In good news for today, NY State IT Department has issued a series of guidelines for State Agencies to use Web 2.0, new media and social collaborative tools. The downside is that there is going to have to be training, the upside to the Empire 2.0 strategy is that it could end up with a better run state.

The ideas proposed under the Empire 2.0 strategy being adopted by NY State includes one unique component, a way for the public to interact with the state through a portal called “NY State Tech Talk”. People who use the site can vote up or down ALA Digg the ideas that have been submitted by others on the site. This is a decent way to do participatory government, and one that should be watched to see if something like this can be launched out at the national level, or if the system gets gamed by users voting up some ideas and voting down others.

“The launch of Empire 2.0 to expand the use of new media and Web 2.0 technologies holds exciting promise,” said state Health Commissioner Richard Daines, in a news release. “Various means of social media networking has enabled our department to relay important health messages, such as smoking cessation and obesity prevention to tens of thousands of New Yorkers. Through this new strategy, we look forward to expanding our efforts to include even more personalized and interactive means of reaching as many of our citizens as possible.” Source: Govtech

The site is fairly sparse right now without many ideas input into the system (although it just launched) which is surprising. But as news gets out about this experiment in social media as participatory democracy, this should be interesting to see how the system is eventually used, who uses it, and what the level of participation to gaming/spamming is on this kind of system. You do not have to be logged in to vote, or otherwise participate in the site. Over time they might implement better controls to work out a one person one vote system, or any number of already well known guidelines to keep gaming the system at bay.

In all though, it is a great first effort on the part of the State of New York, and embracing social networking as a core function of government is going to be a precedent setting system.

Tags: NY, New York, Social networking, support, system, vote, participatory democracy, systems

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