Draft social media guidelines, a step in right direction

Union government released a draft policy or guidelines for use of social media by its agencies

September 18, 2011 09:55 pm | Updated 10:37 pm IST - BANGALORE:

First impressions while skimming through the Delhi Traffic Police's official Facebook page is that the response is quick and consistent, the ‘updates' on traffic snarls and routes are useful and the forum is fairly vibrant. Yes, in just over an hour, images of at least seven traffic violations were uploaded by citizens, including that of a minor riding a mini-bike — flagging valid privacy concerns here — one-way transgressions and faulty number-plates, one even of a car identified as that of a political party.

Scattered efforts

While several government departments have warmed to the idea of using Web 2.0 to interact with citizens, in the absence of a comprehensive social media policy or guidelines, efforts have been at best scattered, and often not very consistent. The Union government's draft ‘Framework and Guidelines for Use of Social Media for Government Organisations,' released earlier this month, is a significant step towards consolidating these efforts by laying down guidelines on how government agencies can use this tool to “reach out to this audience at a key stroke.” The policy states that government departments can use this new medium not only to disseminate information but also to undertake public engagement in policymaking and to get feedback on delivery of services.

The 40-page document lays down a comprehensive framework dealing with aspects, both legal and structural. On resource allocation, it recommends that government agencies appoint a dedicated team trained and equipped to deal with this new medium.

The document, which lists the best practices in several countries and the existing initiatives in government departments, identifies social networking sites, blogs, video-sharing sites, micro-blogs and wikis as the main platforms to be used. It also encourages creating own and independent platforms to do so. The guidelines are also fairly detailed on topics such as information disclosure, etiquette and infringement of intellectual property rights.

Data handling

On data handling, the draft mandates that records and trails of any information sharing be captured and recorded. It recommends that “privileged access may be mandated by the government along the same lines as ‘take-down notices' and ‘information requests' currently being sent to social media and other platforms for intellectual property rights infringement and other offences.

Policies for security

For this, it states that specific policies can be drafted for information security and archiving. This could include “service-level agreements” between the government and the service provider for content storage, shared access and archival, and setting a response time for removal of offensive content as short as five minutes and as long as 15 minutes.

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