I’m still blogging occasionally, but only over on GovLoop.  I started this WordPress site primarily because at the time, only GovLoop members could see blog posts there.  You still need to join GovLoop to comment, but everyone can read posts now.

I don’t want to have to keep double-posting, so I’m just going to post there.

Besides, if you’re reading my blog posts, you probably would get a lot out of joining GovLoop.

So – I hope you’ll read my posts over there!

We’re looking for someone with creativity, initiative, and great web coding skills (HTML, CSS, JS).  The job listing is open from now until April 7.

We’re the team that manages EPA’s home page and many sites, including Earth Day. You might also get involved in emergencies, like our Japan nuclear emergency site.

We also manage EPA’s top-line social media sites and are looking to expand our offerings.

I’m especially interested in you if you think you can show us how to do better.

If that’s you, please apply!  If you know someone like this, please share.

Current federal employees with competitive status; reinstatement eligibles; & candidates applying under the EPA CTAP or the ICTAP Program apply here: http://jobview.usajobs.gov/GetJob.aspx?JobID=97839537

Any US citizen, apply here: http://jobview.usajobs.gov/GetJob.aspx?JobID=97839182

The original question was: should gov’t Facebook pages allow people to post?

I want to be very clear: I interpreted this question as being about posts – where they start a whole new item: text, photos, videos, links, etc.  I’m emphatically NOT talking about accepting comments.  To me, that’s a non-discussion: you absolutely must accept comments, good and bad, in accordance with a published comment policy.  For example, EPA’s is here.

In the image above, I’m discussing allowing people to use what’s in the red box at the top of the page, not the “comment” link or “write a comment” in the green boxes.

At EPA, we welcome comments on our main page, but don’t allow people to post their own stuff.

There are plenty of places for them to make their points, including commenting on our posts.  We don’t need to give them a platform.

I disagree that not allowing them to post is the same thing as any other Web page.  Other Web pages don’t allow comments, aren’t shareable, and aren’t in a network of 500 million people.

Plenty of interaction happens without allowing people to put whatever they see fit on your branded page.

I think of it this way: a social media presence is like a booth at a shopping mall.  You’re there so they can see you as people vs. an institution, you talk to people, you listen to what they say, they can hear each other’s ideas, and you catch casual conversations among people all around you whether they’re talking directly to you or not.  You might even hold a public discussion, where you put out a question and then invite people to share their thoughts.

But you don’t allow people to plaster their posters all over your booth and you don’t hand them the microphone unchecked for 3  hours to say anything on any topic.

What do you think?  What does your agency do?

To be clear, we just need a static image with rollovers that appear as you mouse over a state.  Not a Google-like map, not anything fancy or GIS-based.  Just an image that will show a little info and then let people click the state to go to a page w/more info about that state.

Recovery.gov’s map is done with Flash, but we want to do it using Javascript and CSS for easy maintenance and accessibility.

Got any ideas or examples to share?  Yours or other people’s?

We’ve got a mockup that’s quite good, but the little popup balloon appears in different places in different browsers.

Here’s an example of what’s happening.  I was pointing at Nevada, so the text is right, but obviously the balloon’s in the wrong place:

What’s interesting is that the balloon shows up in different places in IE, Firefox, Safari, and Chrome.  Apparently, mouse tracking works differently across browsers.

Thanks!

Every month, we update our popular topics list based on what people are searching for. We also often try out new features. So we also do a heat map run every month. For example, over the past few months we’ve moved around the popular topics and we’ve added a map with links to regional content.

I just compared the heat map from November 2009 to the one just completed, and I’m pretty pleased.  The stuff at the top hasn’t changed, and it’s still clicked a lot.  But many other areas are being clicked a lot more (more intense colors in more places). I interpret that as meaning that more people are finding what they want on our home page.

Neither the tool nor the page are perfect, of course.  And there’s plenty of other stuff we look at and consider. And not everyone will agree with our overall design (I know some folks think our banners are too big). But it’s nice, now and then, to get a sense you’re moving in the right direction.

November 2009 (Download 7MB PDF)

January 2011 (Download 7MB PDF)

You’ll find our guidance on:

• Twitter
• Facebook
• Widgets
• Discussion Forums
• Getting Your Video Posted to EPA’s YouTube Channel

We’re revising our blogging guidance, and we’ll post that when it’s ready.

We also have guidance on representing EPA online as an individual.

I’m not overly concerned for three reasons:
1) Twitter’s existence depends on reliability.  I’m confident they’ll improve.

2) We should be using all available tools, especially for emergency info.  If one channel fails, we still have others.  For example, in addition to Twitter, we use Facebook, large email lists, Flickr, YouTube, and our Web site to disseminate info about the oil spill.  And we’re researching cell phone text alerts (and the unified command already uses them).  That’s just online; we also meet regularly with non-profits, local governments, and others in the Gulf region.

There are no guarantees any single channel will work at a given moment.  During 9/11, cell phones and even some landlines stopped working, but texting still worked.

Another point: we’re in these channels for the long haul; when an emergency occurs, we already have a base of fans/followers/etc.  We’re not starting new accounts that no one’s ever heard of.

So diversity is one key to being confident that we can reliably communicate.

3) Getting off Twitter and onto the next big thing is relatively simple compared to the mindshift of getting into social media channels in the first place.  The policy and cultural issues are mostly the same.

So we could move pretty fast to something else if Twitter, Facebook, or other sites vanished tomorrow.  Whereas agencies that never use these tools because of the possibility one might go down will never gain from the whole concept.

Agencies who don’t currently have the resources to use multiple channels should still get into at least one.  Twitter, like any tool, has its pluses and minuses, but if it’s the right tool, I wouldn’t avoid it because of some service hiccups.

To sum up, I’ll steal from a colleague’s email on the subject:

“The benefit of getting the government on the road of social media, even if it gets stuck in a traffic jam , and realizing you just need a wider road or different route, far outweighs the thinking that they have no business being on the road at all.”

My stated goal each year is to “blow away” what we did the previous year.   I mean that literally – I use exactly those words.  This has yielded some very good things:

2007: Daily tip widget, seen 1 million times monthly (and that widget set off a flood of others).

2008: Greenversations blog and photo contest with 750 entries

2009: Pick 5 for the Environment and bilingual daily tip podcasts (English | Spanish)

2010: It’s My Environment participatory video project (First compilation | instructions) and Pick 5 International (thanks to our friends at the State Dept!).

Of course, we do lots of things each Earth Day, not just these key projects.  Here are some results:

• Home page daily views jumped nearly 40% on Earth Day:
  • 4/21: 37,000
  • 4/22: 51,000
• Earth Day home page daily views more than doubled:
  • 4/21: 16,000
  • 4/22: 39,000
• Pick 5 daily views nearly tripled:
  • 4/21: 4300
  • 4/22: 11,700
• In the first year of Pick 5, we got about 4,000 signups.  Since we launched Pick 5 International a week ago, we’ve gotten 2400 new signups, 1200 of them yesterday.
• The It’s My Environment compilation video, which went live with closed captioning, was viewed more than 400 times.  In one day, it’s been seen by more than 50% of all EPA videos on YouTube.
• We took advantage of the new coding in our home page to embed a video message from Administrator Jackson.
• About 15 people in 10 cities started live tweeting Earth Day events and will continue through this weekend’s festivities @epalive.

Want to learn more?  I’m teaching a webinar on how we combine Web 1.0 and 2.0 tools for our Earth Month outreach May 5, 3-4:30.

But today brought two fun things: being in a documentary about open government and then being mentioned on the Washington Post’s site as they discuss the documentary.  The documentary shows several folks talking about what open government means, how it’s going, and challenges we face.  Chris Quigley, the filmmaker, did a great job piecing together different bits so the viewer hears different perspectives on the same topic.  On Chris’ Web page, you can view the video or individual interviews.

I’m very excited about what’s coming with open government.  I’m now heavily involved in pulling together EPA’s open gov’t page (it’ll be at epa.gov/open) and our open gov’t plan.  I’m proud that we’re going to do better than the requirements laid out in the open gov’t directive.  And I’m also happy that we’ll be able to showcase what we’ve been doing all along.  Open gov’t concepts aren’t new at EPA, but this will be the first time we’ve provided access to them as a whole.

My day-to-day job mostly focuses on communications, so my team’s contributions go far toward participation, as opposed to the collaboration and transparency aspects of open gov’t (although we did create the mechanism for publishing senior EPA managers schedules).  And that stuff’s fun and produces solid results.  But right from the beginning, what’s most gotten me revved up is the prospect for people we’ve never really engaged to help us choose good policies.

That’s why I keep giving my talks to senior managers about social media.

And we’re seeing good things happening, from our enforcement office’s months-long discussion forum about enforcement priorities to the current discussion about solid waste.

And we keep exploring new ways of connecting to the public, like broadcasting our announcement about the greenhouse gas endangerment finding. That was the first time we’d ever used that tool, but only nine days later,  we used it again to allow the public to ask questions about Superfund.  And more’s coming in that vein.

We’ll also keep going on stuff like video contests.  We have so many in the queue at the moment that we’re having to plan months in advance.

So the past year has been good, but I think I’ll have trouble this time next year deciding what to highlight!

But we’re also allowed to post them on other online job sites. I’m guessing we’ll simply describe the jobs in plain language and then link to the usajobs listing.

So I’m looking for suggestions. Whatcha know?

Especially helpful would be links to articles or other lists where people rate the sites for # of users, ease of use, etc.

I’ll keep adding to the list below as people submit them via comments.

Thanks!

Sites I already know of:

• monster.com
• hotjobs.com
• indeed.com
• theladders.com