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One downside of the convenience of working online is the multiple varieties of online piracy. This post reports on two I’ve recently experienced.

My email provider, the University of Toronto Scarborough, for some reason decided that messages from the Canadian Internet Registration Agency reminding me to renew the domain name www.digitalstate.ca were junk, and didn’t transmit them to me. The one message that did get through told me that the deadline had passed and I had lost the domain name. And indeed the website, which had been used to promote my book Digital State at the Leading Edge, went dead. As soon as it became available, the domain name was acquired by a gang of pirates at www.dompro.com, which traffics in domain names. If you go to the site now, a similar gang called Name Drive is offering it for sale. I refused to play that game and acquired a new domain name for the book, which is www.digitalstate.org. The moral of the story is to work with your email provider to make sure that messages from CIRA aren’t considered junk.

The second story concerns an online conference call provider that I’ve been using, primarily for conference calls among the six authors of Digital State. The service is automated, so that all you do to arrange a conference call is dial their number at the prearranged time and enter the access code. Somehow someone got the moderator’s access code, which I had divulged to no one. They ran up a bill of $ 400 US on conference calls, most made in the early hours of a Sunday morning. The bill was automatically charged to my credit card. When the conference call provider’s invoice arrived in my email, I protested, and after a number of calls with customer service and accounting, the provider agreed to refund the charges, though due to exchange rate fluctuations and credit card transactions fees for currency changes, I received $30 (Canadian) less than I paid. No longer working on a multi-author collaboration, I cancelled my account with the online provider. The moral of this story is that if I ever do need a conference call provider in the future, I’ll avoid online options, and choose one that goes through an actual person.

And the moral of both stories is that there are lots of pirates out there in cyberspace, and you can’t be too careful about either your intellectual property, like a clever domain name, or your private information, like access codes or passwords.

Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown,
10 Downing St.

Prime Minister:

Events beyond your control have dominated the political agenda of your first week in office, likely leaving you little time to think about your website. But it is in moments of crisis that communication is most important.

Your predecessor Tony Blair was an expert communicator in traditional media, but had little facility with new media, and the Number 10 website during his ministry made that painfully obvious. It had a dull header (the great seal and text, all in black-and-white), no visual focal point, and was unable to decide whether it was a current or historical site, everywhere mixing news stories with historical content about the building and former PMs. One might argue that Blair’s communications office was actually doing you a favour by managing the site so ineptly, making it easy for you to give it a new look.

I’ve watched the site closely over the last week, and your communications office has made some significant steps to improve it. News stories about you are getting more attention, dominating the centre of the page. Much of the history has been moved to the right side bar, and material from Tony Blair has been consolidated into an archive. You have made frequent use of the newly-created Downing Street YouTube channel for broadcasts and you are web-casting your first Prime Minister’s question period. Clearly, the website is among your priorities – and it should be.

I would carry these steps further. Put all the historical material – and only the historical material – on the right side bar. Similarly, put your news – and only your news – on the middle of the page. Present your news in a challenge-response format: here’s what we’re doing about terrorism, global warming, and flooding in the north. Use the left sidebar to organize information relevant to different types of visitors such as citizens, the media, business, students, and foreign visitors.

In addition to putting your statements on the Downing Street YouTube channel and web-casting question period, start a v-blog and use it to post short informal statements. This can help you create a friendlier image than the former chancellor as policy-wonk. You need to use the new media to compete with opposition leader David Cameron [link], who is both younger and perceived as more youthful than you.
Finally, the header. I suggest putting the seal, or perhaps simply the number 10 in the middle, centred between “the website of Prime Minister Gordon Brown” on the left and “residence of the Prime Minister for three centuries” on the right. And there are many visuals you could use for background – the building, its rooms, images of Westminster and Whitehall.

The work of modernising (your spelling, sir) Britain includes modernising your website. Good luck.

Your faithful overseas new media observer,

Sandford Borins

Politicians at the digital leading edge are creating Facebook entries to reach out to younger voters. So why have the federal and Ontario governments decided to block access to Facebook for their public servants?

The Ontario Public Service, like most employers, recognizes that permitting some personal business on government computers helps employee morale. Of the 600 million pages visited by Ontario public servants in March 2004, 8% were for sales, 7% sports, 5% travel, 3% investing, 3% gambling, 2% chat, and 2% match-making. Only .1% was blocked and most of that was remote webmail (see Digital State at the Leading Edge, p. 96). In OPS management thinking, Facebook, like hotmail, apparently is the thin edge of the wedge of employees’ spending too much office time online for personal matters.

But there may be a deeper reason. Traditionally, public servants are anonymous, in the sense that their policy advice to ministers is confidential. Thus ministers, not public servants, are responsible to the public for decisions. “Confidential advice to ministers” remains a justification for refusing freedom of information requests. Other aspects of public service anonymity, however, are being chipped away. Service delivery principles dictate making the names of front line staff available to the citizen being served. Canadian governments post online directories of public servants – though some other countries, for example the UK, do not.

Individuals typing alone at their screens often post the most intimate details of their lives, seduced by the apparent anonymity of the setting. But would a public servant want the world to know that, away from the office, he or she is a deep ecologist, abortion rights activist, Focus on the Family stalwart, or Tamil militant? Would that not conflict with the assumption of apolitical neutrality, the ability to serve any government-of-the-day faithfully? The level of self-expression found on networking sites can conflict with the traditional facelessness of the bureaucrat. A public servant contemplating a Facebook entry, even from a home account, should be wary.