The enthusiastic public response to a government department blog has raised concerns that blogs may require too many resources to maintain and create a drag on Government 2.0.
Speaking at last week’s CeBIT conference, Mia Garlick, assistant secretary for the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, said that her department’s blog had sparked a deluge of comments that raises questions about the allocation of department resources.
Garlick is concerned that in response to the 2.0 initiative, which encourages members to communicate with the public through blogs and other social media avenues, public servants will become bogged down by the process of managing the outpouring of public comments.
She noted that most of the messages were unrelated to topics under discussion.
"The majority of people who posted comments on that blog discussed the government's internet filtering policy," Garlick said, "but a very small proportion of people actually responded to the topics that we talked about."
"We're not a moderation company, we're not a blog hosting company, we're not YouTube, that can have infrastructure to host user-generated content," she said. "We were constantly moderating that because there was such a passionate response and so that took a lot of resources.”
According to Garlick, government agencies need to limit the time public servants spend on the blogs.
Another member of the Government 2.0 taskforce said that the government faces a challenge convincing public servants, who have been working in an environment where speaking out has not been encouraged, to change their ways.
"As a public servant it's not a natural act to be out there blogging with citizens. We have to learn how to do that," Glenn Archer, chief information officer for the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations, said.
