On the other hand, public institutions have long been criticized for not communicating where the people are. Notices posted on their own website are unlikely to read by anywhere as broad an audience. Plenty uses newspapers, but even my grandparents get stuff from Twitter before the paper now, if just from younger people sharing it with them. I agree Twitter shouldn't be the only channel, but it is where the people are, or at least were.
If only we had a standard to make syndication of data simple, I mean really, really simple. It had to be so simple the standard could even be called Really Simple Syndication.
How does this help to fix the essentially non-technical problem that on long enough time horizons, and by long enough maybe 5 years at most these days, content that is optimized to provoke reaction ("engagement") outcompetes content that is optimized to promote contemplation, on any network, whether syndicated or not.
These days setting up a website costs $16/mo[0] and is so simple my 70yo father-in-law did it. I'm pretty sure most public agencies can find that in the budget.
well, it was. now we’re seeing these companies—who used as one of their primary selling points to lure in talent, “come help us make the world a better place”—in real time, one by one, we’re beginning to see their true motives and true colors come out as they begin to close up public access.
i think the real question is when, not if, we end up with public infrastructure.
It's worth noting that many government institutions nowadays have (often several) social media communications "officers" officers, whose only job it is to disaminate information via social media (twitter, Facebook...). Now you'd think that if they hire a person for these sort of things (btw keeping track of multiple social media account and monitoring relevant keywords is definitely not typical nontechnical user territory) they could train the person to update a cms as well.
What's harder: signing up for Twitter, or convincing the sysadmins in your medium sized government organization to let you update text on the site in real-time without change control for each edit? In a way that anyone nontechnical can do so securely and publish to RSS?
Or Remind, or ClassDojo, or Parentsquare, or whatever our school district goes with next year. I think they could all do SMS delivery, but none of them got it quite right. The apps are all buggy too. Various updates are often squirreled away on Twitter or "$schoolname Parents" Facebook group.
I think I remember suggesting RSS to them as an option. Utterly technically trivial. If they'd done that and then syndicated it out to Twitter etc, they could have served everybody.
