Multi-channel delivery: eGov publishing channels

On the call yesterday, we were breaking multi-channel delivery into the two
ideas (1) devices (e.g., mobile devices as a secondary channel) and (2)
multi-channel redistribution from a PSA and/or social network re-publishing
perspective.  When we were discussing the idea, I was thinking about
something like http://twitterfeed.com/ where the government would post
"good" data and then use a government-sponsored service to push their data
to various approved channels automatically.  

 

Using an automated redistribution tool like twitterfeed makes sense to me as
a best practice but I assume the government would want it to be more capable
and probably more within their control.  Maybe this idea has been raised
before (although I haven't seen it), but it seems like there's a real
opportunity for an international body or individual governments to consider
building a tool that would provide redistribution for all of their
departments and agencies.  The objective being a single government web
application that automates redistribution of syndicated government
information to social networks and other communities: twitterfeed for eGov.
This sounds like something Owen has previously suggested, but I can't
remember.

 

http://twitter.com/HouseFloor seems like it might be an example of the
back-end of this sort of process.  Based on looking at this page, it seems
to me that twitter is screenscraping
http://clerk.house.gov/floorsummary/floor.html to create
http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/7402662.rss which in turn feeds
twitter.

 

By providing this sort of web application, government can encourage the use
of open government data standards since the input files from each agency
would need to use a standard approach.  This reminds me of the original
ideas behind SGML to "write once and publish many" (e.g., Braille, print,
electronic).  Most likely, the decision to publish to a social network as a
channel is itself probably a hurdle for some agencies.  Having a
government-approved web site that assists government organizations in the
eGovernment redistribution process would reduce the need by each agency to
determine which channels are appropriate/approved and it would eliminate the
technical effort by individual agencies to transform their data format to
the format required by the social network website.

 

It seems like if something like this took hold it could also be a seed for a
couple of other good outcomes:  (1) broader use of standards by the govt.
for communication to the public and (2) government-wide capability to
provide automated dissemination of various datasets (not just 140 character
stuff) which would lead to improved interoperability of government data (at
least for the formats chosen).  

 

Joe