Nothing better than a good debate…..

I had the excellent pleasure of someone not only having read my post on life leaks but then having them point out that I was contradicting myself at the very moment we were discussing it – it was such a good point that I didn’t even mind not having made it myself!!

We were talking about the fact that we plan to use OpenID as the login option on the platform being built for the Virtual Town Hall – and the fact that this will actually encourage life leak rather than helping control it. Good point!! But then I thought about it some more….

Personal Identity Management is exactly what it says – personal. It is your own responsibility and something which everyone will want to manage differently. OpenID is a tool for bringing your identities together into a single login which you can then control far more easily (just one password change and not dozens when you lose your laptop) but it doesn’t allow for much subtlety as yet as it really only deals with the registration part of things – it doesn’t allow you to present different part of your core data to different people and places which is what you really need to avoid the life leak problem.

Is this a reason not to use it? Absolutely not – it is an excellent development and a natural step in the evolution of proper identity management. But we should be very careful to make sure that people are away of the implications of using such a system and I think it throws more responsibility on us as architects of a new system to help people understand those implications.

 

Life leak – its a nasty business

I have always been rather careful about letting different parts of my life interact with other parts. My parents had limited contact with my friends, I still keep two mobile numbers (work/personal in case you wonder), I fret about how to categorise people on instant messenger and I never email friends from my work email address except in dire circumstances. To start with I am not sure why I was so structured about this but as time goes on I am increasingly relieved that I set things up like this as it means I have some choices when it comes to how I present myself online. With email addresses being the usual unique identifier that sends social networking and other apps rifling through your PC I find it really useful to choose consciously which address to use. So – I use my work email for my Facebook account – something that I consider to be a necessary evil as I am researching this stuff -and I keep it quarantined from my personal email. This should be enough to stop regrettable life leak and avoid friends and colleagues colliding but unfortunately this discipline is increasingly difficult to maintain as there is something rather brutal in rejecting someone’s ‘friend‘ request in Facebook land just because they don’t meet your zoning criteria and I now find the odd friend (or relative – they are even harder to ignore) on my Facebook page.

As I talk to people in Councils about social networking one of the first things I suggest is that they actually look for the people who are already doing it – after all officers are citizens as well and they should be your best advocate in the community. And this is not just good advice for Council’s – recent Useit research says the same thing for the commercial sector. 

But this suggestion throws the life leak problem into sharp relief and though I think it is very dangerous ground if people’s jobs are dictating what they can and can’t say in the personal life I think it becomes increasingly important that both sides of the equation – citizen/officer and council – are able to agree on some kind of social networking contract which will ensure that officers have enough latitude to be able to act as citizens on the wider social web but also understand what is appropriate from the Councils’ point of view. Now, in return for this the Council should get a huge increase in the number of people who are putting their message out on the social web but there are of course risks which I wasn’t going to elucidate here as you can probably list them yourself.

What I want to highlight is the fact that part of this social networking contract may have to be focused on talking about digital identity and talking people through the thought process of why you might want to keep a personal email address and what it means it talk about your council job on your Facebook page that uses your personal email as distinct from a work one. The best one of these I have seen so far is Carl’s draft from Devon CC but I still think this needs to go further.

Do you think I am worrying too much?

I think its essential that we release the huge potential around the use of social networks and freeing up officers to take a more direct role in their community conversations where they are also citizens is one way to do this. In fact – in the future – not doing this could be a limitation of their democratic rights. But if we don’t also support a more sophisticated view of digital identity this could get very messy indeed. If one of the necessary tasks of building a social web strategy is in bringing together a single relationship with the citizen in the same way as services have been focused around a single customer relationship then we need to think carefully if we want to make it possible, and perhaps desirable, for us to accommodate multiple identities within the system. It could be perfectly reasonable for a client of social services not to want to use the same identity for their citizen activities and the same could be true for officers / citizens.

I am not sure what the answer is here – and I think the technology is still evolving – but I do think the questions of identity and the associated life leak needs to be part of the debate around social web for Local Government.

 

Devon CC – Social Web guidelines

Carl from Devon CC has posted his social web guidelines on his blog.  You can find them here.  I think this is a hugely helpful thing to do and something that all Councils need to be getting on and doing…..enjoy….

I think one of the trickiest things about council officers using the social web is what happens when they want to act as a citizen and not as a member of staff?  Its difficult to reconcile personal opinions with your professional position but it is something that will have to be accomodated as officers are often voters as well.  Its a line which they have been walking for years in the physical world but it becomes much more complicated and immediate in the a networked society context and I think we will all need to get a lot more sophistcated about indentity and indentity management to deal with this.