open government
How Federal Agencies Can Effectively Manage Records Created Using New Social Media Tools
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Finally, a Name!
John—
Thanks, as always, for your informative and timely summary of the Administration’s plans and progress. The Accountable Government Initiative is another step in what seems to be an important and well thought out management improvement program. In that spirit, a couple of questions on which I would be interested in your take:
Does the Initiative underplay the importance of collaboration and governance strategies? I do not want to go too far here since collaboration will clearly be critical to achieving many of the initiatives, but I was struck by the lack of a direct and explicit attention to what many consider to be the overwhelming public management issue—how to get organizations (federal agencies, levels of government, sectors) to work better across organizational boundaries. Much of the collaboration language in the memo seems to focus on sharing best practices, which is all very good, but seems to miss the essential point that to achieve any meaningful national outcome, organizations must form networks with other organizations and not just coordinate actions.
Is “accountability” the right brand? I am not convinced that at root the problems we face are the result of the failure to hold agencies and individuals accountable for what they do. Rather, the problem is a lack of tools, processes, resources and authorities. It seems that the accountability brand picks up only half of the mantra from the 1990s (make managers manage) and neglects the crucial other half (let managers manage). I recall Steve Kelman had an article a year couple of years back on the pitfalls of working management improvements from an accountability angle.
Thanks for your questions. Here's my take:
In your comment about the lack of any emphasis on interagency collaboration -- I agree. The memo is largely silent on this crucial point. Charitably, you could read "collaboration" into the sections about setting high priority goals, and appointing the goal leaders, but the Administration has not put down an ambitious marker on the importance of cross-agency collaboration as a strategy for achieving outcomes the American people care about.
And as to your question about branding the initiative as "accountability," every presidential memo, especially one like this, has two audiences -- the general public and government employees. That's why the Clinton Administration's reinventing government mantra was "works better" (something government employees cared about) and "costs less" (something the public cared about). President Obama's message touches on these: "open and responsive," "efficient and effective," and "cut waste and modernize" . . . but the overall heading does stress "accountability," which is something the public cares about but is not a rallying point for government employees. Public servants don't get out of bed and go to work so they can be "accountable" (well, other than the folks at the Government Accountability Office).
The Obama Administration has yet to find a way to broadly and personally connect with federal employees in a way that inspires them to make a difference in their own work place, for the people they serve. For example, the SAVE Award generates thousands of ideas, but is a top-down program that only recognizes and acts on a tiny fraction of these ideas. There needs to be a way to broadly engage -- even empower -- the workforce to innovate, cut red tape, and serve the public. Being more accountable or increasing productivity are not the kind of clarion calls to service to deliver results Americans care about.
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Federal Agency Social Media Hubs
For State Department: domestic outreach via social media is grouped together on the home page at state.gov. Additionally, international outreach at embassies is listed at the State Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/usdos#!/usdos?v=app_6009294086.
The National Institutes of Health has a central point for our social media efforts: http://www.nih.gov/Subscriptions.htm
The Department of State has an extensive Social Media Hub that is located on our intranet. In fact a majority of the content on the Defense.gov site comes from our site.
We provide How To guides called Social Media Field Guides, Best Practices from around State Department, a Forum section and a Resource and Research section.
We have recently added two new programs to the Social Media Hub - our Ask the Experts program and our Community Managers Group.
By far, our site is one of the most extensive sites for social media in the Federal, State and local governments. We are regularly asked to consult to other agencies on the development of our Social Media Hub and to share some of our content. In the future, we would like to find better ways of sharing the information we develop.
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has a comprehensive hub:
http://www.fws.gov/home/socialmedia
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I am interested to see how US Government agencies are dealing with social media records
I am interested in how the US Coast Guard complies with record management?
In May 2013, NARA released a white paper on best practices for the capture of social media records. You can download that from: http://www.archives.gov/records-mgmt/resources/socialmediacapture.pdf
Page 5, 2nd row, lists the US Coast Guard, provides links to 2 resources, and lists the following Social Media in Use: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Vimeo, Flickr, blogs, and RSS feeds. The last column explains that communications and transactions conducted on the social media site on behalf of the Coast Card must be managed as a Federal Record. Recommendations are based on the type of content and include deletion, screen shots, and backupify (http://www.crunchbase.com/company/backupify) to archive content and comments.
A newer publication (2012), the Coast Guard Social Media Handbook, can be downloaded from: http://www.dvidshub.net/publication/issues/10409 See pages 3 and 7 for a reference to records management.