Confidence in sharing

Some of those who fancy ourselves big time into blogging and social media are a little bit down on codes of practice.  Maybe we see ourselves as mavericks, laws unto ourselves, hep cool cats who don’t need nobody to tell us the score.  But the reality is, how roguish can you really be if you use social media to write about local government?  Dominic Campbell (who admittedly seems to strike a cooler profile than I do) regrets the introduction of a social media code for civil servants:

Unfortunately, the moment that pen is put to paper and guidance is created, no matter how effective and light weight, things change and often for the worse. Guidance removes the freedom for people to think for themselves and results in situations where people download confidential files onto disc and send them through the post. Until civil servants are trusted to think for themselves, mistakes will continue to happen and the latent creative potential of the collective civil service will remain untapped, no matter how much guidance is created to give permission to behave to the contrary.

I tend to agree with Dominic actually and have always relied on common sense, but the workplace reality may be a bit different.  And sometimes it’s hard for me to remember how nervous I was when I first started blogging using my professional identity.

Another part of our workplace reality is that we work in political environments.  Councillors often have their well meaning efforts turned into political ammunition.  Officers aren’t spared either.  I’m sure we’ve all worked with councillors who seem absolutely great, committed, and easy to work with.  But next thing you know, they’ve dropped you or a colleague into it in a full council session over a misunderstanding, an honest mistake or just for working on an initiative dreamt up by the “other side”.  Not everyone’s like that, but hey, that’s politics.  And if only nice people were elected, the council wouldn’t exactly be a representative body, would it?*  So we do have to be careful and aware.  

But that doesn’t mean we can’t share, and maybe a blogging code of practice would help give people the confidence and guidelines not  so much to contribute, but to fall back on if they need to.   An ability to say, if anyone should ask, “Hey look, I complied with the civil service code.   The Government wants us to blog.” 

At our community of practice development event (see all about it here on the CoP, behind a free registration wall), the issue of confidence came up several times.  I asked a participant if she thought having a code would help.  She thought it would.   So in that vein, I propose the civil service code of practice for participation online and the BBC’s social media guidelines.  They’re both common sense, concise and they’re not contradictory (mostly).  I like the BBC’s approach to acknowledging that people do use different identities online and so long as you’re not blogging about work that’s ok.  I’ve put the full text of both on this wiki page in the Policy and Performance Community of Practice, so that we can comment or modify the code for our own local government needs – if we so wish. 

______

* a paraphrased quote from the great Molly Ivins.