Government 2.0 It's a Mandate!

After social media enabled protests in the recent past in the country against the Government of India, the Department of Information and Technology (DIT) under the Ministry of Communications and IT, not only realized the potential of social media as a platform but also sensed the urgency to deploy this medium to put a halt on further damage and reach out to its people with more transparency. This realization led to the making of a draft for the framework and guidelines for the use of social media for the government organizations after consulting various media experts, social media consultants, and lawyers. This draft was consequently released in the month of September, 2011 for the public feedback and discussion in an open forum. After filing and assessment of the feedbacks, the final policy is expected to see the light of day by December-end, says Abhishek Singh, director, e-governance, DIT.

 

DIT is formulating this framework and guidelines with the purpose of enabling all departments/agencies of the Government of India to adhere to them while choosing any social media as per the classification done by Kaplan and Haenlein in 2010collaborative projects, blogs and microblogs, content communities, social networking sites, virtual game worlds, and virtual social worlds.

It will be entirely up to each department to decide its own social media platform and design the roadmap for its deployment as per its requirements. This draft has made an excellent attempt to educateright from the beginningabout the social media, its various platforms, its usage, and laid emphasis on defining the objective very clearly. Based on that objective, departments can make an informed choice and do voluntary disclosure of non-confidential information.

Need for Using Social Media

Singh says that this initiative is bound to bring more transparency between government and citizens and various stakeholders. He further added that this initiative is planned to strengthen all the National e-governance projects (center and state level), urban and local departments/agencies, ministries, and upcoming 12th Five Year Plan (2012-17). Singh stresses on the fact that this will not only ensure enhanced outreach (with 35 mn users on Facebook, 15 mn on Orkut, 900 mn mobile users), 24x7 real-time engagement, and two-way individual interaction but will also play an instrumental role in managing frivolous and misleading perceptions about the government.

 

 

This is certainly a positive government initiative and looks quite holistic for the development of the country and matching international standards, echoes Pradeep Chopra, co-founder, Digital Vidya and Soch.la

                                                                     Part 1 (To be Continued..)