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What we've seen in the Australian media over the last couple of years is a considerable
reduction in the importance of print media. Double digit decline year to year in the circulation
of print media has been the obvious arrangement. The sorts of things that we're much more
likely to see these days are stories breaking online, perhaps on Twitter, and being picked up
by the mainstream media a little later. Many of the mainstream, if not all the mainstream
media publishers have online sites, as you'd expect, in which they can do the breaking news
bit and get those things across. But it clearly isn't arresting the decline.
There've been some interesting models that the mainstream media have undertaken in order
to address these things. There are models about pay-walling their news, about subscription
arrangements and those sorts of things. I think we are seeing a very significant trend to new
media and the new ways of breaking stories. I would regularly find that just with a Twitter feed
on a computer to the side of my desk I'll see breaking stories arise in a way that might not be
picked up even on the online media for an hour or so afterwards, just because of the way
these things break. It changes the news cycle, it changes the need for us to respond, and it
changes the need for us to know what to say to media in those circumstances. I think this has
been a significant change in how public servants need to react to the new media.
Now I'll provide you with a copy of the slides by PDF afterwards so that you can see them, so
you don't need to take notes necessarily, but the slides are largely around pictures rather than
words. And I'll probably be talking to them.
These are the social media statistics for Australia as at the end of March this year. You can
see there are about 23 million people in Australia, and you can see that slightly over half are
Facebook users. Actually it's more important than that. About 19% of the people in Australia
are less than 15. Now I'd like to think that many of those don't have their own Facebook
accounts, it might not be true completely, but I think we can say probably the penetration isn't
quite as high there. There are about roughly five or six percent who are over, over 85, I think
it's over 80, and it's probably true that not a lot of them have their own Facebook accounts.
It's a bit ageist I know, but I think we can say confidently that the saturation isn't quite as high
there.
So what we've got is that these 13 million users are distributed amongst 75% of the
population, which means that's about 13 million out of sort of 16 or 17 million. What does that
mean? Well the real penetration of social media is about three people in every four, about
75%. It's certainly more than half of Australians between the ages of 15 and 80 are using
social media all the time. I think it's important that we understand that this is the audience that
we're likely to reach online. Over 12 million unique visitors to YouTube, lots of blogging going
on, increasingly usage of Tumblr. Tumblr - 3.6Mn, or just over users of LinkedIn, significant
numbers of people using social media. I think this tells us that if we're not paying attention to
what's going on here we've got a problem.
In 2009, the then government launched a task force to look at gov2.0 and what could occur?
The engaged task force. The task force reported at the end of 2009, and the government then
made a declaration of open government in 2010. But encouraged the use of social media by
public servants, and to inform people about what those services could be. Since then we've
seen considerable growth in the use of social media by public servant agencies. There are
hundreds of public servant Facebook sites, hundreds of authorised public service Twitter
accounts, a whole range of blogs and things like that. You can find those relatively easily
online. Indeed I'll show you in a moment where you can go to find a definitive list of those.
What are we using these sorts of tools for? We're using them for the delivery of services to
citizens. So large agencies like the Department of Human Services run information accounts
on social media, they run conversations on social media, they join groups on social media to
make comments about things, they pursue this new media way of doing things very, very
significantly.
We use it for media and marketing monitoring. Now one of the interesting things, and as an
aside, is that citizens want us to use social media, and say the government should be doing
this, or the government should be responding on that to social media. But, there are a
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significant number of them who also complain that we're monitoring social media. So
sometimes in the one article you'll see, you should be paying more attention, but you should
stop monitoring it. I'm sort of thinking well how can you do that? It doesn't sort of arrive in my
brain without paying attention.
So there is a sort of challenge around what we do here, and balance these competing
demands amongst citizens. I think the overall majority are very clearly interested in our
delivery of services through social media. We're seeing some policy engagement and
discussion on social media. Again there's something of a challenge here, and I'll show you
some examples later. The challenges as we know, you can have a reasonable conversation
about something that isn't particularly controversial on social media.
One of the games that you can play along with online media is to look at the ABC, the
National Broadcasting Corporations website, look at the comments on the articles. I don't
generally encourage you to read comments, because it could be problematic for you
eventually. If you look at those comments it's interesting to see how many it takes before you
get in to a fight between one side of politics and the other. It’s about 25. If you've read an
article that has more than 25 comments that isn't about sport, and doesn't end up with two
sides of politics essentially being abusive to each other, you'd be very surprised to see it. So
we know that those topics deteriorate relatively quickly. What does it tell us? It's one thing to
have conversations about IT strategy or something like that, using social media or IT policy.
It's entirely another question to be using those same sorts of approaches to having
discussions about migration policy, about customs protection and those sorts of much more
emotive issues. Certainly it's hard to get the balance right there.
It's also about maximising internet resources. One of the, I think obvious things, not really
picked up by people sometimes, is that if I want to put up a Facebook site for a particular
purpose I could do it almost overnight. I can start a Twitter account at next to no cost
immediately if I want to use it for a particular purpose. We're using someone else's IT
resources to get our message across. Now we shouldn't be naive in thinking about what's
happening in those circumstances, quite clearly if you're not paying, you're the product not the
user necessarily. So what we're doing in those circumstances is using the resources provided
by these companies, which are largely making their money from advertising, but using their
resources to get our message across. I've got to tell you I'm pretty comfortable with that if
we're doing it properly. I think that yes, we can manage that reasonably in a way that allows
us to make good use of those resources.
Now the open government declaration talked about three pillars of the conversation.
Informing, engaging and participating. Now I'm going to run through each of these with a
couple of examples of where you can see what it is that we're doing.
The first of these is informing. This is Australia.gov.au, the website you can see in the
background. We're in the process of a continuous improvement of this website upgrading it
over the last couple of years. For those of you who are interested, we've moved it to a cloud
like solution, moved it off a proprietary content management system, in to Drupal, and we're
continuing to do that. By the end of this calendar year we'll have it in the public cloud. We're
getting the benefits that you would expect to get as a consequence from those things. If you
search this site for social media you'll find a tab, or a link that has all the government social
media sites on it, and you can see what those are if you wanted to explore more what it is that
we're doing.
We get a couple of million hits a month on this site, for a range of things. People overseas
trying to find out information about Australia, very popular, one of the very popular hits is
people looking for when the school holidays are. I suspect it is parents looking for when they
finish rather than when they start, but we get a lot of hits around those sorts of things. So we
do provide that general information. As you drive down further in it to it you can see the
whole-of-government search, a big search box on the top, allows you to find links to
government services, and things the citizens might want.
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That's useful in terms of informing of citizens around services or around things that Australia
provides. It isn't necessarily a rapidly changing set of information. We do upgrade it, we
publish campaigns that we're using, or the government advertising is using on it, it's not
meant to be an instant response website. That's as opposed to some of the emergency
services, generally speaking, websites, online presences, where they are actively engaged in
talking to people about what is it they're doing.
The Queensland Police Service is perhaps the best example of what's going on in this regard.
Queensland, one of Australia's States, has a very active social media presence. Now it didn't
happen by accident that they got very active at this. They were, to an extent, lucky. At the
time of a very major set of natural disasters they had just launched their online presence. As a
consequence of this from 2010 through to 2011 Queensland experienced a set of natural
disasters, of some flooding and some cyclones, and as you can see, just as this one example,
the ‘Likes’ on Facebook shot through an enormous increase as a consequence. Because
what people found was an active way of engaging with the police service and getting
information about the sort of things in which they were interested.
So successful was this campaign by the Queensland Police Service, they were able to
establish a myth busters account almost on Twitter. When people put things out that were
false, deliberately or not, they were able to correct that and make sure the public knew what
was going on. They've had to go to the extent on their Facebook page of putting a display,
and I don't think you can see it on the... oh yes you can, I'll just go back for a moment. You
can see in the bottom left hand side they've got to say, if you're reporting a crime don't do it
here, but go to these numbers, it's been so successful.
Now it's one of those interesting challenges I think, that the success was to the extent that
people were reporting on their Facebook page, I was just driving down this street and I saw
the crime going on in this house. Which was fine, except they had their real user name and
their Facebook profile, and if the criminal subsequently got in to trouble they had a very good
understanding of who it was who dobbed them in to the police. So it wasn't a very useful thing
to do.
[Audience laughter]
Luckily they've got past that and understood where to go, it's not meant for those sorts of
things. It is very good for getting discussion with the public, particularly about these matters
around emergency services and urgent things.
Now I draw a set of rules from this particular part of usage that I think are worthwhile
considering. The first is now is the right time to be engaged in social media, to provide
government services. It's not something that one needs to wait in order to do. Now is when
you should be doing it. Generally speaking I think it's true in the Australia context, if you aren't
people are probably asking questions about your particular department and what it is that it's
doing. The next is this notion of trusting staff. I'm going to reflect on that a bit more as we go
further in to the presentation.
I think it's important to recognise that every day relatively junior government staff engage with
the public on the telephone, across the counter, in the street, in a whole range of ways. They
do that without creating enormous difficulties for the department. Indeed on the whole they
cope with difficult situations in a very responsible way, and generate excellent results for the
department. My concept here is why shouldn't we trust them therefore, to do the same
online? At the end of the presentation I'll talk about some of the challenges people still see
about social media. I think the lesson here is that we can trust our people to do things, and if
we do trust them they respond very well as a consequence.
The next point here around social media is to understand that this is a two way conversation.
Indeed the gov2.0 movement if you like, or the gov2.0 concept, is to take those web
technologies and move them from broadcasting to communicating or collaborating with
citizens, answering their questions, responding to their concerns, engaging with them. It's not
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just about broadcast. And if you don't understand the difference between those two things
then that can be difficult on social media.
One of the interesting things I find occasionally in looking at Twitter accounts is the number of
Twitter accounts that have very few followers and don't make use of #. Now when I talk to
government agencies about this, they'll say oh we didn't want to follow anyone 'cause we
don't want to endorse anybody, and consequently we don't have many followers, but we think
that's more of a safe house. Well actually if you've only got 30 followers you're not using #.
You're better off going out and screaming at the bus stop 'cause you'll actually connect with
more people that way than you will putting out Tweets at 11 o'clock at night on your not
watched account.
We know that two hours is about the life of a Tweet. If it isn't picked up in two hours it's gone,
mostly. As a consequence you really do need to be engaged. You need to be accessible as
well. This is the notion that again, that if all you're doing is broadcasting things, essentially
putting out ads, and don't respond to questions or engage with people, you're going to get
some benefit to a certain extent, but you're not going to get the full benefit of these new
platforms, the ability to actually get involved in discussions with people, and help them in that
regard.
Finally, and I've touched on this already; understand that although the free platforms do mean
you're the thing that's being marketed. That doesn't matter, because you can use those
platforms and get particularly good benefits at very low costs, in terms of hardware and
infrastructure. Yes, there are other costs which I'll come to in a moment.
So I think this is the challenge here. We're ready to use these things now, and it's almost
necessary, I think, in 21st Century government to be involved in doing those things.
The next thing that I wanted to talk about is around engaging on online media. I mentioned
this briefly before. This is the notion of actually discussing things with people. I'm going to use
a particular example that's about the business that I have most of the time, in terms of
consulting around technology issues. One of the biggest challenges we have in government
procurement previously has been a challenge of what we described as a probity risk, unfairly
giving someone an advantage in a procurement. Now the risk averse nature of the public
service, combined... and I trust there aren't many lawyers here, but combined with the risk
averse notion of lawyers is that we get this probity event that says you mustn't do anything.
You know it's really much better if you don't talk to anybody at all, 'cause then no-one will ever
accuse you of doing anything wrong. The minor consequence of that is you also never buy
anything useful. At least you won't get in trouble for doing that.
Now what online means have allowed us to do is something we couldn't do before. Online
means we can tell everybody about everything. All you need to do is look at our site, and you
can see what procurements are coming up, you can see the draft statements of requirements,
you can comment about those things. As a major procurer the two biggest challenges that
worry me are that I will attempt to buy something that isn't for sale, and of course companies
will still offer it to me, but I won't know that they've had to cobble it together and charge me
extra to do that, I won't know where the risks are as a consequence, unless I've asked them
beforehand.
The second is the risk that I won't know what the cost drivers of something are. So I won't
know that 80% of my requirements could be met at 20% of the cost, and the next 20% cost
80% of the amount being invested. If I could cut those back I might be able to save significant
amounts just by not asking for those expensive things and doing without them. Previously it's
been very hard to engage with companies to find that out. The use of online media like blogs
and those sorts of things allows us to put these requirements out to everybody beforehand, in
drafts, or in consultation, ask for comments. They don't have to necessarily be on the website,
they can email us the comments back if they want to, separately, we can anonymise them or
make them generic and show them on the website so we're answering everybody's questions.
We can engage in a way that we haven't been able to previously.
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We've been doing this for a couple of years now, I see this method being picked up to some
extent in the U.K, in the U.S, in other jurisdictions as well, as people start to get this
consultation notion going. There's a bit of reluctance amongst businesses that has to be
overcome because of the challenges of not believing what the government says it's going to
do. Clearly you've got to demonstrate those things. One of the things that you can
demonstrate is if you've actually changed the statement of requirements as a consequence of
what you've learnt from online consultation. You can point that out on the blog and say thanks
for your consultation, we did these things as a consequence of it. We've found that that builds
up confidence amongst businesses, and allows them to contribute more fully the next time we
go to market for it.
The lessons that I've drawn from trying to engage in this arrangement is firstly that content is
the most important thing. If you set up a blog and post to it once every six months no-one will
read it. If you put up stuff that's trivial, or is essentially re-posting other people's stuff, people
won't come to that blog. What you need to be doing is putting up useful content that people
will want to use. You need to plan ahead so that people can say; you've got a programme of
what it is you're blogging about. You know when you're putting those posts up. Generally
speaking I think if you're posting to a government blog once a week you've probably got a
reasonable balance in those things. You've got a continual stream of information and
engagement going that keeps the readers interested. You need to plan ahead.
You need to respond to comments because if people make comments on your blog site and
you ignore them then they'll say why did I bother doing that? I may as well just leave it alone.
You've got to respond to comments in a way that people can see. It's more than just the
automatic response.
I had the occasion, I was sitting up late one night, as I do occasionally, and I had got an alert
on Facebook that said someone was commenting on one of our sites about ICT recruitment.
The person was complaining because what had happened, our staff had inadvertently turned
on an automatic message thing. When you made a comment it said, thank you for your
comment, we really appreciate it. The sort of thing that you get on hold on a telephone, but
they'd fixed it in a way that it didn't just come on once; it came on every time they made a new
comment.
Now why this person was having a discussion with the answering machine at midnight I'm not
entirely sure, but I did see this stream of discussions. I broke in to it and said, “Hi, I've seen
that you've got a problem, I don't think it's the sort of thing that we can address here because
it is the middle of the night after all, but I'm happy to take it on and fix it up”. I got the comment
back that said, who are you, the poor tech that's up in the middle of the night doing these
things? I said well no, actually I'm the Government Technology Officer, and she checked me
out. Here's my Twitter handle, you can look at these comments to see whether he's really me.
Oh fine. The comments that she'd been putting on the site had been getting increasingly
quite... and she was very upset, so increasingly abusive and things like that.
Well in the space of about half an hour and a couple of comments turned that around so she
was happy with what was going on. Next day she took all those inappropriate... not
inappropriate in the sense that they were things we'd rather not have on the site I guess, she
took all those down. It was completely turned around, because we had been responsive to
her. Now don't take from that the notion that all your senior executives need to be sitting up
and watching Facebook in the middle of the night. They don't need to do that but clearly you
do have to respond to what's going on.
You also have to meet expectations around this. If you're running a site that is normally
manned from 9:00 'till 5:00, your normal business hours, say so on the site. Say, we man this
site between 9:00 and 5:00. We don't man it at 3 o'clock in the morning, and we'll respond to
your comments by the next business day, or the end of the next business day, whenever we
can. So just create that expectation. Most people, and I say most, but not all, most people
don't expect public servants to be awake 24 hours a day and able to respond to their
comments immediately. The asynchronous notion of communications in this online age
means that you can afford to manage expectations quite reasonably in this regard.
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When one is responding online we talk about it happening in three potential capacities; official
capacity, a professional capacity, and a private capacity. Now this participating really tells you
the story of what public servants are able to be doing online. If you're the official spokesman
of an agency, or you're making an official comment, you're making that comment obviously
with the departments backing. You're the one allowed to say those things. You're the one
allowed to make the points. If you're making it in a professional capacity because you've got a
particular area of skill or something like that, that might not be connected with your work. It
might be connected with your work, but you're not making official comment, then that needs
to be clear as well.
Of course you can participate online in an unofficial capacity completely. We have some rules
about what we need to do. Participating has been a challenge for the public service in
Australia in recent years. It's my thesis essentially that the challenges are badly over-stated
by media and by a range of people. I guess you'd expect a public servant to say that. My
evidence would be that very few people actually get sacked as a consequence of mistakes
made online. They're not really mistakes I guess, if you do them deliberately, but things made
online against the Code of Conduct. Well under one percent of complaints that the Public
Service Commission deals with that start with online Code of Conduct issues. There are much
more serious things that are going there. So I don't think it's as big a problem as people that
do.
There are challenges in how you go about it. I have two Twitter accounts, the AusGovCTO
Twitter account is the one that I use for official announcements. Generally for correcting
things where I have a fact that someone else doesn't have, that I can put out. You can see
that I'll only Tweet occasionally, I'll only put a few things around about that, enough to keep
the momentum up, enough to be involved in what's going on. I don't rely on this particular
account. Some other people, my staff also have access to this account, if they can remember
the password, and could use it to make comments as well if they want too. It's something that
I keep pretty much for special occasions or I need to do it.
Most of my work is on my private Twitter account, where I'm much more active. I make a lot
more comments about things that are going on. Now I comment on this sometimes in an
official capacity, so I do that as well. Sometimes I'm talking about IT issues in a professional
capacity, and sometimes I'll talk about the things that interest me in a private capacity which
are largely linked to rugby union and Lego mini figures. Nevertheless, that's the sort of
discussion that I have. There are many more Tweets on this account than there are on other
ones.
People will try to reach me on both accounts occasionally, and I'll respond on those, but I'll
make it clear why it is that I'm responding in a particular way.
Audience Member:
John, what's [inaudible]...
John Sheridan:
Oh sorry, re-tweet. So what I'm saying is I'll re-tweet something, it doesn't mean I'm endorsing
it. So what I'll essentially say is, I thought that was interesting. I wanted to get that out there. It
doesn't mean I believe what it is that they're saying. There's an interesting... one of my son's
tells me I shouldn't say things are interesting, what I should say is I think it's interesting,
'cause sometimes what I think is interesting is really very boring. I think it's interesting that you
do get comments around people who re-tweet things. Sometimes to make the opposite point,
but people who don't understand, they think that's endorsing the original point. 'Cause you
have to be careful with the nuances of tone and things like that in a medium where you can't
see people's faces, or hear their voices. So it's useful to put that up.
Now quite clearly you couldn't have a statement like that and then say something if you're a
public servant, terrible about the Prime Minister and leading with, I didn't really mean it, it
wasn't an endorsement, or something like that. It's just to get that point across.
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Now as a consequence of doing that you can look and there's various ways of measuring
your effect on social media and how effective you'll be. One is [inaudible], and it's very easy to
use these mechanisms to create artificial score levels. So if you look at... a score of 52 would
probably put me in the top 20% of Twitter users or social media users worldwide. You
shouldn't think I'm getting [inaudible] as a consequence of that because I know that people
who have different talents, for instance they look nice or can sing well, have much, much
higher scores than I do, and tens of thousands, or millions more followers in those things. So I
don't want to pretend that just because I have this that I'm getting some sort of massive
penetration as a consequence.
As I mentioned, because there are only 15 odd IT journalists in Australia, once upon a time if
you wanted to make a media announcement you had to do things on paper and do that. In
government terms, if I want to make an IT media announcement I just tweet about it, as I
have here. You can see a couple of tweets there. The first is that this year we're going to
make our budget data available online about 12 hours after the budget is launched, and it'll be
in CSV files, so machine readable files, that people can look at the budget and make things,
something that's never been possible in Australia before. You can also see improvements
that we made to data.gov.au, to provide more people. I'll come on to that open data in a
moment.
Audience Member:
Sorry, I just have to jump in. Do you enter the... compliment this announcement on social
media space with mainstream media?
John Sheridan:
Hardly ever. We usually point to blog announcements; I mean we'll do that like that.
Occasionally we'll have spoken to the Minister and the Minister will want to make such
announcement. So the Minister will make it through a mainstream media, normal media
announcement, and then we'll follow that up with tweets pointing to it and things like that. You
have to be realistic, the stuff that I look after, there's not all that many people are interested.
Certainly attracting ministerial attention is much more likely to happen if I stuff it up than if I
get it right. So we don't get a lot of ministerial releases and things like that. Mostly it's
departmental stuff.
The rules that we've come to get here are rules about making online comment that I've
paraphrased a bit here, to pick up in these discussion points. Essentially they're reminding
people about what it is they have to do when making public comment. We know that if you're
making public comment online then that isn't going to go away. Someone is going to capture
that comment somehow, whatever it is you do about it. It's there forever. There are billions of
other things there forever as well though, so again it's important not to over-state what people
might see. But it's there forever.
So people, public servants making comment online are required to be professional about
doing things, to recognise that the reputation of the public service generally, and their
organisation in particular, can be put at risk by the wrong sorts of comments. We've seen a
number of, a very small number, two or three cases where public servants have been
dismissed for making inappropriate comments that tie back somehow to their organisation.
The public has an expectation that public servants will maintain the sort of higher level of
conduct. They also have an expectation that we get paid too much, and that we're all lazy,
and it's hard to balance some of those expectations completely at the same time. Generally
speaking they have the expectations. We need to make sure we don't lower those by our
behaviour.
We have to say things that are appropriate. I don't find this, any, if at all particularly, I think
everyone understands why you might make appropriate… or how you might make
appropriate comments, but we do have to emphasise that to our staff. We have to make sure
we're also saying things that it's lawful to say. Now this isn't in any sort of a draconian sense.
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Rather make sure they're not saying things that break very reasonable laws. Finally on the
test of reasonableness it's the notion that we have a system that allows people to do things. If
they do things wrong they are subject to disciplinary action, but it's not harsh or draconian
disciplinary action. It's tested on whether reasonable people would see what they did as
appropriate, and it's, I think, useful sometimes just to get that across to people. You do get a
discussion from time to time about the fact that the public service is something picking on
people by doing this, all those sorts of things. I don't think that's the case.
The lessons here, I think, about how to get a good response to what it is that you're doing
online as a public servant in the context of official comment particularly. First of all present
facts. When someone, and you saw those articles that I showed right at the outset of my
speech, back in my building across the lake my staff are currently drawing statistics together
to put in a brief post I'll put up against one of those things later today, that will say, well
actually here are the facts about this. I won't say, and by the way, I think the person who said
this is an idiot, although I might think that. I won't say any of those things. I'll say here are the
facts about this. So we'll have at least corrected the record in that regard. I think that's useful.
You need to maintain respect for people, just as you would normally. I think all of us know that
we'll see things written online that you know people would never ever, ever have said to the
face of the person that was there. So my view is: if you wouldn't say it to their face well you
shouldn't say it online either. You need to avoid those things. Make sure that when you're
making official comment it's clear that you are, and when you're making personal comment
it's clear that you are. I don't think anybody thinks I'm making official comment about our local
rugby union team when I comment about its performance. Similarly I think that if I am
commenting about IT, and reasonably so, people would say well that's the Government CTO
doing that, and then ascribe certain things as a consequence.
The other thing is too; well the next thing is to go where they are. Again, having a blog that's
got about five followers, that doesn't have an RSS feed, that no-one reads, and you never
check the statistics of, you may as well launch messages in a bottle and send them out to
sea. If there's a blog that discusses things, or makes comments about things, that's the sort of
places that you might want to make comments on in order to get those opinions across. Of
course, you need to know when to stop. There are trolls out there on social media who will
keep pushing, and keep pushing, and keep pushing, and as you keep responding to them
they'll grow bigger and bigger, and more important as a consequence. You need to know not
to get involved in that. So I know there are people who will tweet to me occasionally to whom I
just won't respond, because I can't persuade them of the wrongness of their views, and if I
tried I'd just be having an argument for hours or days about it. Know when to stop so you
don't then engage the wrong way.
A bit about open data; we've done a lot of work in open data recently. We've re-built our open
data website, data.gov.au on the CKAN platform, if that means anything to you. We've put it
in to our public cloud and re-hosted so you get better responses. We're in the process of
federating it with the other States and Territories to get better coverage of data, and we've got
more and more data sets coming online each time. As well as 3,500 machine readable data
sets we have tens of thousands of other resources available through data.gov.au. All of that is
about making information available to the public in these new media times.
What are the concerns that our people have about dealing with online media? If you are
putting forward a proposal to do something, what are the concerns that you might need to
address in your proposal to justify what it is that you're planning to do? First of all you need to
work out how to deal with inappropriate content. What do you if people post things to your
blog, or your Twitter feed or something that aren't appropriate, your Facebook site, how do
you handle that? You need to have thought about that in advance so you know what it is that
you're going to do. It's not the right thing to just disappear things. I think you often need to
show why it is you've done something so that you can see. Have plans for your own content
about what it is you're posting and when, so it isn't an accident when something occurs.
If there are inappropriate comments on your websites, or your Facebook pages, all those
things, you need to have a plan as to how to deal with those things. Again, you don't want to
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be working at that plan at 5:30 one night when you've just seen a nasty comment made about
the Prime Minister on your website. You need to have thought; well this is what we'll do about
those things. You need to have the sort of filters that block inappropriate language
automatically so you can't do those things. I think you can, generally speaking, use post
moderation, that is look at things after they're posted rather than before. There are times
when you might want a pre-moderation policy. For example, in what we described as the
caretaker period, between the time an election is declared and a new government is in power,
we switch our blog sites, generally speaking, to pre-moderation to make sure there are no
election comments or things like that made. Generally speaking post moderation is fine.
You need to recognise that you won't get immediate results from these arrangements. You
won't somehow become a much more popular department tomorrow than you were today just
because you've opened a Facebook page, or you've started tweeting. Over time you will build
credibility as a consequence of this engagement with your stakeholders, and that will improve
things.
You need to understand that ongoing resourcing is required. Not necessarily in the IT cost of
platforms, but the need to have people responding to things working in these areas. How
many people's the right number for this? That's a really interesting question. Our big Human
Services Department probably has about 30 doing that out of, let's say 25,000 staff.
Queensland Rail has three, and they're responding to every Twitter comment that they get
about the rail service being problematic. Given that that happens a lot, then there's a lot of
work involved in that. But it varies. So you need to work out what it is you'll do, create those
expectations about when you might respond and how often you might respond. Establish your
policies around that.
You do have to, as I said, discuss this notion of risk averseness to make sure that you know
what it is that you're happy with for your organisation doing. What is the appetite for your
senior leaders to engage with risk in those things? You need to have had those
conversations with them previously. I remember when we were starting our first blog site. I
had a conversation with our Secretary who's now the Secretary of Prime Minister and
Cabinet, and I explained to him what it is that I wanted to do, and how I thought this would
work. He said well that's interesting John, but here's a list of things that I think will go wrong.
And he rolled off a... what was in sort of 2009, the typical list of things that you might think
would go wrong. He said, but that's alright, because I can see you're ready to accept
responsibility for those, and if they do happen then you'll just get sacked and that'll be OK. I
said well that's OK, 'cause I'm happy that they won't. That won't happen. Indeed they didn't,
and our blogs have been very successful as a consequence. I'd established his risk appetite
for those things, and what he knew... yes, things could go wrong, but if they did the risk would
be limited, all those sorts of things. So it's very important to know that at the outset.
Now that pretty much summarises what it is that I wanted to get across for you today. I'm
happy to take questions now if you have any? Yeah.
[Questions Snipped]
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