McLaughlin Floats Idea of a Federal Employee, Um, Facebook
BY Nancy Scola | Friday, September 11 2009
Andrew McLaughlin, Deputy U.S. Chief Technology Officer for Internet Policy, said during his closing keynote at yesterday's Gov 2.0 Summit in Washington that his 'things to get to' list contains an intriguing potential to-do: an official, searchable intranet where federal government employees each have a individual profile that would list areas of expertise, core competencies, and, naturally, contact information so that folks could connect up with one another.
You could see how such a directory of government employees might be enormously helpful. With something like that, you might unlock all the intelligence and experience that is now more or less siloed inside DHS, DOD, DOJ, HHS, what have you. There is, of course, enormous overlap in the sort of work that government employees do, both in subject matter and the approaches that they use to do their jobs. As a simple example, you might imagine somebody who is doing new media work at the Coast Guard reaching out to somebody doing something neat with, say, new collaborative tools over at the FCC. Heck, happy hours might even result. And that's never a bad thing.
Or is it? Is there a downside to opening up the possibility of semi-official vertical connections between mid and low-level staffers? You can imagine that some higher-ups might be made uncomfortable by the idea that their underlings are making friends outside the building, but the nice thing about McLaughlin's position is that he's an advisor to the President. With that comes some degree of not worrying too much about bureaucratic sensitivities. Are there privacy concerns? And if not, if this is worth doing, which branch of Washington officialdom would be responsible for actually getting the thing up and running?