Check out the TechPresident story on the back-end rebuild.

This is a big deal, as it is rare for large government agencies, particularly high profile ones such as the White House, to build their public-facing Web sites using open platforms.

As an agency that builds a lot of Web sites for government agencies, the White House’s decision to go with Drupal might signal a major shift in how government agencies, and their IT leadership specifically, look at open source solutions.

While we do not ascribe to the notion that open source is always the best solution for every client, we also think that the tendency for many government agencies to not even consider them as viable options is short-sited. Organizations should weigh the pros and cons of a variety of Web site CMS platforms, regardless of whether they are open source, and then the select the solution that best fits their needs.

Hopefully the White House’s decision to go with Drupal will begin to remove some of the unwarranted stigma still attached to open source platforms among the public sector IT community.

Jose Villa

The campaign, sponsored by L.A. County Department of Public Health, was almost a year in the making, and forced our agency to rethink everything we thought we knew about advertising and cause marketing.

I just published an article for MediaPost’s EngageTeens column on the approach that led to the creation of We’re Fed Up… you can read it here.

Jose Villa

The new site provide a lot of information in very engaging formats, including an interactive map and variety of reporting tools on how the Recovery Act money is being spent. It’s also a clean, organized and highly usable Web site. Federal Computer Week ran a nice piece on the site launch.

Yet, as someone who has been running a Web development firm for 11+ years, I still can’t connect the dots on how it could possibly cost $9.5 million to build. Even though it is a large, complex site, with a lot of back-end integration, a sophisticated and highly customized CMS, and significant hardware/hosting infrastructure, not to mention an aggressive roll-out (I think the site was built in 4 or 5 months), the price tag still seems way too steep.

Let’s look at it this way – assuming a $200/hr blended rate, and subtracting a healthy $1 million for hardware and software, that works out to roughly 42,500 man-hours. Assuming a 5 month timeline, that represents 8,500 man-hours per month, or 53 FTEs dedicated to the project. There is no way 53 full-time, 100% dedicated / utilized individuals were required to build this site. No way.

Kudos to Smartronix for making a lot money in 2009!

Description: A talk at the Personal Democracy Forum conference on research into the social patterns of teenagers on online networks.  Dr. Danah Boyd is a Social Media Researcher at Microsoft Research New England and a Fellow at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

The Sensis Take: Not all social networks are created equal.  Facebook’s Ivy League origins and Myspace’s urban hipster roots are still evident in the socio-economic skewing of users.  Be aware of the social divide between users when using social networks in your social media campaign

“As we think about creating public spaces, what’s the meeting point for our conversations? Is it MySpace or Facebook? Twitter or IRC? What you choose matters. Where you and your colleagues hang out matters”

An Anthropological Introduction to Youtube

Description: A talk by Dr. Mike Wesch at the Library of Congress last Year.  Dr. Wesch is the leader of Kansas State’s YouTube Ethnography project.

The Sensis Take: What you do is much more important than how you do it. Hidden by the myriad of social media tools is the fact that there are only four functions to social media:

• User generated content
• User generated distribution
• User generated filtering
• User generated organization

Will My Video Get 1 Million Views on YouTube?

The Sensis Take: The small chance of a video going viral in a big way is more reinforcement that high quality creative is a necessary component in successful social media campaigns.

Online Ad Spending Rises At Double-Digit Rates, Gains Share Vs. All Other Media

The Sensis Take: As uncertainty increases in a chaotic economy, the granular analysis available to digital advertising makes its value to advertisers unassailable.

19 Presence Management Chores You Could Do Every Day

The Sensis Take: Sometimes, all it takes is a few minutes to participate in the daily conversation to keep your brand personal.

The Feed: What the Government is Twittering Now

Description: Nextgov.com just launched a new tool that aggregates Twitter feeds from dozens of federal agencies. See what’s going on across the entire government on one page.

The Sensis Take: Enabling user generated distribution via twitter is just a start to facilitating the democratic process.  The public wants to participate, make sure your agency knows how to crowdsource democracy.

~Blair Goldberg, Associate Digital Strategist

Having drunk my social media Kool-Aid and the White House’s history of new media success, the circumstances were set to love last week’s Online Town Hall on Obama’s health care plan.  But the event fell short.

They had a great Facebook integration with a newsfeed of on-topic status updates, but it didn’t matter.  They deftly used hashtags with Twitter, but it still didn’t matter.  They solicited compelling video questions through YouTube, but it just didn’t matter.

With all of these innovative approaches and platforms for connecting with stakeholders, they couldn’t manage to get a clean video stream with the video content on either http://www.whitehouse.gov or http://www.facebook.com/whitehouse.  It made the whole experience unbearable until I went and found a video feed from CNN that didn’t give me a headache.

Despite all the things that didn’t go well, including one humorous reference to whitehouse.com instead of .gov, I would say that the White House new media team did an effective job of integrating all of these different social platforms into one event.  By crowdsourcing questions and facilitating the digital conversation, the White House provided a vehicle for increasing the inclusiveness of a frequently all-too-distant political process.

My only major non-technical complaint was how overwhelming all of the information was.  I’m a fairly quick reader, but there were several long entries in the town hall newsfeed that scrolled before I could finish reading them.  At first that was frustrating, as it felt like trying to participate in the conversation would be akin to whispering into a hurricane.   Over the next few hours, I saw the real power of this process.  It engaged me in dialogue with my friends who didn’t participate in the actual event.   While “Internet Time” is normally discussed as acceleration, this process extended the event for hours (days in one case) as the dialogue continued.

Today’s big idea: If you can’t manage the basic technologies of the Internet, the most sophisticated tools still won’t help the idea spread.

- Blair Goldberg, Associate Digital Strategist

The social network was created Steve Ressler in late 2007 using Ning, a platform for creating custom social networks. I became a member a few months back (the site is open to anyone with an interest in connecting with the Federal government).

Needless to say, for those of us who work with the Federal government, this emerging tool has huge potential to change how we look at doing business with the government. I personally use it to keep track of trends and discussions occuring among thought leaders in the government. 

Congrats to Steve and GovLoop on the big milestone!

Jose Villa

President

On its most basic level, Gov 2.0 is the use of Web 2.0 and social media tools by governments to improve their operations, communicate with their constituents, and increase transparency. This can include government at the federal, state, and local levels.

Needless to say this is an important issue for those of us who work in new media here in Washington DC.

A couple of weeks ago I went to Gov 2.0 Camp, which was held March 27-28 here in Washington DC. Gov 2.0 camp was an unconference intended to discuss issues surrounding the Gov 2.0 movement. The event sold out and was attended by a lot of people. It turns out that a lot of people, both inside and outside of the government are very interested in this issue of using new media tools to improve government.

I won’t do a complete recap of the conference, because a lot of other people already have. You can read some of them here, here, and here.

Suffice to say for now that the Gov 2.0 movement has a lot of momentum and a lot of important people are interested in the subject. More to come.

Danny Allen