Posts Tagged ‘Social Media’

Building Better Open Government Websites Recap: Accessibility and Social Media Panel

December 7th, 2009

On our October 30 workshop with Potomac Forum, we invited Terry Weaver, Director of the Center for Information Technology Accommodation (CITA), to be on a panel discussing 508 legislation compliance and Social Media. 5 significant points emerged from that discussion which will affect multiple agencies engaging in social media and open government initiatives:

  1. Youtube now offers captioning. Ms. Weaver made it a point to indicate that since it is now possible to caption videos on YouTube, an excuse for posting a uncaptioned video no longer exists. Federal agencies must caption videos wherever they are posted. Posting an uncaptioned video and directing screenreader users back to the agency site for the captioned version is not equal access. It is more like the separate text version of a website that some agencies used in the early days of Section 508 when they couldn’t comply with the standards on the main page. It is a “separate but equal” approach which provides an alternative means and a practice  she discouraged.
  2. If you are not 508 compliant, indicate that you are planning to be and how someone who wants the information but cannot access can request accommodation. Having a plan is the first stage of 508 compliance and making it clear that you are progressing toward compliance is an important step toward mitigating risk.
  3. There are limitations on some social media sites for 508 compliance. Facebook for instance has content which often cannot be read by screen readers. Therefore any information posted on facebook by a government agency should be available from a compliant webpage elsewhere.
  4. Blogs in Open Government: Images should be captioned with description. Non-captioned videos should not be allowed. It is fairly easy to make most blogs 508 compliant by making sure they can be read by screen readers and also to caption with a description in the ALT tag any images. It was recommended that video submissions by the public not be allowed in comments as most will not be captioned.
  5. In any use of a social media site for official agency business or open government efforts, be sure to check with your agency’s general counsel to be sure that you have all of the proper agreements in place. GSA has examples of the modified terms of service (TOS) agreements it has put in place on www.apps.gov. GSA encourages all agencies to create similar agreements.

Stay tuned for more workshops on building better

open Government websites.

No comments »

Posted in Social Media, government 2.0, online social networking

Tags:

Gov 2.o Spoofing is here. Reciprocal Link Authentication could prevent misunderstanding.

June 2nd, 2009

Postscript:  Another example of government spoofing was a prank cell phone call from India to the Pakistani Defense Minstry the day after the Mumbai terrorist attack.  The called claimed to be an Indian Defense Ministry Official and was claiming that India was going to retaliate. Planes went up in the air on both sides and the US had to intervene to prevent further escalation.  The call was taken seriously because normal authentication procedures were not followed or did not exist.

Hot off the press: Another spoofing incident which alleges civil damages involving Twitter the St. Louis Cardinals’ manager Tony La Russa.

While in general I dont think western Democracies have a lot to learn from the North Korean Government, I think in the case of Gov 2.0 spoofing there might be an exception.  The North Korean Central News Agency was recently impersonated on Twitter in a way which might have fooled a lot of people.  The twitter feed was made to look realistic because it used actual articles released by the Central News Agency. The prank was pulled off by a parody website called Stupidedia and they didn’t seem to intend to create any harm with it.

But this points out how easy it is to pretend you are an official government agency on twitter.  Recently I advocated for a simple reciprocal link authentication policy which would place a link on any official government web 2.0 account (twitter, facebook fan page etc) to a .gov or .mil page which would then give a link or list of links to the official social media account for that agency.  Then anyone could with 2 clicks verify that a social media account is authentically coming from an official government source.   As government presence becomes more common on social media, we will likely see more attempts to grab attention through this type of impersonation.  While it doesn’t seem like much could come of this, all it takes is one person believing one source is the voice of a government and acting on it to cause at the least embarassement and at the worse some harm.

1 comment »

Posted in Identification, Policy, Social Media, Tools, authentication, government 2.0

Tags: