Coming soon to Government ~ Social Media Sites [PCRD WIRED] : Strategy-Nets

...............Coming soon will be government agencies via Flickr, Vimeo, blip.tv, YouTube, and possibly Facebook and MySpace.

The federal General Services Administration (GSA) is in the process of signing agreements with these and other social media sites that will allow federal agencies to use them. Turns out, their standard terms of service agreements (the stuff you don't read before clicking "I Agree") aren't in compliance with federal law. So GSA has been negotiating new terms that are in compliance.

The good news is that Twitter's terms of service are in compliance, and didn't have to be negotiated.

Seventeen federal agencies have signed on so far.

NextGov is reporting that

Most agencies will appoint directors of new media to determine how they can use social networking tools to meet mission goals and comply with President Obama's open government directive, said Sheila Campbell, team leader of Web best practices for the government portal USA.gov and co-chair of the Federal Web Managers Council.

For more on the initiative, read the article at NextGov.com.

Is your workforce board, One-Stop or nonprofit ready to harness the power of web 2.0 and social media? Getting the legal issues out of the way only gets us over one hurdle. Now we have to find the resources to do it, set the right policies, and do some experimenting.

To help you think about this, check out my Six web 2.0 principles for workforce boards and One-Stops.

Or Ed Morrison's paper on re-employment networks and the public workforce system.