Government mulls public service tweets

UK government plans public service tweets

At the recent Mobile Government Conference 2009, Owen Pengelly, head of the Cabinet Office's central sponsor for information assurance unit, acknowledged the need for public services to engage better with citizens. His proposed solution? Micro-blogging service, Twitter.

The Power of Information Taskforce, set up by the Cabinet Office, is trying to "change the paradigm of engagement between government and the citizen, and move from rather staid consultation to collaboration, and it denotes a wholesale move to the web and to Web 2.0 technologies like Twitter," said Pengelly.

A big problem with the idea of public sector employees using Twitter to engage with citizens is the technology’s poor security. Earlier this year a Twitter account belonging to then US President-elect Barack Obama was compromised.

Any move to introduce public service "Tweets" could only happen after a detailed analysis of the information security risk, Pengelly admitted. He also said the power of today’s current crop of mobile devices would need to be taken into consideration when assessing risk.

“The PDAs I carry around with me now are vastly more capable than the ones I carried around a couple of years ago, and people, public servants and civil servants want to do more with their mobile devices,” he added.

Public sector organisations desperately need to get to grips with how much of the population uses technology today, said Butler Group senior research analyst Sarah Burnett.

"They have to balance open government with risks that go with it, because the problem is whether we like it or not the younger generation – the Facebook generation – will only use older communications technology like email if there's no other alternative,” she said.

She added that the government probably sees Twitter as a tool to combat the increasing disenchantment of the younger generation with politics in general.

“I think governments have to be ready to provide other social media channels to engage with this generation coming through. It's a dilemma for them and they're having to strike a balance between security and accessibility,” said Burnett.