What is interesting in the O’Reilly article this morning was the discussion around security clearances for the military and for contractors. The security clearance routine is almost a rite of passage, if you want to work in government or the military as anything you have to be deemed trustworthy by a series of investigations. The more secret squirrel information you are going to see, the higher the clearance level, and the deeper the investigation into your past, your activities, and your beliefs. Anyone who as sat through the “lifestyles” polygraph test can attest to some very interesting questions that are designed to elicit a reaction from the person taking the polygraph. It was one of my more unique experiences that I can never talk about.

What was very cool about my military experience is that I was literally living with anywhere from 7 to 175 of my closest newest friends depending on where I was and what team I was with. The military attempts to foster a deep sense of loyalty to not just the people you will fight and die alongside, but a sense of trust throughout the entire community from your immediate supervisor all the way through the President. But it was all based on “trust but verify”. Your clearance was the “verify” part of the process.

The military experience is one with a very small town feeling, we all know our neighbors, we all live in a fish barrel, and if you have a clearance, in many ways you are living in a fishbowl. Everyone knows everything about you that you have publicly and in many cases privately stated. It is the old TV Show “Cheers, where everyone knows your name”. Cheers monetized alcoholism, Facebook wants to monetize conformity into a social norm based on a person’s stated friends, likes, and interests. Either way there is a monitization component to the process that might offend folks, and indeed does raise worries about what web sites are doing and how people are tracked across the internet.

Facebook is offering a “panopticon” into your life, the more you share the more you are part of the “group”. This is the same kind of social pressure to conform that happens in high school or in other groups where norms can be enforced publicly. Military people, especially military people with high level clearances will get this concept immediately. Kids in High School will get this immediately, the pressure to conform and be like anyone or everyone else is what Facebook is offering, under the gentle guidance of having what you do so immediately public that deviation from the societal norm could result in losing a job, or a clearance, or friends.

The panopticon can be many things, but as we move deeper into social networking we are going to learn things about each other that will homogenize us into the populations that we deal with on a daily basis. Those that fall outside the norm behaviorally or socially within that small group of people will quickly be drummed out of the group. Internet consumers already have a long experience with this by combating trolls from the early days of the internet. Facebook simply provides us a one stop shop, are they really all that they seem; are they socially and culturally going to fit into the culture/society of the work place? Are they who they state they are?

Clearances aside, we have plunged head first into this world without a safety net, without guidelines, and without any recourse under law that is firmly established to protect people or keep companies from building the “walled garden” panopticon that social networking can represent. When the CEO of the major social network states they do not believe in privacy, that organization will implement the fishbowl process that we see with government and security clearances. We all know everything about each other, and we know how startlingly similar we really are, regardless of where we are in the world.

The thing we need to remember, and the thing that we seem to continually forget is that anything we post on the internet is public. If we are going to understand this we need to start hammering this message home as much as we hammered home the message “don’t click on that attachment in email”. While education will not solve all problems, there are still people who click on those enticing email attachments, it is at least a start. The public debate we are having now is good, but it is time to start reminding people that what they post is public, open to public interpretation, and societal pressures to conform to societies determination of what is right and appropriate behavior. We see this in military communities around the world, including those with security clearances. This small town fishbowl is starting to be incorporated into everyday lives, how we live, what we do, where we go, what movies we watch, what music we listen to, and even to what we had for dinner.

The good thing about the internet is you can find a support group for just about anything, the question is how much do you want to post about yourself, and how much do you want people to really know about you?

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We need a federal cloud computing service to help modernize government and see realizable cost savings over the older and error prone way of doing business. Combine this with the data that a person can use at the government spending dashboard it.usaspending.gov you get a potent tool for people who monitor budgets. Not just people, but comptrollers, CIO’s and CFO’s across a broad range of government institutions. The cost savings can in turn be used to manage or run other government programs that help further reduce the costs of government. Many companies have no idea how they have invested in it, or the cost realization that can be obtained from Cloud Computing. Adding these two programs to the government portfolio is one of the smartest things to come out of Washington DC in a while.

The only real major hitches in this will be adoption amongst the GS workers and managers. Is government service truly ready and willing to embrace systems that they have no physical control of? That is a question that will only be answered in time to see how these systems and ideas are adopted. I would expect to see that a new team of leadership and users will form a core group within an agency that uses and adopts these systems and ideas regardless of what senior management or non-adopters will choose to use. We are at our most comfortable when we are using something tried and true, we are at our most uncomfortable when we are dealing with change. The Federal Cloud Computing Services platform and Cloud IT Services is a radical departure from the one datacenter one organization rule that CIO’s, CFO’s and others have grown used to. That is where the challenge lays, how to get government agencies to adopt changes that will reduce the IT budget, open the door to interactions with civilians on a one to one basis, and fundamentally alter how transparent and accountable a government organization is.

This is a major step in the right direction, what remains to be seen is the adoption of these services will look like within the government.

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What is interesting is that while the military is busy trying to hunt down military bloggers, or trying to find ways of minimizing access to social networks is that there is always a way around any form of road block put in the way. Anonymity to a certain point can also go a long way in ensuring that military bloggers can stay on the net and talk about the military. There are always going to be people who hate what they do, the military is no different. This does not mean that the voices of dissent should be silenced, if anything it makes the public view of the military better rounded. Bloggers should be talking about the real military, the one that the troops live with on a day to day basis. It is the personal stories that are interesting, we all have bad bosses, the senior master sergeant is no different. We all make friends on social networks with our management, and wish that we could back away from them later on in life, even the troops do this. There is already a panopticon on the things we do online when it comes to where we work and who we interact with, the military should be no different.

The military though, and since I served and loved about 80% of it I believe that I can say this, should take some lessons away from the RIAA/MPAA and the BSA. RIAA/MPAA have gone after sites where people are doing things that violate copyright. Using many of the same tactics that the military has done by finding out who people are and shutting them down. What this has done is fractured the file sharing community into other systems, that are harder to find, harder to infiltrate, and harder to track. File sharing has gone underground to such a point that the RIAA/MPAA have had to alter tactics to break apart smaller and smaller segments of the file sharing community. The RIAA/MPAA have also set up an artificial scarcity of goods, making it impossible or nearly impossible for people to find what they are looking for anywhere.

The BSA on the other hand has embraced openness, you can purchase software anywhere at any time for any purpose. There is no reason to steal, because the products are ubiquitous. The BSA is also only interested when it looks like it is a major player, but this does not mean that they will not go after individual file sharers either. Rather from what the BSA has done in the past is go after the majors, while issuing take down notices on individual files. The BSA has not been involved in any of the major lawsuits against file sharing systems preferring a more surgical approach to the dragnet approach that the RIAA /MPAA have used in the past.

The Military stands at the same cross roads, they can use the dragnet approach like the RIAA/MPAA to try to keep the troops from blogging or using social networks. They can put up filters, road blocks, URL Filtering systems, even make it official policy that no one can use a blog or social network from a military system. Or they can embrace the BSA approach where they know where everyone is, they know what people are talking about, and try to engage people, inform, and as a last resort try to do something about people being stupid. Depending on which way the military goes the troops will find a way around the process. The military can embrace, track, and help people make better decisions, or the military can attempt to silence, deter, detract, and stop the troops from blogging or using social networks. Of course I prefer that the military embrace, because if they embrace they stand a much better chance of engaging with troops on all levels and possibly avert another major problem like Abu Ghraib in the future. If the participants in Abu Ghraib had blogged, or even if bystanders had blogged about what was going on there, and the military was aware of those sites, the train wreck could have been spotted much earlier before it became a national tragedy.

Let us hope that the military embraces openness in blogging and social networks, it is the best of all possible outcomes. Otherwise, fear of being exposed, or steps at censorship will simply drive troops to alternative methods of communication, or so fracture the community that the military will never know what is being said where. Roadblocks and hurdles have always been overcome by enterprising people, and I can think of dozens of ways of breaking out of the sandbox that the military will put on a network. The more the military embraces openness, the less fear, the less censorship, the better change the military will have in getting the pulse of the troops. The better a change people on the sidelines will have a better idea of what is happening at the troop level and the more integrated the military will be in the internet social community.

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Judging from quite a few conversations I’ve had over the past two weeks, some experienced senior communicators in the UK did what I did – requested the information pack with all the details about this job, which came via email.

Quite a collection of documents, the most important of which is the job specification, a 9-page Word document that expands in considerable detail on the information in the original job ad (which is no longer publicly online, not even in Google’s cache).

Did I consider applying? A few people have asked me that question. The short answer is no, not seriously.

After thinking about this for the better part of a week, I concluded that while I believe I could meet the competencies, skills and experience detailed in the job spec, I am convinced that the indispensible skill requirement for this job is one that is conspicuously absent from my best-skill repertoire: the proven ability to effectively navigate the political seas across the breadth and depth of government – the most critically-important skill for this role, in my view, far more important than any amount of direct and real experience with social media let alone website building or even organizational communication experience itself.

It’s a skill that the job spec makes clear is pretty important. But I think it underplays that importance.

I believe that finding a single individual who can combine that ability with all the senior communication experience and social media knowledge that the job spec details is practically impossible, especially given the nationality restrictions and the hugely ambitious goals the government has in mind with what they want to achieve within just two short years:

Within two years the use of world class digital engagement techniques should be embedded in the normal work of Government.

No, this is not a job for a single individual who matches all the attributes the job spec calls for. Far better a person with the political skills as the figurehead, the navigator, who brings in the communication and other essential skills to execute and deliver on those goals.

The more I thought about this, the firmer this view became. For a single individual, it is indeed a job to die for, I jokingly said to myself – or the job that will kill you.

Even though I had decided that this is not the role for me, I still wanted to talk to the Cabinet Office recruiters about it, perhaps to see what they might have to say to my notion that this isn’t a job for a single person.

The job spec offers the name of an individual plus a phone number. Earlier last week, I did call a handful of times; each time, the person answering the number told me that the person I wanted was in a meeting. Busy I guess. I was too, as it happened, on the road much of the week.

So no conversation took place, more’s the pity, before the closing date.

Still, I was (and am) very interested indeed in the scope and scale of what this job means in our society as a whole and what evolutionary changes will take place in how the government enables effective engagement with the people, whether it’s world class or anything else. It’s made especially interesting and challenging as, somewhere in that two-year timeframe, is a general election.

Unquestionably, a killer job.

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