“… users not the organisation at the centre ..”

On Sunday 7 June 2009, the Australian Museum launched its new website. The site took four years of planning and preparation and enables staff to manage their own online material and to engage in two-way interaction and community building.

The Museum has also been actively working on organisational change, using the mantra – working 20% differently, not 20% more. They have also been conducting online experiments which have inspired staff to engage more proactively in the online world. You can read more about the project here.

This is a fantastic example of how social media, something that no-one is designing or controlling, is gradually changing the way we interact and therefore changing the way we do a whole range of familiar things.

Senator Kate Lundy’s Public Sphere project, that aims to to create an online public sphere and facilitate regular topics of interest to both the general public and to the government, is another great example, albeit in its early days. It is designed to enable people from all around Australia to participate online. Each Public Sphere runs for two weeks, and then feedback is summarised and put into briefing papers that will be made available on the website and to the appropriate channels in government.

The first Public Sphere topic was on High Bandwidth for Australia.

The second Public Sphere topic will be held in Canberra on June 22nd  and is on Open Government: Policy & Practice. This Sphere will gather views on how creating an even more participatory form of government in Australia will improve the effectiveness of public administration, enable communities to better help themselves, promote renewed engagement in the democratic process and enhance the capacity to respond to emerging complex social, geopolitical and environmental challenges.

Both these projects make extensive use of social media/social networking (sometimes referred to as Web 2.0) which is all about connections.

Web 2.0 enables:

• Sharing of content: blogs, wikis, podcasts, vlogs, Twitter
• Self-publishing content: YouTube, Flickr, blogs, Wikipedia
• Adding to established content: user-tagging, Wikipedia
• Discussing issues: forums, blogs, chat
• Tailoring information: RSS feeds, email alerts
• Bringing people together: Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, SecondLife, and platforms such as ning

Web 2.0 means that organisations of all kinds can have increasingly complex relationships with their users, clients and stakeholders because it “… puts users and not the organisation at the centre of the equation.’ (Ellis and Kelly, 2007).

I’m headed off to the Gov 2.0 Public Sphere on the 22nd so I’ll bring you more information in a couple of weeks. In the meantime …

• What can you do differently (rather than more)?
• How can your organisation use social media to enable engagement both internal and external?