W3C eGov: Kevin Novak on “Government as a Participant in Social Networks. Adding Authority to the Conversation”

Note: These are rough notes from the W3C Workshop on eGovernment and the Web.  It is being held in Washington DC on June 18th-19th.

The world is changing.  Over half of the World’s population is under 17.  We need to change to accomodate these new users.  More people are connected to the Web and go often.

We need to be starting a participatory volunteerism.  Its community based interaction, sharing, assistance, managing, and changing.

It’s about relating what you’re doing to the user. How do you allow the participation when you’re the authoritative source?

We have a very diverse user base: Scholars/Researchers, Teachers, Students, Librarians, Publishers, and Public.

In the Web 2.o space, online libraries are really content and media companies.  We must compete in a dynamic world of the Internet and strive to maintain relevance.

The Library is a 207 year old institution.  We don’t do anything quickly.  The technology and the users are changing.  We need to compete.

RSS is now available.  The LC has launched a Meta Search and Beta Search.  LC was a beta tester of the Open Site Maps Project.  In the future there will be podcast, second life, flickr, tag clouds, widgets, and much more.

The blog has become very popular.  There has been traffic coming into the site because they visited the blog.

There are currently 18 RSS feeds currently available.  By the end of the summer there will be one for THOMAS.

We will be putting images on Flickr.  We want to get the photos out there, see how people use our photos,  and see how people tag our photos.   Flickr has been very co-operative.

We want to meet users in their worlds through Second Life.

By the end of the summer there will be widgets.  One will be for Today in History.  There will be others for our thematic portals.  Hopefully it will drive traffic back to the LC site.