Greg Palmer

Haven't done this in a while...

The first screen is at Banana Republic, where they ask buyers to rate various aspects of an item they've purchased, such as the overall fit and various specific fits. In this case, customers thought this coat I wanted to buy was too big.

Often, government agencies suffer from "not built here" syndrome. It's similar to "not an enterprise vendor" disease. Not built here syndrome significantly slows web development as it forces developers and designers to recreate the wheel every time they want to release a new feature. There are plenty of reasons why government has this attitude, but it'd serve us well to remember that the outside world and the relatively open developer community on the web has probably solved 99% of the problems before you encountered them.

So it disappoints but doesn't surprise me that no big government agencies are featured as users of Yahoo's User Interface Library (YUI). It's good enough for LinkedIn, JetBlue, and Marketwatch, but it's "not built here," so developers spend mountains of time solving problems that have free, open-source solutions that are compatibility-tested by one of the world's premier internet companies.

Yahoo provides CSS frameworks to speed design, javascript libraries for rapid interaction development, and examples/best practices to create compatible, open websites. I tell government web departments all the time to let YUI do the easy stuff so you can focus on the interesting parts.

And, to prove that I eat my own dogfood, all of my sites are build using the YUI Grids stylesheet.

Give it a try - I think even the most experienced front-end developer will be surprised at how much it speeds development. Finally, am I missing anyone in government who is actually using this?

I've been a fan of danah boyd's work for years now, but I'd never seen her speak at a conference. She managed to make the Personal Democracy Forum audience really think and pay attention, which isn't the easiest thing to do with the tweeting, laptop/iPhone-toting crowd.

danah opened her presentation by asking the PDF crowd - are you on Facebook? (everyone raises hand), then - are you on MySpace? (two hands stay up). This was a great way to illustrate how neatly real-world social divisions are mapping onto digital spaces. It's also counter-intuitive - Facebook and MySpace are hailed as social bridges and places to connect.

But the reality doesn't match the hype. Users on social services tend to recreate their physical social networks and don't leave mental room for new people or perspectives. The network then acts as a key reinforcer of existing values, rather than an agnostic space to create new social value.

As danah put it, the migration of white, more affluent users from MySpace to Facebook may well represent a new "white flight." It's worth reading danah's various papers on the sociology of online networks.

For government, not engaging on both MySpace and Facebook means abandoning entire segments of the population. This social schism is as much a piece of the digital divide as broadband access and affordability. So what can government do?

First, acknowledge that connecting with constituents may mean engaging in online spaces where you're not completely comfortable. Many social media staffers are young, well-educated, and exist within the "Facebook bubble." But knowing that you have to make this effort may be half the battle.

Second, find out where key influencers in your community are online. Go to your community, don't expect them to come to you. Are they on Facebook? MySpace? Twitter? a local site? Wherever they've gathered online, that network possesses key sociological value for that particular constituency. Yes, there's the digital "white flight" problem, but if MySpace fills key sociological needs for its users in ways that are different than Facebook. So get on there and figure out what those constituents value.

Finally, take it seriously. The segregation of online networks is troubling, but taken seriously in the short term, it can provide you with key insights into constituencies that you may not hear from on other communications channels. You can learn and adapt to serve your constituents better.

Limit your topic

What Happened

In mid-May, New York City's Department of Health (DOH) realized that the H1N1 (swine) flu was spreading in distinct pockets throughout the City, particularly through children, the afflicted, and the elderly. At the Department of Education, we knew that our 1,500+ schools could be a key transmission point for the flu, and we were already seeing higher-than-normal absence rates at selected schools whose geography correlated with DOH's data.

On the advice of DOH, it became clear that we'd have to close select schools in order to prevent the spread of disease. As importantly, we had to be clear about why were closing particular schools, why others would stay open, and we had to reassure parents and the public that we were taking the right course of action. It's easy for situations that affect the public health, like H1N1, to quickly spiral into panic.

There aren't many templates for this sort of thing - public health crises don't happen that much anymore in the United States. We've got a decent public health system that keeps the transmission of communicable diseases and the ill effects of them to a minimum. New York City itself is larger than all but the most populous 12 states, and our public school system alone is larger than the 8 least populous states with 1.1 million students.

What We Did

From the online communications perspective, the first thing we did was decide to make clear that our website should be considered the most reliable source of information. It's easy for the media to twist a story and we knew it was critical for the public to know that the Departments of Health and Education, along with Mayor Bloomberg's office, were the *only* official sources of information.

I placed a key line at the top of our website that doesn't sound important, but is - "This page will always contain the most updated information available." Citizens are used to the government moving a bit slow, and they rely heavily on the media. I wanted to set the expectation from the first moment that our website was a canonical source of information.

Second, we began listing the "last updated" time on both our homepage (which gets 9+ million page views per month) and our H1N1 "canonical information" page. There were points where we were updating these pages several times a day and when school closing decisions were happening on a rolling basis, so it was important for everyone to realize that we were updating very frequently.

We didn't try to reinvent the wheel - we didn't have the time, expertise, or desire to be the Health Department - so we asked them to keep their URLs stable and we linked out to their key FAQs about public and personal health related to H1N1.

Finally, I dedicated a large portion of my time to fielding online inquiries from concerned parents and citizens. These came in through our Twitter account and especially our Facebook page - parents wanted to know why particular schools were not closing, why others were, and how to protect their families. I did my best to get them information specific to their local community; with over 1,500 schools, the answers could be vastly different for each parent.

I also used Twitter and Facebook to "correct the record" anytime discussions veered away from the facts. Realistically, that's one of the biggest fears of government leaders when engaging online, so the value of active engagement and participation cannot be overstated.

What We Learned

So what did we learn about government communications in a crisis? A few key things:

• People rely on the web. Traffic to our H1N1 pages spiked and rose each day as we were dealing with H1N1. People were visiting multiple times a day and wanted the latest information.
• Keep it simple and set expectations. Once people knew to expect the most up-to-date information from official NYC.gov sites, it was clear that the sensationalist feedback loop the media uses was damaged.
• Engage, don't just release. When people have questions, provide answers. It's not just about press releases and blanket statements; people can draw lessons from specific information you provide. For instance, if I explained to one parent why we didn't close a particular school, other parents understood better the broad criteria that had already been explained.
• Your community reinforces itself. If you're not there, someone else takes control. If we had not engaged on H1N1, I suspect that the public's reaction would have been more severe. Clearly we would have done *something*, but it was about taking measured but meaningful steps - doing the *right* something - that helped everyone keep their wits about them and kept a limited physical outbreak from becoming a psychological crisis.

What about you? Have you been in the middle of a public crisis where online communications played a key role?

Greg Palmer is the former Director of Web Communications for the New York City Department of Education.

Internet superstar Pete Cashmore wrote an article on CNN about ten big trends for 2010. As usual, Pete's on the mark, but his last point strikes me as not fully on target.

"We're seeing the ongoing voluntary erosion of privacy through public sharing on Facebook and Twitter, the rise of location-based services and the inclusion of video cameras in a growing array of devices," writes Cashmore.

Saying there's a "voluntary erosion of privacy" is taking a stand on one side of a multi-faceted issue, and it obscures the benefits of sharing and personal information distribution. An erosion of privacy implies that people are giving less thought to their personal public/private sphere, but in fact the opposite is true.

Because of online social services and geo-location, the barriers are lower than ever to determine your personal line between public and private. Lower barriers to entry naturally encourage people to explore sharing opportunities that they didn't have before.

So people are actually being more thoughtful (not less!) about their privacy, its limits, and where they want to sit on the privacy spectrum. Cashmore's proposed erosion of privacy is actually an individual testing of limits using forms of communication that weren't previously available.

So do people make mistakes? Sure, but it's because they're testing their own limits and exploring their place in the world around them. Sometimes ignorance leads to accidental disclosure of previously private information, but that's a problem technology can solve. What technology has enabled is far greater - the ability to share your life with others, meet new people, and gain from their knowledge, experiences, etc.

And what has enabled that explosion of humanity is the idea that you have more granular control over your privacy. If you didn't have that granular control (think back to pre-Facebook, pre-Twitter, etc), you would by default assume all of your life was private, even among people with whom who may now be willing to make it more public.

So you can share particular pieces of your life and maybe even consciously make the decision that those pieces are the ones you think will be most valuable to others. And you can keep others closed off from the rest. And that's not an erosion of privacy at all, but instead an expansion of the limits of humanity, and and exploration of how sharing our own knowledge can contribute to the common good.

Watch as this meteor burns up in the atmosphere and lights up the ENTIRE SKY. Amazing footage from South Africa. (via Bad Astronomy)

James Poniewozik hits on one of my biggest pet peeves - moderate bias in media coverage. This idea that journalists are unbiased and have a responsibility to present all points of view is terribly flawed. The rise of public relations flaks and rampant doublespeak killed that long ago.

As anyone following health reform knows, centrism is a political position too. And you see moderate bias -- i.e., a preference for centrism -- whenever a news outlet assumes that the truth must be "somewhere in the middle." You see it whenever an organization decides that "balance" requires equal weight for an opposing position, however specious: "Some, however, believe global warming is a myth." (Moderate bias would also require me to find a countervailing liberal position and pretend that it is equivalent to global-warming denial. Sorry.

When I started Keystone Politics, and again when we launched CitizeNYC, we don't look to show each side of the story equally. We have a clear editorial view that, while it doesn't come through in all of our editorial choices, isn't something we shy away from. We're looking for the truth, and that usually means one side looks worse than the other.

Hey everybody - just a quick Two Screens post, which is where I point out two screenshots that recently caught my eye.

First, I was watching Leo Laporte's talk at the Online News Association conference and was underwhelmed by the Livestream player. It's a great service, but I think the player could be easier. Actually, I think this about a lot of video players. Check out the "on-air" and progress boxes on Livesteam's player. Both are really small and tough to read or understand. Vimeo is the gold standard for me.

So, Fox decided that there wouldn't be a new episode of House tonight, but that's ok - I'm here to fill you in on exactly what you missed.

The episode opens in an ornate opera house. If you're from anywhere near Princeton you'll assume its got to be New York, but for the sake of House let's just call it the Princeton-Plainsboro Opera House. Anyway, quick shot to the contralto belting out a few lines, sweating, looking a little sick. Cut to a shot of an unstable lighting fixture swinging precariously above her. Is she having a heart attack? Will the light fixture fall? C'mon, you're a bright kid, you can outsmart House!

The fixture falls, glass flies everywhere, the audience gasps, but the massive stage light narrowly avoids the sweaty, corpulent singer. In the VIP boxes, an old man - presumably a donor of some sort - gasps a little harder than the others and slumps over.

Cue theme.

I won't spoil the details for you, but here's the rundown. Foreman thinks he knows what's wrong with the man. House thinks he's wrong, but is too much of an arrogant prick to offer a real suggestion, leaving his minions to perform needless and probably painful tests on the patient.

Cuddy gets angry at one of a million of House's wacky antics. Cut to Cameron and Chase fighting. How long til those two get a divorce anyway? They're too pretty to be married. Thirteen leaves Foreman a voicemail. It distracts him so much that he does something wrong with the patient and misses a critical clue.

Back to the conference room. Foreman realizes the clue he missed. House chastises him. Chase isn't paying attention because he murdered the Omar al-Bashir stand-in. House chastises him. Cameron is on the ball, but worries about the emotional stability of all the men in the room. She says so. House chastises her.

The patient deteriorates, and the team complains that they're still missing something. But what? Is it lupus? Cancer? Wilson is called in and says it's not cancer, which might still mean it's cancer because he's not as smart as House. No one is.

The patient almost dies. Three to four theories have turned out to be wrong. What could it be? A young, beautiful stranger appears. Nope, it's not House's delusion, it's the patient's maid. She's been boffing him on the side for some time now, and turns out she's got any manner of STDs. But now, she feels bad and wants to save him.
 
That's it! He's got a lymphosciatic melonomic case of herpes! Why didn't we think of that sooner? Just give him some goddamn antibiotics and send him on his way to apologize and/or divorce his wife of fifty years and live the rest of his short days in Cabo with his hot maid. Everybody wins.

House is still alone and lusting for Cuddy, who's also lusting for him but has bigger things to worry about since she seems to have lost her baby that she wanted so much. Where is that thing? Maybe Thirteen stole it when she disappeared. Cameron and Chase are still barely speaking, and Foreman is on his trajectory to become the next House.

End scene. See you next week.