Rock Creek Roundup (August 14 Edition)

Posted by: Meagen Ryan, Director of Strategy Aug 14, 2009 0 Comments

The Department of Defense solicits feedback on Web 2.0 capabilities by military families, while the Obama administration uses social media to combat health care reform rumors in this week’s edition of the Rock Creek Roundup:

• As we noted last week, DoD is working out its social media policy right now. As part of this, the Department of Defense Web 2.0 Guidance Forum is soliciting feedback on the use of Web 2.0 Capabilities by Military Families. If you read the first comment, you’ll know that this is a subject that’s important to me, and given the comments that follow, I’m not the only one. Kudos to DoD for opening up the conversation, encouraging participation, and hopefully taking the feedback into consideration when making the decision on what access our troops should have to social media.
• “How does government itself become an open platform that allows people inside and outside government to innovate? How do you design a system in which all of the outcomes aren’t specified beforehand, but instead evolve through interactions between the technology provider and its user community?” asks Tim O’Reilly in this eloquent editorial at Forbes. Using examples from the private sector to make his point, O’Reilly weaves a compelling story.
• The White House is making use of you guessed it—social media—to help dispel myths about the Administration’s health care reform plan. This week they launched a new multimedia-rich web page on the White House site called Reality Check where consumers can go to find out the straight scoop on health care reform issues, and used Facebook and Twitter to directly reach out to more than 1 million fans and followers.
• Also launching in the social media realm this week is the Department of Homeland Security’s ‘Our Border‘ social network, hosted on Ning.com. The department will use the site to post videos, discuss their policies, and communicate with registered visitors. Though they will moderate all content before it is posted on the site, their association with Ning is a step in the right direction, as it pushes the envelope on government partnerships with existing social network tools.

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Meagen Ryan

Director of Strategy

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