Government 2.0
Government employees are clearly now permitted by new APS guidelines to engage with government policy opinion and conversation outside their departments and agencies.
Yesterday Craig Thomler blogged that the Australian Public Service Commission (APSC) had released the successor to their Interim protocols, Circular 2009/5 Protocols for online media participation.
As Craig mentions, the new Protocol is much shorter than the Interim Protocol it supersedes but to the point and quite clear – so appears they may have heeded feedback from people like myself who suggested that while the Interim Protocol was good it was still widely open to interpretation but more importantly outright dismissal. While Stephen Collins commented that it’s likely many departments and agencies will continue to block and impede staff communicating and participating outside their organisations I am hopeful that the new Protocols will facilitate those fighting in the trenches to have the corporate firewall lowered (firewalls are meant to be for security, not censorship) and allow staff who are passionate, who are experts, who want to share and engage with the people at the other end of the programs they’re administering.
Unfortunately having recently been made redundant from my role in government I won’t be able to immediately deploy this new weapon against those who oppose innovation, progress, honesty, collaboration, consultation, productivity and responsible governance … but good luck to those to those who can!
// purecaffeine.com is a user interaction and UX design, social media and Government 2.0 blog run by professional Canberra, Australia web user interaction designer Nathanael Boehm, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License.
