Airing your concerns over government policies and their implementation will be much easier in a few months? time with the department of information technology (DIT) urging all ministries and departments to have a presence on social media to discuss issues on such open platforms.
Soon, all internet users will be able to follow the activities of the government on Orkut, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, directly touch base with the ministry concerned and air their grievances.
The department has come up with a framework and guidelines for use of social media for government organisations. ??Some government organisations are already using the social media and some want to be there. Therefore, we needed guidelines and this work in progress. We expect things to be finalised by the end of this year,? said a senior DIT official.
The guidelines have been developed for all e-governance projects currently under the national e-governance plan and will be applicable to all new e-governance projects being developed by any department. This will ensure both real-time engagement and individual interaction. Government organisations are exploring the use of social media for public engagements for disseminating information, policy making, recruitment, generating awareness and education about public services and even responding to RTIs.
The draft guidelines say: ?These guidelines will enable the various agencies to create and implement their own strategy for the use of social media. The document will help them to make an informed choice about the objective, platforms and resources to meet the requirement of interaction with their varied stakeholders.?
Through social media, ministries will be able to directly interact with the public and link the platform to the respective website. Hence, grievance redressal would be made easy as the public will make use of these pages to air their every day issues related to traffic and municipalities. Also, none of the sites would be left more than a week or two without new content, according to the guidelines.
?We want all ministries to own up the websites and ensure that information hidden in some corners be made public. Bills and drafts which need consultation can be discussed on these fora,? the official added.
Since this is not a major information technology (IT) project, DIT is assuring that only a minimal spend will be required and a dedicated team can be given the charge of monitoring and updating the social media pages regularly.
Further, government departments and agencies can engage social media by making use of any of the existing external platforms or by creating their own communication platforms.
However, social media can only be used by the government to communicate existing government information and propagate official policy to the public.