Comments on: New Media in the States

By: Our Top 5 Posts | Social Government

Our Top 5 Posts | Social Government — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 12:05:00 +0000

[...] New Media in the States (March 3) [...]

By: Alexander Muir

Alexander Muir — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 23:39:56 +0000

@Nick, right- for California something for emergencies might not make sense, but for somewhere like Rhode Island during hurricane season, it makes perfect sense. Larger states could encourage county-level emergency systems, or the state governments themselves could aggregate based on regional area. There are many options, and as you point out, some localities are doing SMS alert systems

By: Nick

Nick — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 09:03:44 +0000

I know you’re talking about state-level Web 2.0 stuff, but San Francisco has an SMS alert system:

http://www.alertsf.com/

In a state as large as California, having an SMS alert system even for enormous natural disasters just doesn’t make sense.

Anyway, thanks for the rundown!

By: Alexander Muir

Alexander Muir — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 22:28:55 +0000

@Pho, you’re right about partisan politics, but check out

http://www.recovery.gov/?q=content/state-recovery-page
http://www.statescape.com/maps/governorsmap.asp

to draw your own conclusions…

By: Pho

Pho — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 15:33:20 +0000

While you may be reluctant to get party political with this, I wonder if states with Democratic administrations are more likely to set up Recovery.govs. Given the criticism of the stimulus bill from certain Republican governors, it would be interesting to see how/if they communicate about it online.

By: Alexander Muir

Alexander Muir — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 01:22:23 +0000

1) usually, they don’t, or they just have a small icon in the corner of their front page. my methods for discovering their involvement included searches, both manual and googlized.
2) concrete numbers are really only available for twitter/youtube, since that information is published by the sites themselves. but going off those numbers, at the state level, very few people are taking advantage of their new media programs
3) young and/or technologically inclined

future surveys could include freedom of information requests/interviews to get more exact information, this was more of a “what’s out there” thing. I agree that government may need to “sell” these services, but one of the main advantage of social media is its viral nature. For good or ill, I think that at the moment the states are hoping that their ventures will just take off through word of mouth. I’m hoping that by drawing attention to these programs and having discussions about them, citizens will be more likely to look for these programs and that government will refine their implementation

By: Hunter Senft-Grupp

Hunter Senft-Grupp — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 18:43:03 +0000

I have a couple of questions:
1) In what ways do the States publicize their “Web 2.0″ features?
2) What percent of the State populations “participate” in the new features?
3) What is the demography of the users?

The availability of these Web features is definitely progressive in a movement towards greater civic participation in government. The next step that must occur (especially as the Internet generation reaches political maturity) is “sale” of these features to the population. I use the word sale in the sense that users must be made to feel that by using these features they are in fact participating in government – and they must ACTUALLY be participating in government as well.

Thanks Alex for this illuminating survey.