We have a DL here at work for everybody who lives in town and it has actually been a great resource. Mostly it’s a lot of chatter or complaining about our cable company but, when things go down, it has proven to be a valuable resource. When the rivers flood, it is constantly updated by people who are commuting as to which roads are closed, ect… During our power outage a couple of years ago, there were people posting offers to give away firewood, give rides into town to get gas for generators, or just share the warmth of their fire. There is also a city council member who works here and she keeps us posted on a lot of current issues. It would be great to see this concept expanded beyond the walls of our “Large Redmond-Based Software Company”.

The concept comes with some hurdles, of course. Social networking sites seem to be very “faddy” (real word?). As one grows too big, people have a tendency to jump ship and move to newer, more fashionable ones. This could cause the headache of trying to keep up with the trend and leave whoever is managing this kind of system to dance around all of the different options. I’m not sure if this is already kind of the case but, it would be great to see a standard set of APIs for interfacing with these different sites. That way, one person could drive the information to many different sites with a simple application on their desktop. Of course, with these companies competing for buisness, giving flexiblity in choice is probably not high on the list of priorities. I can dream though.

Anyways, I’d love to see this kind of idea happen. I know that in my small community, any good stream of information is highly valued. It seems that using Facebook (or whatever) would be a cheap and efficient way for local government to get information out there in real time.

And by the way, I would also love to have some filters for posting on facebook. There are some things that family/co-workers just shouldn’t know.

I imagine you are at Government 2.0 Camp… I couldn’t get funding but look forward to hearing about the outcomes! Especially for the local government community.

Cheers

Liz Rosas
e-Government Program Manager
County of Santa Clara, CA