I recently wrote about the vibrant Twitter community organized around the hashtagging of the airport code for Edmonton, AB (#yeg). The use of the regional tag to organize Edmonton community tweets began in summer of 2008, and has become so popular it now grows organically without much thought to its backstory.

I’ve long argued that Twitter is very powerful for community building, with special value for generating civic engagement and pride and boosting local businesses. Knowing the benefits, and realizing them, though, is very different. Edmonton’s Twitter community has really blazed a trail, and it’s worth examining its success and drawing out a few lessons for would-be imitators.

According to #yeg enthusiasts who responded to my inquires on Twitter and my blogs, local software developer Mack Male and other influential social media enthusiasts deserve much of the credit for the tags’s success (the YEG airport code, now in common vernacular in Edmonton, was not used to describe the region before achieving Twitter popularity). Male regularly updates stats on Edmonton’s Twitter community, and in October cataloged more than 5,600 locals at least semi-active on Twitter and more than 18,000 tweets using the #yeg tag. There appear to be hundreds of Twitter users using the #yeg tag as part of their daily lives, and in-person meeutps get dozens of attendees (no small feat for Twitter communities, at least today).

Male, in a year-in-review blog post this past June, describes advocating the #yeg tag after learning at a conference that Twitter users in Calgary, AB, were organizing around their airport code, #yyc. (Twitter users in Victoria, BC, are also successfully using their airport code, #yyj).

This brings us to one of the first points that makes #yeg successful, and perhaps explains #yyc and #yyj as well: in a harsh climate isolated geographically, airport codes take on greater significance because residents are used to flying whenever they need to get somewhere else.

The #yeg buzzcronym also works because it’s easy to pronounce (rhymes with “egg”) and good for new self-referential words, says Edmonton journalist Karen Unland. Edmonton’s Twitter folk lovingly refer to one another and themselves as “yegsters” and “yeggers” (or “yeg’ers,” a construction that better utilizes Twitters search grouping function). They’ve built out the tag’s utility with features such as Edmonton traffic updates.

Edmonton’s yegsters have also built their community by taking the interaction offline, with tweetups organized around charities, political reform, open data, and other civic concerns. (Here’s a short video from a December tweetup benefiting the local food bank, courtesy of #yeg documentarian Jerry Aulenbach.) The hashtag unites Edmonton’s Twitter users around civic pride and involvement – even if they don’t follow each other in the traditional Twitter stream, many check up on the tag for its local flavor, discovering new connections and community in the process.

So, what is unique to Edmonton’s hashtagging that cannot be repeated elsewhere? Unique geography and a single regional airport seem important. Tourist hubs like Los Angeles, Vancouver, Los Angeles or San Francisco might simply suffer from random clutter (the SF Bay Area, where I live, is so large and full of urban and suburban density points, #sfo will likely never be much more than an airport). Jas Darrah, an Edmonton civil servant, emphasizes that adoption of #yeg was no accident and required key influencers actively promoting and training on its use. That included local press, institutions and government.

So, where might #yeg’s success be replicated? In the U.S., I’d suggest cities with significant populations and semi-isolated geography: Spokane, WA (GEG); Portland, OR (PDX); Bakersfield, CA (BFL); Tucson, AZ (TUS); Albequerque, NM (ABQ); Colorado Springs, CO (COS); Wichita, KS (ICT); Tulsa, OK (TUL); Pittsburgh, PA (PIT). Due to the aforementioned pronounceability factor, GEG, COS, TUL, and PIT gain an edge.

Let’s get this party started!

~ Adriel Hampton is a San Francisco public servant and host of the Gov 2.0 Radio podcast. Follow him on Twitter @adrielhampton.

Intriguing conversation tonight on Gov 2.0 Radio with Lewis Shepherd of Microsoft. Shepherd, an experienced leader in intelligence IT projects, argued that the most successful government IT projects – GPS, the Internet – have come in secretive environments. What does that mean for Gov 2.0, open government and “government as a platform?”
“I’d like to kick the crutch of technology out from under the argument,” Shepherd said, arguing that citizen engagement may being left by the wayside as reform evangelists focus on internal bureaucratic reforms. We discussed Carl Malamud’s efforts to simplify the courts, “Citizen 2.0,” and the pain point for citizen-focused reform.
Joining us in the podcast’s live chat, Chris Jones of SourcePOV also provided valuable commentary to a discussion that began on the new Open Government Directive:
Chris: Could argue that Open Gov Directive is an attempt by administration to initiate a culture change … social media (new media, collaborative media, etc) gets people talking across silos, across agencies.  works against trad. bureaucratic barriers .. for the better?
Chris: Not via Facebook .. !! needs to be a conversation, not a “friend feed”
Adriel: yes, a little glasnost for the bureaucracy?
Chris: yes .. but bureaucracies are very good at resisting change, so it needs to be more than OGD .. that’s a starting point .. agencies mgmt needs to be incented & held accountable … Exactly .. pain point = accountability .. changing the expectation
Gov 2.0 Radio is live Sunday’s at 9 p.m. EST (with a few exceptions for international guests), and you can download past episodes at Gov20Radio.com.

~ Adriel Hampton is a San Francisco public servant and host of the Gov 2.0 Radio podcast.

While many government organizations are still struggling with the applicability of social media tools to their mission, there’s one area for engagement and improvement that jumps right out: bringing collaboration to the traditional suggestion box.
What are some of the ways that agencies use a suggestion box? What are the benefits and risks of taking the review process from an insular committee to all stakeholders?
Computers have already helped us move beyond the simple wooden box and slip of paper to ideas like online sourcing of budget suggestions and process reforms from citizens and employees.
Taking that process to a whole new level, Web 2.0 tools like UserVoice and IdeaScale open up the suggestion box to internal and/or external stakeholders, enabling robust vetting and ranking of ideas in an open forum.
Any agency with a broad front-line community or stakeholder group – any agency, really – could use these tools to empower employees and revitalize its mission. I encourage anyone evangelizing Web 2.0 and social media to bring these tools to top-level decision makers.
Departments and governments already using this kind of collaboration include the TSA and City of Santa Cruz. What would you like to see?

 

An interesting presentation caught my eye this week, and it’s well worth sharing. It’s titled 2015, the web is dead, and if you can ignore a few typos, it’s a powerful look at where infotech is headed – decentralized, mobile, integrated. It also ties in with a point that Deloitte analyst Bill Eggers made on Sunday’s Gov 2.0 Radio podcast: the pace of growth in technology is simply not slowing, creating a period of rapid social change previously unseen.
Imagine taking out your mobile and pointing it at a building down the block and seeing a tenants’ list and key individuals in those organizations with their photos, profiles and recent network updates. Take it further, and you’ve got facial recognition and mobile Web in your glasses (or even in an implant). If you’re in sales, you’ll be pulling info from the cloud on people you meet at a conference. If you’re a law enforcement officer, you’ll be checking warrants from behind the sunglasses.
It’s coming, and fast.

~ Adriel Hampton is a San Francisco public servant and host of the Gov 2.0 Radio podcast.

In a new book that applies systems thinking to complex government initiatives, “If We Can Put a Man on the Moon … Getting Big Things Done in Government,” authors Bill Eggers and John O’Leary describe the moment that a public initiative translates from design to reality – the moment of legislative passage – in scifi terms, as the Stargate. In Chapter 3, “The Stargate Trap” they describe what can happen at that moment:
“The best that can be said of the Stargate Trap is that is sometimes kills bills that deserve to die. More often, the damaging distortion effects on a policy proposal are profoundly negative. Sometimes a bill sits out there and gets picked apart like a wounded animal by opponents, eventually being killed. Sometimes a bill gets loaded with so many goodies and special exceptions to gain the support needed for passage that the final bill becomes unrecognizable from the original idea. Or perhaps the bill is rammed through will little debate. None of these routes through the Stargate enhances democracy.”
This is powerful book because it traces the “big idea” from the political to the bureaucratic, providing myriad U.S. and international examples of both failed and successful processes. But it also confirms many of the fears I have about government process, writ large in today’s California water and national health care initiatives.
I’ll be blogging more about the ideas in this book in the days and weeks to come. Happily, Man on the Moon’s important look at government process is just as readable as today’s business bestsellers – welcome and refreshing in the arena of public policy. It also combats process traps, including the dangers at the Stargate, with action-oriented “Field Guide” sections for success in democratic reforms.
Earlier tonight, Gov 2.0 Radio interviewed Eggers and O’Leary. You can check out that podcast here.

~ Adriel Hampton is a San Francisco public servant and host of the Gov 2.0 Radio podcast.

I hope you’ll join us Sunday night for a very special edition of the Gov 2.0 Radio podcast, as we host a conversation with Bill Eggers and John O’Leary, authors of the new reform treatise “If We Can Put a Man on the Moon: Getting Big Things Done in Government.”
Eggers in 2005 chronicled the rise of innovative e-gov projects and the potential for tech-enabled reform in “Government 2.0,” a work of research well ahead of the curve. In “Man on the Moon,” Eggers and O’Leary apply process thinking to the sticky business of managing complex public initiatives.
Gov 2.0 Radio is live Sundays at 9 p.m. EST on BlogTalkRadio.

~ Adriel Hampton is a San Francisco public servant and host of the Gov 2.0 Radio podcast.

I got thinking again this week about one of my favorite Gov 2.0 practitioners, the EPA’s Jeffrey Levy.
Levy is important not just because he’s one of the nicest folks in Gov 2.0, which he is, but because he’s making real strides in creating road maps for integration of social media into the practice of government. One of his contribution is the short mantra, “Mission! Tools! Metrics! Teach!”
You can read Levy’s thoughts on these four points at his blog, Government 2.0 Beta. Whatever your agency or charge, these four points are great to build flesh around. While everybody is hot for Facebook and Twitter, picking tools without looking at mission is recipe for short-lived success.
Are you a small town or local agency? Perhaps a Ning network is what you’re looking for, or a targeted Twitter outreach strategy using something like LocaFollow. Looking for collaboration in a field of practice? GovLoop groups might hold the key. Creating documents or strategy with a far-flung team? Maybe you want PBWorks, WetPaint or MixedInk.
Metrics will also be specific to your mission. I’ll take ten team members working effectively on a multi-pronged outreach strategy over 500 Facebook fans any day. Also consider the New York Times, which recently created Twitter lists for breaking news stories, then dismantled them when the real-time version of the stories quieted down.
Finally, as the Social Media Club’s mission statement goes, “If you get it, share it.” Follow the lead of folks like Levy, who created a simple blog for sharing the stories of what works and what doesn’t.
Mission! Tools! Metrics! Teach!

~ Adriel Hampton is a San Francisco public servant and host of the Gov 2.0 Radio podcast.

Following on my recent 10 Gov 2.0 blogs to track, here are a few more resources:

http://blogs.gartner.com/andrea_dimaio – Gartner’s Andrew DiMaio

http://candioncontent.blogspot.com/ – Candi on Content

Recommended by Christoph Berendes (whose own Citizen Tools – http://citizentools.netalyst.com/ – is worth your time):

http://blog.e-democracy.org/ – E-Democracy.org Project Blog (and related http://stevenclift.com)

http://www.worldblu.com/nowblu – WorldBlue (workplace/organizational democracy)

http://internationalbudget.wordpress.com – Open Budgets Blog

Should have been on my first list:

http://govtwit.wordpress.com/ – GovTwit

Communities:

http://ohmygov.com/ http://dowire.org http://govloop.com http://govfresh.com/ http://governingpeople.com/

~ Adriel Hampton is a San Francisco public servant and host of the Gov 2.0 Radio podcast.