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Health and Human Services held a new media jam session this week. Our Center
for New Media invited people from across the Department
to come together to share experience, plans and hopes for applying new and social media
tools in the government Web environment. We had an interesting
mix of newbies and early adopters and everyone in
between. To introduce the newbies, we decided to try
to apply the concepts of social media in a physical setting. No small feat.
To introduce blogging, we posted a blog and gave people five-by-eight cards to write comments
on. We passed them around
and people commented on the comments, and then we collected those cards. At another
table, people were twittering, writing on two-by-two post-its. The tweets
were posted to file folders and folders flew randomly around the table.
David Pogue would have been proud. The third group turned a white board into a wiki, writing,
erasing, editing, re-writing. The result was no Wikipedia,
but the newbies got the concept,
and everyone was engaged. We hoped one outcome of our jam session would be a better sense
of direction for the New Media Center itself. What do people want from The Center? What
kind of help do they need? What can we do to expand the use of these great new tools?
Several recurring themes developed: People need training
The Department needs to provide guidance and standards We need to address security issues;
some of our colleagues are barred from using our
new media web site and finally, there’s the
ever-present need to get buy-in from management and from colleagues. My name is Sandy Hilfiker.
I work at the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion.
I work on the Web site HealthFinder.gov, and one thing that I learned today is
that there are a lot of other people in the Department who have similar challenges and
interests related to new media and that I have a lot of
new colleagues that
I can pull from and ask questions as we are starting new things. It’s all about harvesting
the wisdom of the HHS crowd.