No offense to U.S. military employee Mark Drapeau and his quote-unquote “insider’s perspective on Government 2.0,” the title of a 1,365-word essay published on mashable.com today touting the benefits of the U.S. military embracing internet collaborative tools, but I must side with UK columnist Michael Cross who wrote a story for the Guardian last month, entitled, “Government 2.0 is a rubbish name for a good initiative.”
Granted, Drapeau doesn’t even mention “government 2.0″ in his piece, but he does write “web 2.0″ and “enterprise 2.0″ several times. Can’t he avoid confusion and keep to one term? Maybe the mashable editors coined the title. It doesn’t really matter, as sources left and right from Harvard Business Publishing to the Wall Street Journal also interchange the terms.
While I enjoyed reading Drapeau’s essay on government and social media, I take issue with three points which I raise below:
- Drapeau incorrectly speaks for himself and not the government
- Drapeau insists the DoD is underutilizing social media
- Terms like Government 2.0 should be stricken
1. Drapeau incorrectly speaks for himself and not the government
The following rests at the bottom of the mashable piece:
Dr. Mark Drapeau is the 2006-2008 AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellow at the Center for Technology and National Security policy of the National Defense University in Washington. These views are his own and not the official policy or position of any part of the U.S. Government. He can be reached at mark.d.drapeau@ugov.gov via email.
When did the U.S. government stop owning its infrastructure? Regardless whether he checks his email from home or work, the dot-gov address is still owned by the government which provided it to him thanks to taxpayers and voters.
In that light, how can he not be speaking for the government?
Take out the email address line (too late now) and no argument from me. Else, he’s a government employee wanting to be contacted as such.
2. Drapeau insists the DoD is underutilizing social media
A science and technology policy wonk working as a Fellow at the National Defense University, Drapeau heads up a research project called “Social Software for Security.”
The project’s intent is to inventory available government technologies and meet with experts to identify impediments for military use. Longer-term, he writes the project would recommend to DoD leadership “an overall military strategy for using social software for national security.”
Using mashable.com as a bridge to those not knowledgeable about governmental goings-on, Drapeau writes about mingling at nerd conventions and meeting people “surprised that someone from the government or the defense department is interested in what they are doing.”
This is very notable. He goes on, pointing readers to his personal Twitter feed and adds, “These technologies have many potential benefits for our military forces.”
I wonder if Drapeau knows of U.S. Navy Captain Hal Pittman, former acting deputy assistant secretary of defense for joint communication, and the new commander of the Joint Public Affairs Support Element, according to last week’s news release from the U.S. Joint Forces Command.
Pittman understands social media. He knows about blogging. Like Drapeau’s, he also has a LinkedIn profile.
In November 2007 testimony to a U.S. House Armed Services subcommittee, Pittman spoke of “a need for collaboration, coordination, and horizontal integration of our actions and words.”
We live in a world of citizen journalists, where every action or operation is witnessed, taped and reported, individual actions are amplified, and organizations face the challenge of strategic implication. In today’s flat world, a seemingly isolated interaction in the morning becomes fodder for bloggers immediately, appears on local television news by noon, and is international news by evening.
Pittman continued, “Strategic communication and public affairs blocks of instruction have been developed and are being incorporated into Joint Professional Military Education, working closely with the various academic institutions and the military war colleges,”adding that the Defense Information School began offering distance learning via internet classes in 2006.
The DoD embraced online learning two years ago? This is contrary to Drapeau’s claim that the military community “is definitely underutilizing the human resources in the [internet] community.”
3. Terms like Government 2.0 should be stricken
I admit that part of the problem here is people and institutions are promoting terminologies that say everything and nothing simultaneously. Ask 20 people who don’t work in IT or PR what “Web 2.0″ is all about and you’re likely to receive 20 different answers, with some people citing blogging, Facebook profiles and groups, NPR audio streaming, eBay buying-and-selling transactions, online choose-your-own adventure porn movies, and the like.
Ask those 20 people what “Enterprise 2.0″ or “Government 2.0″ are, in contrast to “Web 2.0,” let alone “social media,” and I’m willing to bet you’ll see a lot of raised eyebrows and “uhh” responses.
It’s fair to presume that if one has never seen all of these terms before, reading Drapeau’s article would be an eye-opener, literally, with seven references to Web 2.0 and one to Enterprise 2.0, let alone the title of Government 2.0. Heck, I was confused reading it!
Don’t even get me started on Mobile 2.0 which ReadWriteWeb used two years ago and is still a mashable.com category!
I think people should pay less attention to fads and hypes like Government 2.0, which these terms really are. The concept of Web 2.0 has been around for almost five years and it’s still tossed around as if it’s brand new.
Call it something else. I’m going to use social media because it rolls off the tongue easier; and, who can’t define those words?
People like Drapeau and institutions like the WSJ should pay attention to the words of folks like Guy Kawasaki who recently tweeted to me (referencing his 2006 blog post in reaction to Seth Godin):
What do you think?
Tune in tomorrow for a follow-up on Drapeau and why 10 words he wrote in a comment response shows how little he appears to know about the U.S. government and social media.
About Ari Herzog
Hi,
I was going to post some comments on your social web business post but didn’t. so i’ll jump in here.
as to Enterprise 2.0, i’m very involved in this. the term was created by someone I know well and i am actually the person who setup the blog that he talks about it on.
http://blog.hbs.edu/faculty/amcafee/
(so now you all know where i work)
there are very good reasons to keep the separate names and i do think Government 2.0 is a fine thing to use.
i’ll just now list the first one. try telling a CIO he needs a blog.
their first comment will be. my child has a blog, why do i need one. its for kids.
a corporate worker treats information very differently than a person who is publishing his own personal ideas. in a corp, information is power. similar to a government, but i expect they also have different issues, especially when sharing information between different groups within the same governmental organization (ye old turf wars).
as for the government, here’s a background article on the CIA. they have put quite a bunch of work into this area lately.
http://www.bluedamage.com/2007/10/12/cia-goes-web-20/
note, the CIA has a large private equity group that invests in cutting edge technology startups.
Socialtext, one of the leading wiki vendors, was heavily invested by the CIA for their startup.
Let me also drop down a url about an interesting thing that happened. there was a battle on wikipedia about if Enterprise 2.0 was a valid term given that Web 2.0 already exists.
http://blog.hbs.edu/faculty/amcafee/index.php/faculty_amcafee_v3/entry/help_help_were_being_repressed/
you will find other entries on the blog about what happened. HBS actually created a case about the whole situation. as a demonstration on how a discussion that normally would have been between a small group of insiders, but instead became a discussion by anyone on the Internet that wanted to participate (which of course is exactly what Web 2.0 is about).
i have not read the articles you linked to here but i will later and might have more comments.
the challenge with new technologies (which is what i’ve been working in my whole life) is getting them into old organizations.
as you know most people don’t like change. and the problem with new technologies is that many (if not most) fail.
anyone remember the followup to SNA, called APPN? Great technology, with multiple faults and no one wanted to try it out (no one ever got fired for buying IBM… unless they used APPN).
but now, the same concept is the basis for what we are on right now.
thanks,
sds
(ps. thanks for posting stuff like this. hope you stay in government, the world needs people like you)