal social software developments and deployments.

Nobody would argue that making public data easier to find and consume is not a good thing. However making data available, keeping it fresh and up-to-date, does cost money. The actual cost of making data available (ensuring it is de-identified, accurate and up-to-date) is not difficult to determine for an agency. However the cost of tracking related mashups, managing comments and requests for data availability and improvement, getting extra capacity to manage data that are very frequently accessed, all these are more difficult to predict.

A conversation with a federal client on Monday about this last aspect was illuminating. He observed that certain data may allow businesses to create services that they charge for and profit from. If successful, these services, irrespective of whether they are useful to the public, would put a significant demand on the government infrastructure. The question then would be how to strike a fair balance between providing data transparency and access to the public, and ensuring that taxpayer money is not being used to subsidize businesses. It would seem fair to have those businesses contribute to the cost of the infrastructure that allows them to be profitable. On the other hand there do not seem any provisions in the current “open data” initiatives.

The supporters of open data will clearly say that this is a desirable problem to have to deal with, as it would be the proof that the approach works. On the other hand, it is important that open government proponents ask themselves these questions, together with others about the possible downside of transparency, as this will help them anticipate issues that may derail these important initiatives.

Great stuff, I’m sure, but I fail to see who would be willing to know about whether a construction site they are walking by has received financial contributions through the stimulus package. I’m sure that, not being American and not having any particular attachment to this, I am missing an important part of the picture. But I am still waiting to see the valuable applications that will be created by leveraging data made available through data.gov. So far most of the open government data examples I have seen are about giving people a way to keep an eye on what government does. This is definitely very important, but can we have something new (besides traffic, parking and public transportation) that has to do with service delivery, to re-energize our faith in the power of information?

The county CIO who arranged this meeting said that people are probably having conversations about what should be done to improve the county when they are at a bar or are watching kids playing soccer, which is what they usually do rather than show up at council meetings.

The discussion then went into how social media could help bridge that gap and whether a single Facebook page or different pages for different agencies would be most appropriate. What I told them was that Facebook or Flickr or YouTube or any other social media is pretty much like the bar or the soccer field. People spend time there mostly to socialize with friends and peers. Creating a county or agency Facebook page and waiting for them to be friends or fans is like pretending that they leave the bar or the soccer game to come to the council meeting.

So the best option is for government folks to dress casual and join the cyberequivalent of pubs, soccer and baseball fields, to be on their own citizens’ social media groups and pages, listen to what they discuss and – where relevant and appropriate – contribute to those discussions. A county communication officer observed that the boundaries between being a member of the community and a county employee have always been blurred, and if she was at a soccer game discussing about whether the park needed being cleaned, people would look at her both as a peer and a county officer. There is no reason why this should not be the case on social media.

I met three categories of clients:

• Have-nots.. They usually work in domains of activity that they do not feel are conducive to the use of social media, especially agencies that have little or no citizen-facing role, such as internal service providers, auditors or regulators.
• Communicators. They work for citizen-facing agencies and look at social media as an alternative or complementary delivery channel to reach out to citizens. they are concerned with how to articulate an effective Facebook page for heir agency, or with using Twitter to provide feeds to citizens rather than implementing RSS feeds on their own web site. Employees are allowed on social media only as administrators of the official pages or feeds.
• Savvies. They appreciate that there is no real boundary between the personal and professional use of social media. They have it all covered, with all the policies, security controls and monitoring activities that are needed to let employees safely use social media in the workplace.

I am happy to report that, discussing with clients in all groups, I was able to ask them questions they could not answer and are likely to reflect upon in the coming weeks. Here are three samples, one per group:

• For have-nots: What about gathering and analyzing information that people create, accumulate, tag, rate on social media and that may be relevant or even critical to your mission?
• For communicators: What makes you think that people would care at all about the face of your agency on Facebook? .
• For savvies: Are you sure that social media fair use policies cover also the use from personal devices and off working hours?

Reality is that understanding and leveraging social media is a long journey toward a destination that nobody has figured out yet. Banning use, pretending that this change won’t affect us or our agencies or assuming that we can drive and control that impact, is futile.

Two main take-aways for me:

• Government clients are confused as to (1) whether vendor offerings really meet their security requirements, (2) which workloads could be easily moved to a public cloud and (3) what’s the roadmap from public to private/community clouds.
• Some vendors have great confidence that their existing solutions already meet most of the security requirements and claim that there is already a lot of government stuff in the cloud.

Therefore, either vendors are not effectively or convincingly marketing their success stories, or government clients use “security” as a blanket topic not to move to the cloud.

My current reading though – and I know this won’t be welcome by some – is that most of these conversations really are about alternative service delivery models.

Except one or two cases, all conversations focused on “cloud computing can make me save money” rather than “I need scalability or elasticity”.

But even just looking at cost savings, most compare their current costs with numbers that come from “public cloud” vendor offerings. On the other hand it is clear that certification and accreditation to comply with a variety of security requirements, as well as additional constraints about service levels (such as finer-grained control of data location) will increase costs. Last but not least, I’ve heard two clients mention the “geopolitics” angle that I recently covered in a blog post as well as in a research note (Gartner clients only).

All this led me to tweet this simple line: In most cases government organizations that mention cloud are just looking for better sourcing, and don’t really need a cloud.