Answers via GovFresh: What happened to Manor?

Luke Fretwell over at GovFresh has picked up the question I asked in my recent blog post about the disappearing social media presence of the City of Manor, TX. He has allowed me to repost here on my blog. Thank you, Luke!

What happened to Manor?

• Luke Fretwell · Bio · RSS
• May 30, 2012, 10:21 am

Ines Mergel asks a great question about a government 2.0 icon emblematic of the potential local open government had in its nascent heyday way back two years ago:

“What happened, Manor?“

For those unfamiliar with Manor and its young gun superstar and former CIO Dustin Haisler, Manor was symbolic of the “small town startup” that could strategically leverage modern technology to better serve citizens and run more efficiently while still keeping IT costs to a minimum. Haisler leveraged QR codes, WordPress, Google Apps, engagement platforms and other experimental technologies that brought Manor into the digital 21st century.

Today, that Manor is gone.

Haisler eventually left for the real startup world, and it appears the baton was either not properly handed off or just dropped altogether.

I asked Haisler about this, and here’s his reply via email:

I think this shows the need for a few things:

(1) Forming a social norm around innovation and experimentation in government, which requires significant measurement and reporting in order to combat the risk that comes along with a change in administration.

(2) Government innovation programs should not be run solely from within City Hall. There should be controlling interests from community stakeholders (businesses, non-profits, academia, etc.)

(3) The need for education. Current and future leaders of government agencies need to be educated on the business value that comes from using participatory technologies within government.

This presents a unique opportunity to reinvent civic innovation within Manor (where I still live) from a truly grassroots perspective driven from the community.

Design is inherently subjective, so it’s difficult to argue whether the new site is prettier than the previous version, however, there are several non-aesthetic components now missing from Manor’s previous “beta city” vision that should be standard in all new government websites:

• no integrated content management system (it appears they’re now using Google Blogspot to post site updates, but these are separate from the site’s primary pages)
• less prominent social media accounts (previously, Manor had a Facebook, Twitter and Flickr presence, but now only Facebook is accessible, albeit hidden)
• no commitment to open source (previous WordPress theme was developed and made freely available to any government)
• no site search
• no accessible email or online contact form
• no open data portal
• no open 311 reporting
• URLs no longer mapped to cityofmanor.org domain
• basic disregard of 508 compliance

I’m not familiar with Manor’s current operations and technological leadership but, judging by its new website, I concur with Mergel that “they apparently went back in time and put up a horrific website in a design that reminds me of the early days of the Internet.” (disclaimer: I helped set up and design the previous version)

Whatever the reason for the set-back, there’s a lesson to be learned in how to better transition an IT environment developed by a tech-savvy CIO to leadership that appears to be less informed on today’s technological standards.

Most importantly, it’s seems there’s an opportunity here for the Gov 2.0 community to come together and address how small towns manage IT sustainability and help those that are less tech-savvy better understand and implement strategic, experimental and open technologies.

How can we do this?

 

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About Luke Fretwell:

Luke Fretwell is the founder of GovFresh. Contact him at luke@govfresh.com or connect on LinkedIn or Twitter at@govfresh or @lukefretwell.

Control Your Online Public Profile Using Social Networking Platforms

I just taught a segment in David Lazer’s Social Networking class at Harvard on how people can analyze and visualize their social networks. David invited the whole class to join him on LinkedIn and we noticed that a couple of students were hesitant to join due to security concerns. We have a very mixed audience of MPP, MPA, Midcareer and PhD students from all kinds of different industries – some of them from the military and security area. One of the students asked me: “Can you give me one good reason why I should join any of the social networking sites?” – given the background and affiliations of some of the students, I couldn’t come up with an argument why people should join – on the contrary I understand that some people need to keep a low public profile, so that not too much of their private information or details about their CV will become publicly available.

So I started to think about what are reasons why I have all my information uploaded to all kinds of websites? I have a Flickr page, an openBC/Xing profile, a LinkedIn profile, a personal website, a corporate website and post on my own blog and on our blog at the Kennedy School. Am I too open to give away this much information? On the other hand, I am not working in the military or security area, right?

It turns out that there are ways to control what people can find out about you. I talked with Bill Liao, the co-founder of Xing (formerly openBC) about this issue and he pointed me to the people finder search engine ZoomInfo. It is a search engine that gives summaries of people (Find tab) or let’s you create a more detailed profile online, so that recruiters, etc. can find you easier (BeFound tab). Controlling what you actually want other people to find about you comes with a price: pro version for $49/month. But it is definitely one way to control what information can be found about you and also a way to manipulate your online information.

I tried it and was surprised about the result (Remember, I have a at least seven different pages directly connected with my name where I actively produce content). Here is the result:

So there are four entries – one with the direct link to my Kennedy School subpage, but the others are from older sources tracking some of my (past) academic activities. That’s about it. Google on the other hand finds 13.200 different entries.

Another way of controlling what is found by Archive.com or Google seems to be to ask thems to take down some of your indexed information and not display it when people search for your name.

What are your thoughts on the dangers of having your information publicly available on social networking platforms? Are there any measures you take to avoid having too much information available for the rest of the world?

(hm… guess I just created another piece of publicly available information)

Check out also the Netgov Blog for additional comments on this posting.

cRANKy.com – first age-relevant search engine/social networking plattform

I just discovered the first age-relevant search engine – slash social networking plattform: cRANKy.com. It is targeted towards +50 year olds (seniors and baby boomers). They intend to provide information on specific topics such as jobs after retirement, how to become 100 years old, how to make new friends, etc. Some of the searches are neatly presorted in categories on the frontpage.

I like the “How to make friends” section – which ties into what Thomas and I are working on: people in specific phases of their lifes are only adding specific types of (new) contacts to their network of friends. Especially when you retire – you won’t see your co-workers on a daily basis anymore, your routines are changing and you might loose some of your contacts. See my earlier post on the sustainability of online ties.

It’s also great, that the most relevant topics are pre-sorted by relevance (to avoid being overwhelmed by too many results), there are some prominent buttons to increase the text size and you can top 10 yourself, so that information can be pushed at you.

I like to see more of this on other search engines, too – or am I too young for this?

StudiVZ bought by Holtzbrinck

The biggest German social networking platform StudiVZ for college students was reportedly bought by the publishing group Holtzbrinck. StudiVZ is a complete mock-up of Facebook (what is an interesting fact in itself – is copying a business model, design and idea really acceptable when we are talking 100m Euros?). See the StudiVZ blog for the official announcement.

Holtzbrinck already runs the popular dating platform Parship.de and with this acquisition they are extending their (potential) customer range to almost all age groups.

This is interesting in terms of research on online networks – and one of my earlier posts on the sustainablity of online ties – when students leave the phase in their life where they need to connect with other students, how are they going to maintain their ties? Will they delete their profiles/abandon the platform and are lost as customers to the platform providers? Holtzbrinck probably needs to think about an extension to cover the needs of their users beyond their college years (and aside from dating), something like openBC/Xing which might cover their professional needs.

What makes online ties sustainable? A research design proposal to analyze online social networks.

Recently we heard more and more that online social networking plattforms don’t really work – Alexa teaches us, that people tend to sign up for MySpace, Facebook or openBC, but plattform providers have the hardest time to keep the network alive: people tend to sign up, but don’t or only infrequently come back to their profile.

This made my co-author Thomas Langenberg, EPFL Lausanne in Switzerland, and me start to think about the question: What makes online ties sustainable? We came up with a reasearch design that looks at four different phases of a life cycle of online ties.

Here is the abstract of our paper:

“Recently, the Pew Internet & American Life Project published a study about the number of social relations people maintain online and the omnipresent question was raised again: are actual face-to-face contacts declining over time and are they replaced by online social interactions. Our virtual life is scattered in online profiles across sites such as openBC.com, Friendster.com, Match.com or MySpace.com. There are currently more than 400 different online social networking sites – with new sites popping up every day. Building on existing factors of persistence and sustainability of network ties in general, we address the key research questions: Which factors lead to the creation, maintenance, decay and reconnection of online network ties? Our research draws on prominent issues in the social network literature, which address the gap between research on offline and online social networks. We examine individual, dyadic, structural and content-related characteristics to understand how and why actors in different phases of their life cycle turn to online ties. Within the presented research framework, we derive propositions and develop a research design to collect and analyze qualitative and quantitative network data. The overall goal is to develop recommendations on how online social networks can become sustainable over time, and we develop questions and avenues for further research.“

We came up with the following typology of online vs. offline:

You can download the full paper on the Working Paper website of the Program on Networked Governance at Harvard.

Also: check out my entry on the Program on Networked Governance Blog.

Appendix:
Interesting post: “Why social networks fail” over at Tristan Louis’ weblog.