Our friends over at GovGab have started a conversation about web 2.0 tools at http://blog.usa.gov/roller/govgab/entry/government_in_the_web_2 we think you should join.

After some introduction that I encourage you to read on their site, they say:

So, America, I pose a question to you… What do you think of government agencies using social media tools like blogs, RSS feeds, podcasts, YouTube, Flickr, widgets, and microblogs to reach out and give you information? Is it good? Bad? Are there ways you’d like the government to provide information that we haven’t thought of or addressed yet? After all, we’re public servants and we’re here to serve, so let us know what you want and need.

So far they've got nine comments, all of them interesting. Some are from government employees explaining why their agencies aren't terribly social. Sometimes there good reasons. Read Ray's comment dated 4/11/2008, 2:05pm to see an example.

The thread has also shown that the GovGab folks are really listening. A poster called lentigogirl noted that GovGab's Flickr pictures were tagged "All Rights Reserved" when photographs produced by the government should be public domain.

Within a few hours, GovGab blogger Sommer came back with this response:

lentigogirl,

Thanks for the heads up on the Flickr photos. I hadn't noticed the photos were labeled "all rights reserved" before. Whenever I view our photos I'm logged into the account and that piece of information isn't displayed to you on your own account.

I've done some research on Flickr and they don't offer an option to set your photos for the public domain. The closest I can come for now is designating them "Attribution-NoDerivs Creative Commons" (for more info http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/). Also see the Flickr Help Forum for more information on this topic: http://www.flickr.com/search/forum/?q=photos%20in%20public
%20domain
Based on comments in the Help Forum I think the best solution might be to just tag all our photos with a "public domain" tag.

Thanks for teaching me more about Flickr -- it really is all about communicating with each other!

Have a great weekend!
Sommer

Now THAT is responsiveness. As regular FGI readers know, I've really enjoyed GovGab from day one. I think they do a terrific job. So now that they're asking for input on Web 2.0 stuff, I hope you'll take a moment to help them out by sharing your opinion. Then I hope that more agencies will use GovGab and the USA.gov as service benchmarks for responsiveness.