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Getting Government Hooked On subir dey
Social Media has already started penetrating individual’s life in a big way. It’s now time for governments to jump onto the bandwagon Democracy is a system of governance that, in a very simplistic manner of saying, gives power to the people. The power to decide the way their nation is run, the way the nation interacts with other nations in the world, the way the nation governs those who make it a nation. Social Media gives the same power to the common netizens who, for years have only been the receivers of knowledge and information online. With the increasing proliferation of Social Media over the past few years it can safely be assumed that Social Media is here to stay. What started as initiatives from members of the public, like Tom Steinberg’s fixmystreet.com or chicago. everyblock.com has now steadily crept into the mainstream. With the UK government stepping into the Social
President Obama was soon to announce the Open Government Initiative. “My administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in government. We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration. Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in government,” He said while unveiling the initiative. On his first day in office, the President signed a memorandum1 directing all federal agencies to participate and collaborate with the people and ensure that there is transparency in their functioning. Leading by example, he circumvented the White House Press Corps while seeking opinions from Americans about his administration and received over 11,000 responses. The questions from citizens are available on YouTube’s CitizenTube channel2 and viewers were required to vote for the questions that they wanted him to respond. This was a very interesting demonstration of cyberdemocracy and populism. This interview was Obama’s first after his State of the Union address3 which was viewed by 1.3 million live on the White House’s website. Of course this is apart from the approximately 48 million others who watched the address live on TV. The White House also said that about 50,000 people participated in a Q&A session with Government Officials after the speech via facebook. While the White House hasn’t been able to figure out exactly how many people viewed the speech through their iPhone app but they did announce that more than
People have always been using the Social Media of their time for a variety of purposes, including, to change in the way governments or society work Media sphere with twitter and friendfeed accounts for the Parliament and 10, Downing Street, Digital Britain and their High Commissions and Consulates. This is a realisation that has dawned upon quite a few government agencies around the world, the heaviest user of Social Media in governance is the United States of America, predictably enough, considering the way the Internet has penetrated the lives and lifestyles of its citizens. However, one can also attribute this development to President Obama’s social media powered election campaign. As a natural progression of his success with the Social Media experiment, 50
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a terabyte of data was streamed4. This isn’t surprising considering the fact that little over a year ago 13.9 million people watched the President’s inauguration on CNN.com alone. Similarly, when Obama goes on overseas trips the number of questions he receives is staggering. Sample this, 17,000 responses from a visit to Ghana and 250,000 from a visit to South Africa, albeit some of these responses were from outside Africa but still, considering the thin Internet penetration in the continent these numbers say a lot about the potential of Social Media integration in governance. As for internal transparency, Data. gov, leads the way in democratising public sector data and driving innovation. The data is being surfaced from many locations making the government data stores available to researchers to perform their own analysis. Developers are finding good uses for the datasets, providing interesting and useful applications that allow for new views and public analysis. The government is now publishing online data that has never been available in the past about federal spending and research. Data.gov started as 47 data-sets from a small group of federal agencies and as of December 2009, expanded into more than 118,000 datasets with many more such initiatives like reversing an executive order that previously limited access to presidential records and web-casting White House meetings and conference. What’s even more interesting is the administration accepting that, “By themselves, however, these steps do not provide the transformation in the philosophy of governing that the President wants. They are improvements over past practice, to be sure, and valuable ones. But more needs to be done.” Of course, the UK and the US aren’t the only countries that are on Social Media,