A decision I made shortly after leaving Public Address was to not make the mistake of starting to blog under a pseudonym. The problem was that as newly-minted public servant in 2005, and it also being election year, it had been extremely difficult not to make extensive comment about subjects one does not broach when in the employ of the Crown. In plain English, I had to learn to keep my mouth shut.
And it wasn’t easy, and I failed sometimes.
When I kicked off Object Dart here my first thought was that it would be easy to assume a non-de-plume and get to blogging, and saying whatever the heck I wanted. The main hurdle to this idea was that “Che Tibby” had become something of a brand (for better or worse) over at PA, so losing the title would mean losing some potential readers who might want to migrate. Ego is, after all, a powerful motive.
But more importantly, I knew that using the pseudonym would doubtless get me in to a little bit of grief. Something I had been aware of for a while (mostly because I was guilty of doing it) was the inappropriate pressing of the “hot send” button. The crew at Sir Humphries were on the receiving end of it a number of times. There were quite a few issues I used to feel a lot more excited about, and if I was hopped up on coffee I would happily give out a broadside. Nazis used to drive me over the edge… I really hate the damn nazis…
As my intended brief stint in the public service has dragged out to a couple of years I’m finding that the anger about issues is abating, and the abatement seems to be doing good things for my general levels of stress. So I think it’s with actual online experience I can now dish out advice to other members of the public service who might like to get themselves into the Web2.0.
Tip #1. Using phrases like “Web2.0″ is sooooo 2007. What was Web2.0 is now OEM and not a big deal.
Tip #2. Blog, twitter, edit Wikipedia and comment places under your real name. If you’ve genuinely got the time to be engaging and/or relationship building online, then the pseudonym will or could get you into hot water.
I’ve covered this ground before, but Poneke’s recent experience with some of the seamier side of the blogosphere clearly demonstrates that there are people out there who will likely try to “get you” simply because you’re a public servant. We’re not the most popular occupation at the best of times, so the public finding out that we’re “wasting time/money” by putting our private lives online is likely to raise a few eyebrows. Using a non-de-plume, which is inevitably found out, can only add suspicion to the minds of non-interweb people who probably don’t know what the hell you do on a good day, let alone one where your hangover or mood doesn’t let you reach that exalted stage of “most productive”.
It was better therefore to go under my on name (which a surprising number of people thought was a pseudonym anyhow!) Firstly this allows me to own whatever I do online. There can be no cases of mistaken identity, and no getting my workmates under the same IP address in any trouble (Wikipedia editing anyone…). Secondly, it actively prevents me from straying into to ‘hot send’ territory. This is especially the case if I’m commenting from a work computer.
Thing is, the day is almost here where interaction online is no longer frowned upon in the workplace. All indications are that professional people should be able to self-regulate their internet usage, and that general levels of web interaction and use of applications will increase accordingly.
The risk is that public servants are tempted to say things online they might happily say in the pub, and that this is recorded permanently. My own view is that using a pseudonym will only increase the likelihood that an individual will take that risk. You only have to look at the behaviour of public servants around key or interest-specific issues (such as the seabed and foreshore), to see that people do occasionally step across the line.
But Google doesn’t cache a bit of protest. It does almost everything else. So keeping it all above board means your future self might not find a sudden rush of cold-water poured on an otherwise spotless career.
Oh, and Tip #3. Don’t write about, hint about, or blurt about work. Ever.
5 June, 2008 at 9:39 pm
I fail. I guess I will hve to stop blogging when i get a real job. However you are man of ethics Che.
One of my old jobs was “internet police” for the corporate I worked for. Interesting and disturbing all at once (20mins a day is NOTHING!)
5 June, 2008 at 11:32 pm
‘“Web2.0″ is sooooo 2007′ it may be to you, but for me I look at it and think “Hmm, that’s Web Thirty-two Sixteenths in old money”.
6 June, 2008 at 1:06 am
Good post Tibby. The fact the the SSC now has it’s own blog (albeit a trial one) and Jason Ryan’s NPSC blog indicates the progress in the social media area for public servants.
I hope that the SSC develops some ‘formal’ guidelines for state sector employees around the use of social media. The one they have on In Development is a good start.
6 June, 2008 at 2:41 am
you should start using your full name with middle included.
6 June, 2008 at 8:13 am
Your real name is Chet Ibby, I bet.
6 June, 2008 at 9:29 am
Good post, Che. I don’t agree with tip #3 though. If public servants feel that they can’t write & engage with others about their work, it sort of defeats the purpose of using social media in government. We are paid for our judgement: I would expect people would exercize it whether they were blogging, tweeting or sitting in a pub…
6 June, 2008 at 10:54 am
Hmm… I see your point Jason, but you’re still running up against the important principle of an ostensibly neutral permanent civil service. Which I don’t think anyone would want to abandon.
I also think there’s also a difference between use of social media within the government space to engage others with others about their work and and use of these technologies to engage those outside.
It’s one thing to blog about the roll-out of a service or implementation of a policy, it’s another thing entirely to blog about something that’s still being developed – where ideas are being contested and there are very likely party political divisions on what is the ‘right’ approach to achieving certain outcomes (or even agreeing on whether those outcomes are the desirable ones).
You could argue that blogging/other social media are useful for very early blue-sky kicking around of ideas, and for socialising the policy ideas afterwards during the implementation stage, but that in between, more caution should be exercised. And possibly that the audiences for the two are quite different.
Blogging (etc) within the government space at the early stages of kicking an idea around might be useful for stimulating an intra or inter-departmental community of practice on a topic (heaven forfend, it might even help with a whole-of-government approach). There might be circumstances where you could extend that to an extra-governmental, but still limited, community of practice, that has password access to a blog/wiki (e.g. the SSC Participation Community of Practice Wiki). But defining criteria for when you might go wholly public with that early stage policy development blogging is unlikely to be easy. My guess is that it’s going to be more appropriate for societal issues on matters of ethics and morals (eg the work of the Bioethics Council) than for issues which might be hotly contested on a daily basis in the House. I’m interested if you think differently on this, and why.
One other thought is that it might be helpful to consider experience in the last 25 years of where the lines are drawn on disclosure of information which would aid ‘effective participation in the making and administration of laws and polices’ and to ‘promote the accountability of Ministers of the Crown and officials’ (s.4 of the Official Information Act) when claims for withholding information are made under ss. 9(2)(f)(iv) and 9(2)(g)(i) (and conceivably under 9(2)(g)(ii)) of the same Act. And where those claims for withholding have been rejected because it was felt that there was an overriding public interest in disclosure.
On the one hand the desirability and legitimacy of public participation is affirmed in the law, on the other it sets up reasonable protections for the policy creation and advising process. Surely this is the contested space of ideas that has senior management and ministers concerned about ‘premature’ openness? Especially given the febrile media in this country (both mainstream and online) and the consistent failure of senior civil servants and politicians to have the bravery to make the case for more open and robust discussion of policy ideas through various media channels. I can’t remember the last time I heard a senior official on the radio rebuffing a journalist on these kinds of issues, when policy information has been leaked/revealed/disclosed ‘prematurely’ and there’s been a spurious beat-up as a result. Perhaps, given your job, you can!
Possibly one way of tackling is this to go back and do a case study on what DIA did with the proactive release of policy documents (including cabinet and committee papers) at the time it was doing the policy development that led to the Gambling Act. Ask questions about what would have been acceptable for a civil servant working on this piece of policy work to blog on their own personal blog (as opposed to a departmental one) and, perhaps more importantly, *when* it would have been appropriate for them to blog it.
Does it have to come down to a hard pre-decisional/post-decisional split? What type of decision at what stage of the process?
6 June, 2008 at 10:56 am
After writing under my own name for years, I briefly toyed with the idea of using a pseudonym, only to have a prominent entertainment lawyer tell me it was better to use my own name.
I tend to take people more seriously when they write under their own name. Otherwise it makes me wonder what the writer is afraid of, what they have to hide (Usually nothing!).
6 June, 2008 at 11:12 am
and that’s exactly the way i’ve been talking about work, with my own voice.
i think what i might have missed that point in the post. you need to ensure that the voice you’re using is clearly your own. do not ever assume your employer’s voice, because you will be wandering into serious issues of the sorts andrew highlights.
that said, my own opinion is that it’s ok to air conceptual ideas you might be working on, as long as the ideas are distant enough from the nuts and bolts work that management will have a bearing on.
on the other hand, you should never ever talk the specifics of why your blue-sky idea was not implemented within your agency….
6 June, 2008 at 11:39 am
Yep, I think that point about using your own voice is critical.
But the difficulty that is then encountered is whether the reader understands that you are using your own voice and reads it in that personal register, or whether they read it in the register of Fred Smith, employee of Ministry of Whatever.
This problem of appreciating the register of the communication isn’t new and I still (with my limited reading) haven’t seen any solution to the problem.
It was blogged nicely by Danny O’Brien. (IMHO) four and a half years ago, so nicely that it is one of the few blog posts I can actually remember, and still refer people to.
6 June, 2008 at 11:53 am
one solution to the register issue (without reading that post you’ve linked to), is to ensure that it’s readily apparent that you’re not writing from with the “government space (“i.e. what i’ve called “within the e-government arcade”).
obviously writing on In Development is a governmental voice, but what i write here could at best be construed as professional development.
any guidelines written for public sector blogging/social media would need to ensure that public servants themselves knew the difference. if they’re clear about it, then they can be clear about which voice they’re using.
a simple way to characterise it for inexpert readers could be; if the government is paying for the platform, it’s official. if the individual is maintaining the platform, it’s not.
but, if the individual is a public servant “talking shop” on a private platform… then there might be an issue.
6 June, 2008 at 12:58 pm
I kind of have what you might call a ‘psuedo-pseudonym” in that a lot of people know who I am and on my old blog I used to post pictures of myself (as intially it was intended as ‘hey look at me doing weird shit in a foriegn country’ blog).
But these days being in country made me go a bit more private.
6 June, 2008 at 9:48 pm
Andrew, the points you raise are good ones, but I can’t help but wonder if we are at cross purposes. From my view, blogs (& social media) are just tools that we use to support engagement and to deliver on our outcomes. Discussions about when to use blogs in the policy creation cycle, for example, while interesting, fundamentally miss the point. Every policy issue will potentially demand a different type of approach and engagement – blogs may be an appropriate communications strategy in some cases, but not in others. The key, for me, is that those decisions will be made as part of an integrated communications approach to supporting the policy and business outcomes of the agency.
Public servants need to use their judgement when making decisions about when to use these tools as much as they do when making decisions about posting content when they are using them…
For me, one of the mistakes that I think we made with e-government that I would like to see us avoid this time around is to mistake the technology for part of the solution. Blogs, wikis, podcasts, social networks etc., all just support or enable communication, engagement & interaction — it’s what we do in that space that is important.
7 June, 2008 at 8:19 am
Hang on a minute though Jason. Are you talking about use of these technologies by government, or privately, by individual civil servants such as Che?
I thought Che’s post was about the latter, although I may have muddied the waters in my initial comments responding to your first comment.
Dragging this back to personal blogging by public servants (not on a government hosted blog), can you articulate any rules/guidelines for their ability to blog about policy issues without getting into employment difficulties?
7 June, 2008 at 10:18 am
Andrew, yes I was referring to public servants using social media for agency initiatives.
Advice for public servants wanting to comment on policy issues in a private capacity is pretty clear: follow the Code of Conduct, use your judgement and make it clear that you are not representing your agency or it’s views. If it’s policy that your agency is involved in (even peripherally) and you shouldn’t be commenting in an official capacity then tip #3
applies.
7 June, 2008 at 11:04 am
That Danny O’Brien article on register was execellent (lessons to remember!)Thanks Andrew
7 June, 2008 at 1:51 pm
Excellent post Che and great conversation.
My tuppence – people don’t have “one voice”, we all have many. Two have been hinted at in the conversation, “work”, “personal” but I suspect there are many more eg, “personal: husband”, “personal:father”, “work: interview” “work: lunchtime” …
When people use a “voice” (or adapt a “persona” as it seems to be called when referring to the Web) the clear thing is to be both personally aware which one is being used. From that you can define the appropriateness, let the audience know and adapt the language.
One way we define “personas” is by the ‘space’ it is within. For example a “work:lunchtime” persona is usually employed at a definite time and probably a physical space – when someone comes back from lunch late and is still using that persona but you’re not it feels “wrong”.
On the Web one of the defining ‘spaces’ is the site chosen to voice ones opinion.
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Questions: in a virtual world where people can’t see physical cues (in suit, out of suit) can one log in be used to represent all the differing personas I may wish to have (and we all do even if it’s as simple as “work”/”personal”)?