Government To Use Twitter For Public Service

Government To Use Twitter For Public Service

Owen Pengelly, head of the Cabinet Office's central sponsor for information assurance unit proposed that the government should employ the services of Twitter to better communicate with the public. Pengelly spoke at the Mobile Government Conference 2009, and he reiterated the need to consistently communicate to provide immediate public service.


Pengelly said, the Cabinet OFfice is "trying to change the paradigm of engagement between government and the citizen, and more from rather staid consultation to collaboration, and it denotes a wholesale move to the web and to Web 2.0 technologies like Twitter."



One particular concern over the government's use of Twitter is its lack of security.  Pengelly acknowledged the fact that public service "tweets" should be subjected to information security risk analysis before being posted.



Pengelly added the wide range of mobile devices emerging today should also be studied when analyzing risks.



"The PDA's I carry around with me now are vastly more capable than the ones I carried around a couple of years ago, and people, public servants, and civil servants want to do more with their mobile devices."



Pengelly further asserted that sites like Twitter could help bring back the younger generation's involvement with politics.