As social networking continues to grow, it is characterized by little governance and self-organization, especially for the residents of the Gulf Coast states as Hurricane Gustav approached. The long-lasting devastation and lack of credible information that are part of Hurricane Katrina's legacy permeated the minds of many regular citizens with an awareness of the web. With the help of the free social networking site ning.com, they volunteered to support a Web site to alert people of Gustav's path, providing critical information such as the location of emergency shelters. All this work was done in one day - 31 August 2008.

How did this happen? It all began a few years ago when ning.com and others began an experiment in harnessing the power of social networking for creating structured social interactions. Ning's online service enables building and using social Web applications supporting hundreds of applications, video sharing, photos, tagging, blogs, wikis, map mashups that can be used to create multiple mini Web sites that are all hosted and managed by ning.com. For example, as Gustav approached, Ning created a hosted wiki. Within 24 hours, volunteers copied useful emergency management information, such as links and feeds from Katrina Web sites, and updated them. These citizens also provided neighborhood and regional updates. This site can work even without computer access or Internet connections as it can be accessed and updated using Twitter and an iPhone or another mobile device. This volunteer-supported site is best understood as a platform that aggregates content from a variety of social media sources, such as Twitter, Flickr and YouTube, allowing ordinary citizens to post and link to a variety of information and content.

Governments should look at this recent exercise in Web flexibility and get busy retrofitting wikis, blogs and social-networking sites to deliver similar capability. Learn from ordinary citizens that new capabilities are only a mouse-click away in harnessing a form of Web-based community activism that providers for a more-flexible self-service approach to government-to-citizen interaction and are less dependent on government's more-general information broadcasts.

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In my view this works best for dramatic events, or in other exceptional circumstances. We've seen it already many times, with Katrina wiki, wildfires twitter in California, etc. Not so effective for day to day running of public services or even community services.

Osimod, I disagree. All that is really required for success with a social networking e-government experiment is for people to care. That can be accomplished by providing extra services that make sense outside the scope of a catastrophic event.

A school system could provide a system that tracks stats for local little-league games, in addition to school system sponsored athletic events. Any parents of students who's stats would be available would then frequently visit that school system's website, and participate in the social networking features available. In the event of an emergency, or even a big community event, that school system would have an easy position from which to kick off it's efforts to manage and get through the situation.

Let's say a school receives a bomb threat. Traditional responses to a bomb threat are to send out an all-call to the parents, and move the kids a safe distance from the school while the appropriate authorities do their thing. Kids these days have cellphones, which means that parents will be informed of the situation from the kid's perspective, which can often breed uncertainty, fear, and doubt. If the school system had a feature on the athletics oriented site that would alert parents via text message or email to athletic events, it can be commandeered to provide status updates to the parents, and anyone else who elected to be included.

Successfully getting the interest of the citizens in times when there is not a clear and present danger is the key to a successful foray into social networking for e-government, and provides a firm base for emergency situations to be managed from. If people care, they'll be there.