Dozing off yet? If not, you deserve a pat on the back for managing to stay with it past the phrase ‘civil service principles for participation online’ (sorry, now I really have sent you to sleep!).

So why am I trying to sedate you? Well the Friday before last I was fortunate enough to be invited to attend a session hosted by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Cabinet Office  billed as “the Power of Information Taskforce Seminar for Civil Service Bloggers”.

[Apologies in advance to my hosts on the day. I don't want to appear like an ungrateful guest at the party in this article. All comments are intended as contructive criticism]

The seminar itself, held as one of two stand alone consultation sessions and coming out of the on-going work for the Power of Information task force , sought thoughts and challenge to the guidance for online participation announced by Tom Watson , Minister for Transformational Government, back in June , specifically aiming to:

• discuss the viability of the guidance
• expose and test whether the guidance works
• identify situations the guidance doesn’t cover
• provide a networking arena for blogging Civil Servants.

While I’ll try not to go over old ground as both the guidance and the session itself have been covered so fully elsewhere (see Jeremy Gould’s elation at the publication of the guidance, and a report on the session from both Ingrid Koehler of the Improvement and Development Agency for local government (IDeA) and Dave Briggs of DavePress fame), I thought I would add my two pennth worth.

Reading posts from others who attended, it seems we all share broadly the same concerns around:

• Who is this guidance for? Current bloggers or future participants online? If it is for existing bloggers, it is clearly intended to impose some boundaries to their current participation and may well scare them off (or at least make them think). If it is intended to encourage a wider group of participants, it may need a rethink, giving more context to the scores of civil servants who haven’t a clue about all this fancy online stuff. It remains in the realm of the online specialist and clarifies little for the novice. Having said that, given the risk averse culture endemic in the civil service, it does provide the ‘permission‘ so often required by civil servants to act.
• Linked to this last point, should we not first be making the business case for online participation rather than jumping the gun and setting the boundaries too early? While I recognise that the guidelines are relatively light touch and positive in tone, they immediately establish a fence around participation without any clear view as to why people should take the risk of potentially (accidentally) breaking these new rules. Where is the ‘manifesto for participation’, highlighting the benefits of engaging in this way in order to improve democratic engagement, policy making and open the doors of Whitehall to some new and exciting opportunities to move from e-gov to we-gov ?
• How are these guidelines and benefits of online participation going to be communicated to the wider community of civil servants , a huge workforce of massive latent potential and a lot to contribute no doubt? Leaflets? Training? Mousemats and mugs? Whatever it is, it needs to be done sensitively and in a balanced way that sells the benefits not just highlight the risks.

In terms of what I would add to this:

• Above all else this strikes as being a leadership issue. Not a training issue, not a guidance issue, but a leadership issue. Guidance that gives permission to participate is fine, but until more senior civil servants and ministers participate online themselves and lead from the front, this initiative will come across as little more than rhetoric (and having an aide to blog on your behalf doesn’t count, ok?)
• While guidance may be the first step on the road to recovery, it must be recognised that it is going to take a lot of long hard work to undo the high profile and largely negative press generated by the closure of the now notorious civil serf blog and witch hunt of its author (among other more recent examples such as the Christopher Glamorganshire case in Wales). These knee jerk reactions must be prevented from happening again, jarring as they do with the online culture of honesty, openness and transparency, or else civil servants will remain fearful of online participation no matter how much guidance is published.
• There remain too many geeks and not enough policy wonks in control of the online agenda. This is skewing content and commentary on policy, service improvement and other matters, emphasising the views of communications and web specialists whose geekery further discourages contributions from a wider group of individuals. Again, to encourage wider participation this will require commitment and encouragement from on high and an ability to let go.
• In terms of the bloggers consultation session itself, I was left a little confused as to why the session was held after the guidance had already gone live . Will the notes taken at the session really be fed into a rework of the guidance, adapted post-go live? Also while I recognise and respect Tom Watson’s work to crowdsource the guidance, again this very much targetted the usual geek community (myself included) rather than non-contributors (an equally vital group to get buy in and thoughts from). Perhaps a more extensive engagement exercise would have been useful for such potentially important guidelines, drawing on techniques such as the wiki used by IBM when developing their own guidance, ensuring wider reach and greater ownership?

Part of my concern is no doubt related to the thought that this keenness for social media rule making may leak into local government, on the whole a far more open and self-determining system than that of central government. I only realised the depth of my feelings on this subject when Dave Briggs posted an innocuous comment on the IDeA’s Communities of Practice site calling for the adaptation of these guidelines at a local level:

“This is great news, and I think it would be really interesting to see how these guidelines could be developed for, and applied to, the local government context.”

In a response titled “Just say no!”, I’d say I made my feelings pretty clear on the matter (Dave and I are still talking, don’t worry):

“I have to say I am intrigued by this whole guidance situation… The guidance for central government comes from a love of, ney obsession with, guidance in central gov where people aren’t empowered to think for themselves… This is embodied by the ludicrous code of conduct which in itself results in a self-reinforcing cycle of guidance creation to ‘risk manage’ every possible move a civil servant may make.

This code doesn’t exist in local government, beyond the loose terms and conditions stipulated in contracts. There isn’t the same oppressive, top down, scare mongering that fills civil servants with dread and fear and crushes much of their creativity and innovation (or at least truly radical and disruptive innovation acting at speed)…

In order to really embrace the opportunities presented by web 2.0, surely we should be encouraging local government and its employees to take some risks, try something, fail, learn and then try again - rather than stifle them with guidance before the vast majority have even begun this journey of learning and experimentation?

I say let’s embrace complexity, take some risks and have some fun!”

Wouldn’t it be great if we could instead move to a situation where the only rule is that there are no rules (beyond “play nice” at least), where public sector employees are trusted to contribute in a mature and adult manner, where open dialogue becomes the norm?

Unfortunately, the moment that pen is put to paper and guidance is created, no matter how effective and light weight, things change and often for the worse. Guidance removes the freedom for people to think for themselves and results in situations where people download confidential files onto disc and send them through the post. Until civil servants are trusted to think for themselves, mistakes will continue to happen and the latent creative potential of the collective civil service will remain untapped, no matter how much guidance is created to give permission to behave to the contrary.

But then again this might in fact be just the permission civil servants have been waiting for - here’s hoping!