The Febrary 25, 2009 Collaboration Project Innovation Speaker Series meeting featured Susan Swart, Chief Information Officer, and her team from the U.S. Department of State, speaking on the new collaborative initiatives the department is launching in the field of new media. Following their presentation was a facilitated discussion of how to implement the President's Transparency and Open Government Agenda.

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Presentation and Meeting Notes

The Department of State's presentation: "State 2.0: Using Collaborative New Media to Conduct Diplomacy"

Collaboration Project Meeting
National Academy of Public Administration
February 25, 2009
12:00 PM - 2:00 PM

Presentation - U.S. Department of State

Presenters: Susan Swart (STATE CIO), Darren Krape, Michael Logan, Molly Moran.

Overview

Knowledge itself is State's key product, but its people are spread across the globe and stovepiped communications hamper using that knowledge effectively.
State has embarked on a number of collaborative initiatives to begin breaking down stovepipes and share information better.
Many of these are grassroots initiatives; they happened because people with specific interests wanted to do things differently.
The new administration has brought lots of focus to using these tools to execute State's mission, but State is sometimes slow to change.

Virtual Presence Post program (VPP) - Web 2.0 for public outreach

There are many places on earth with no physical US presence, and many people there get news primarily from state-run media. How does the US engage these people?
Using the VPP system, State can reach out to local communities and get a high impact with fewer resources.
VPPs are all customized and differ by the locations they serve. For example, the VPP in Nanning, China has a blog called "Where Is Ed Dunne?" that features, among other things, an interesting conversation about American vs. Chinese ideas of vacation. This helps engage citizens there directly with State personnel.
The Gaza VPP is in Arabic; it conducts lots of web chats, since State personnel can't be there physically. It hosts contests to get people engaged and talking about subjects like democracy.

Communities@State and Diplopedia

Connect Public Diplomacy Officers in each of the European countries and allow them to share best practices as well as their PD successes, with one another and with Washington.

Communities@State is a collection of blog-based websites where users can exchange ideas on topics of common interest. They are a good way to capture and categorize conversations by date and topic, and archive them for future reference.
80% of communities are on the interagency unclassified network. Overall, the communities average about 12,000 visits and 30,000 pageviews per month.
The initiative has gotten State out of the "trap" of email. "Communities" is like an evolution of e-mail or a listserv. EUR Affairs in particular was looking for rescue from email - exchange ideas, best practices, success stories, and aggregate entries for a weekly newsletter.
Diplopedia is a wiki-based project that acts as an online encyclopedia for State. It is based on Mediawiki, the same platform that powers Wikipedia; it is easy to use and familiar.
Diplopedia launched quietly in 2006; in 2007 and 2008 it has 200% growth along all success criteria. These include the number of authors who are actual users, not administrators (1500) and the number of page views (over 4 million).
It is not hard to get people to adopt both of these tools, but what is hard is getting them to use them in tandem, and see how to use the best features of both. Communities are better for late-breaking stuff, but information of enduring value is better served by a wiki. Leveraging the best features of different technologies is the key. We don't fit square pegs into round holes - we CAN do that, but try not to.
All of these initiatives had top-level support from a DAS and Office Director - that helped a lot. Those senior officials were the first posters on the site. Top level support really helps make a culture change and spur adoption.

Japan Economic Scope

Uses Communities@State to better share the information from the weekly email newsletter that used to be sent to 800 people. By moving to a blog tool, they could take advantage of archiving, user-managed notifications, more timely publishing of information, removal of bottleneck, etc. - without doing any extra work.

The Japan Economic Scope is a community that is the product of the Economic Section of the embassy in Tokyo. In Tokyo, that is a very large office of people, and they are prolific writers and analysts. They had been putting together a weekly email newsletter that they sent out to a list of interested people - some in other parts of the embassy, some in other consulates, many in D.C., and others who could be somewhere else entirely but have a personal interest in the topic.
The challenge was that the number of people who got their e-mail list had grown and become about 800 - so imagine sending an email every week to 800 people! Out Of Offices, bouncebacks, and the information just sits in peoples' inboxes. So, they wanted to move to a blog format. They knew what their content and audience was - those are questions we ask every group who say they want to start a new community.
They used MovableType, blogging software that automatically archives all of your content. The site now has 6,000-7,000 entries and it's been up for about a year. The site automatically manages the audience - there's a subscription feed. 936 people are subscribed which is more than they had on email. The system lets people manage their own content and add or delete themselves from the list. And some readers don't want the entire site, just a certain topic - you can subscribe just for that category. It lets people manage for themselves how they get and manage information. The time needed for one person to coordinate everyone's writing is reduced.
It's also a good knowledge management system. It helps people get up to date if they're going to be stationed in Tokyo. In the past, people would forward their e-mails and lots of side conversations would take place, but those weren't centralized or saved. Now, they happen in the blog's "comments" section and are saved.

The Sounding Board

Secretary Clinton wants to use social media to advance diplomacy. She wanted an intranet website for State employees to send suggestions to leadership.
The site was launched and had a great response; 130 fantastic and substantial ideas were submitted. The comments feature was recently turned on and over 100 were already received. People are taking this seriously and are excited about it.

Question and Answer with the Department of State

Is sounding board attributed or can you be anonymous?

Both - We have talked to Citizens Briefing Book and TSA IdeaFactory about this issue. We've given people a choice to be anonymous, because Secretary Clinton wanted that and had announced it that way. We hope it makes people feel more secure saying what's on their minds.

What is the management process for prioritizing and actually acting on the ideas and making them part of State culture?

There is not a vetting process. People come to the office and work through their ideas and talk about what they want to accomplish. So far, the institutionalization has come through the communities. It's still a very grassroots adoption model - but we think there will be a tipping point. The age of our workforce is also an issue. Some levels of the organization are still used to telegraph "cables" with a hierarchical clearance process - we have some work to do convincing them.
How we do filtering depends on the initiative. Our challenge now is trying to strengthen the projects by linking them together. There is a new community site for social media practitioners. Comments are generally not moderated, although the Sounding Board process is still TBD.

How do you do policy? Where is the blog hosted?

We really want community blogs. On Diplopedia we just had gardeners that emerged. We spread the word among friends and supporters. We only announced the wiki once we had substantial content on there. Sounding Board is the same. How do we staff it? We use folks from different offices now, but that won't sustain. We reached out to the Diplopedia wiki community and blog administrators and asked for volunteers, and many said okay!
As people rotate into the foreign service, it's getting institutionalized because people are taking it on as part of their portfolio.
Many say "Okay, the technology is great, but where's the data?" We host lots of these on ODNI's servers but it's still an extranet. We do have a certification process, if you use the word "pilot" people are less scared

We have been advocating that when someone comes to a government website, they should be able to accomplish their task online. You talked a lot about improving diplomacy and democracy and knowledge management, but how do you actually help people accomplish tasks online like visa & passport applications?

The visa process is hard because you need personal interaction and it takes place overseas. Consular Affairs has projects to automate the visa process. Passports are the same.
Lots of agencies work for the public but we also mainly work with foreign governments -they're our audience.

Much of State's efforts are focused on knowledge management. Is that resident function with CIO or also a CKO?

These initiatives are within the CIO, but it's a very distributed IT environment throughout State. There is a CKO that is within the CIO organization.

Facilitated Discussion - Implementing the President's Transparency and Open Government Agenda

Lena Trudeau facilitated the discussion on Implementing the President's Transparency and Open government agenda. She introduced Michele Heffner from GSA who is on detail to the Office of Science and Technology Policy. Michele agreed to share the group's feedback with others in the office.
Michele outlined the White House's strategy for fulfilling the requirements of the Transparency and Open Government directive. The strategy has three components :

Using the MAX system to get input on ideas and topics for the directive, across three discussions: Transparency, Participation, and Collaboration.
On the Medium-term they will use Innovation.gov to get the broader community involved by providing ideas and comments. This will be an iterative process using blogs, jams, etc. They will also be collecting best practices and will eventually have a list of 10 pilot projects to focus on.
Intend to create an Innovation Lab, an ongoing forum for bringing together innovators from inside and outside of government.

After Michele made her remarks, the room was opened up for discussion. The following is an aggregate of the questions posed and ideas suggested by the group.
What would we tell Obama to do, knowing our government culture?

One way to accomplish culture change would be to have the President meet physically with his political and SES leadership to talk about his priorities.
Obama is "the CEO of government" and should involve those who are tasked with carrying out his vision.

There is a need to define what "open government" means:

It's more than transparency; it's about the orchestration of capability and reaching outside our silos.
Tapping into outside expertise should make us more efficient and effective.

The argument was made that we cannot sustain a government that's collaborative and one that's hierarchical - they cannot coexist.

Suggested using previous initiatives like HRLoB and seeing what aspects of that can be useful.
Initiatives like that are useful "accelerators" in identifying the communities of practice who need to be engaged with a given issue regardless of agency.

State and local government needs to be involved at the beginning of the process.
Most people in government are focused on implementing the stimulus and reviewing their own existing regulations.

Collaborative solutions have to be relevant to the business process; most agencies don't have time to focus on anything else. Getting the CIO into the agency's business always seems like "extra work" - it has to be real.

It is important that there is a set of criteria for identifying the 10 pilot projects.

The directive is aimed at CIOs, but none of this can happen without forcing the criteria against which they'll make selections.
There should be one initiative each in: regulatory issues; service-oriented issues; an issue where the citizen is not the client; environmental issues including health care; an area that demonstrates concretely how transparency saves money.
It is critical to set up deliverables every few months. Some can be internal, some external, but this will keep momentum going forward.

A common application infrastructure would be useful so that folks don't leave the room with "21 different solutions" to the problem.

A standard would help answer a lot of top-level questions ("how much does it cost?" "who else is doing this?") and speed the process of putting things in place.

One example where collaboration was helpful was DoD's acquisition process.

In theory, DoD should select capabilities by doing market research and finding new innovations in industry. This was hard to do. Now, DoD has Techipedia, a wiki clearinghouse of capabilities.
Every agency has a similar problem. This initiative has important lessons learned about how to cross boundaries and involve the CIO.

A suggestion was made to put together and distribute all the suggestions that came through on the transition team's Citizen's Briefing Book initiative.
Lastly, Tamie Lyles-Santiago mentioned a federal-wide conference scheduled for July 21^st and 22^nd which will focus on transparency and openness within government. The goal is to provide the administration with a platform to talk about transparency. She invited everyone who is interested to participate on an advisory board for senior leaders to keep the conversation going.