Education.au ltd’s me.edu.au social networking site has continued to generate interest not only from the education community but also from government and corporates.
My colleague Sarah Hayman and I recently presented at a South Australian Government Web 2.0 conference.
This was a lively and informative event attended by 150 delegates from across South Australian Government and other sectors.
We heard stories of desire within government departments to get access to the superb capabilities provided by external Web 2.0 sites such as Linkedin, Facebook, Myspace and me.edu.au to:
- improve social and knowledge networking within government and
- deliver on citizen-facing Government strategies
We also heard of groups in Government forming “bottom-up” networks using these Internet sites, only to have them closed down because of management concerns about the risks of storing internal government information on public sites.
A common frustration was that many of the popular Web 2.0 sites are blocked by government firewalls.
Another key business driver for the adoption of web 2.0 technologies and paradigms within Government is the need in many departments to be able to attract and retain younger people for whom online social networking is an integral part of their lives.
A number of departments have started pilot web 2.0 projects by deploying internal blogs and wikis behind their firewalls using open source products. Some brave souls are even contemplating using the social networking features of the latest version of Sharepoint!
We discussed the opportunity for governments to use a productised version of me.edu.au as a next step along the web 2.0 path:
- adding a social/knowledge networking overlay to existing information sources such as blogs, wikis and intranets.
- connecting people and information sources within and across departments
- deployed internally (behind the firewall) to overcome information sensitivity and firewall policy barriers
- possible integration with existing ideentity management systems
Another common theme was the need to know best practice policies and processes for setup and operation of these new generation social networks.
One Comment
This post does a great job of bringing out the tensions between wanting to engage in online social networking and the incumbent position of control. We are clearly in that mirky transition time between and entire generation of people who are comfortable living openly online and those of us who grew up in a time when publishing digital content required some level of effort and expense.
I remember during the design of me.edu the debates about the point (or otherwise) of duplicating facilities that are available for free from a number of sites. But it seems that me.edu has indeed hit a sweet spot for those in the transition.
Well done and all the best for this service for Aussie educators.
Fang - Mike Seyfang
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