In 2007, a small group of people began an intentional, collaborative experiment in open, transparent, and direct communication about your space program. Our goal was to enable your direct participation in exploring and contributing to NASA’s mission.

Many of us have since begun new adventures. This site will remain as an archive of the accomplishments of the openNASA experiment.

A Lesson in Social Media Innovation

By Nick Skytland, 26 October 2011
 Nick Skytland

There has been a lot of talk about the need for developing social media policies within government, but little talk about how best to effectively COMMUNICATE the policy once all the work has been done. Organizations spend month – even years – discussing, debating, writing, editing, and reviewing their social media policy before it’s published for all to see. The end result is usually a PDF document or static webpage that is rarely viewed by the intended audience. Logically, this makes sense to us – it’s the way we’ve always done things in government. Why would we do things any differently?

But, imagine if you could do things differently! Why does your social media policy (or any policy you develop for that matter) have to be a PDF document on a website? What if you didn’t expect your audience to download and read a 2000-word document and actually used social media to communicate your message? What if the way you communicated your policy was actually engaging?

The Department of Justice in Victoria, Australia is an organization that really gets what social media is all about. After countless hours developing their own policy, they modeled what it looks like to be a cutting edge Gov2.0 agency and used social media to communicate their social media policy! Instead of expecting their staff to read a black and white document, they produced an amazingly engaging (and colorful) short video that explains the key elements of their social media policy.

It’s truly inspiring.

I had a chance to listen to Patrick McCormick, who is the General Manager of Online Collaboration and Digital Engagement in the Strategic Communication Branch of the Department of Justice in Victoria, talk about this video and what else they are working on. They are really innovating on the way business is done in government. I encourage you to check it out for yourself and listen to this Podcast with Patrick McCormick where he discusses his views on how the Department of Justice Victoria transformed an internal training video into a YouTube success with over 32,000 views and what he has to say about Gov 2.0 Strategies.