Survey Results - Q1: Access to Web 2.0 and PS Renewal-related Websites

The first question of the survey was inspired by an idea from New Zealand’s public service blogger Jason Ryan in a posting where he referred to the Stop Blocking! campaign. I instantly felt an urge to rate the Public Service of Canada’s Departments and Agencies, but the undertaking was a little ambitious. So I compromised for a single question that would provide an imperfect but very telling picture of the current state of site blocking in the public service.

The question was: “Which of the following websites are you able to access from your work computer? Select all that apply:

1. The PS Renewal page on the Canada Public Service Agency internet site
2. The PS Renewal discussion guide on the Canada Public Service Agency intranet site
3. The site An Inconvenient Renewal
4. The group Bottom-Up Renewal
5. The blog Contrarian Thinking
6. The blog CPSRenewal.ca
7. The Facebook group on PS Renewal (or just the Facebook home page if you don’t have a Facebook account)
8. Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s channel on YouTube
9. Randy Pausch's Last Lecture on YouTube
10. The "Canadian Civil Service" page on Wikipedia
11. The Prime Minister's photo gallery on Flickr
12. The "Emails, Emails and More Emails" presentation showcased at the Canada School of Public Service
13. Business Week's video on "being entrepreneurial"
14. Ottawa Citizen's reporter Kathryn May's articles on the federal public service and PS Renewal-related initiatives
15. The 2007 Manion Lecture audio recording.”

My intent with this question was to get an sense of just how many public servants have access to PS Renewal-related Web resources. While some of the links above are not directly related to PS Renewal, their content either lends itself well to the spirit of PS Renewal, or constitutes information that you would expect all employees to be able to access in an organization operating on principles of trust, transparency, and openness.

The selection of some of the sites was also governed by their popularity. As of October 31, 2008, Alexa’s ranking of the top websites in Canada included: Facebook (#3), Youtube (#5), Wikipedia (#9), Blogger (#10), and Flickr (#19). The Government of Canada held the 11th spot.

I was specifically interested in knowing what percentage of public servants didn't have access to those sites and resources. The methodology I used to compile the results was the following. By asking people which of the sites listed they could access from their work computer, I was able to determine which ones they couldn't access. I then compared the answers of respondents from the same departments to see if their responses were consistent. When there were inconsistencies, such as it can be expected in a large decentralized departments (e.g. Service Canada) where different offices may impose different access restrictions to websites, I applied the following rule: in order to conclude that the employees of the department don't have access to a specific website, all the respondents from that department must have no access to that website”. This logic obviously skews the results in favour of the sites that are accessible (the more respondents from a given Department, the greater the odds of concluding the site is accessible), however it gives me a greater degree of confidence with the claims I make later when I say that a certain percentage of the public service doesn't have access to a given website. For instance, let’s say I have 4 respondents from the same department: 3 say they can’t access a given site, 1 says he can. I will conclude that the employees in this department can access the site, even though in reality 75% of them may not have access. By applying this rule, I may be embellishing the actual level of accessibility to certain sites, but at least it reduces the odds of exaggerating the level of inaccessibility to those sites.

The table below presents three sets of data:

1. The 34 Departments and Agencies represented in survey (which accounted for 85,4% of all public servants);
2. The 87 respondents;
3. An extrapolation of those results to the whole Core Public Administration (i.e. 107 Departments and Agencies totaling 263,118 public servants), factoring the size of each Department and Agency.

Percentage of federal public servants who can't access PS Renewal-related websites from their work computer

Sites	34 Departments and Agencies Represented in Survey	87 Respondents	Entire “Core Public Administration” (Extrapolation)
The Facebook group on PS Renewal (or just the Facebook home page)	50%	61%	73,50%
Business Week's video on "being entrepreneurial"	35%	53%	60,80%
Randy Pausch's Last Lecture on YouTube	41%	59%	60,60%
Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s channel on YouTube	38%	56%	55,30%
The "Emails, Emails and More Emails" presentation showcased at the Canada School of Public Service	35%	57%	54,70%
The Prime Minister's photo gallery on Flickr	32%	48%	46,90%
The blog Contrarian Thinking	24%	34%	43,00%
The 2007 Manion Lecture audio recording.”	15%	38%	18,10%
The blog CPSRenewal.ca	12%	25%	17,90%
The group Bottom-Up Renewal	12%	21%	4,70%
Ottawa Citizen's reporter Kathryn May's articles on the federal public service and PS Renewal-related initiatives	9%	22%	1,40%
The PS Renewal discussion guide on the Canada Public Service Agency intranet site	6%	15%	0,90%
The "Canadian Civil Service" page on Wikipedia	6%	17%	0,90%
The PS Renewal page on the Canada Public Service Agency internet site	3%	6%	0,70%
The site An Inconvenient Renewal	0%	14%	0,00%

I don't want to discuss the results too much – in fact I hope that the readers will discuss them using the “Comment” feature below and therefore spark an interesting conversation – however I will point to some of the highlights I see:

• Although Facebook is the top Web 2.0 site in Canada, an estimated three quarters of all public servants can't access it from work– not even the Facebook group on PS Renewal. (Wow! Those CBSA recruits really scared government officials last year…)
• Over half of public servants can't even access the Prime Ministers’ channel on YouTube, and just under half can’t access his photo gallery on Flickr! (Who do we work for again?)
• In 2008, nearly 18 % of public servants still can’t download a legal MP3 file from the Canada School of Public Service website. (I guess we still have a long way to go before becoming a true “learning organization”!)
• Approximately 43% public servants can't access my blog, despite the fact I use the Blogger platform – the 10th most popular site in Canada. Nevertheless, it is an improvement compared to what it used to be. A year ago, none of my friends at PWGSC – which accounts for nearly 5% of all public servants – could access my blog, but in this survey most said they could.
• The figures are better for my friends at CPSRenewal.ca who, despite the fact they use the same platform as I do (Blogger), are able to be reached by an additional 25% of public servants (that means 65,000 more people!). That is a relief, since I think their blog is the single best source of news on PS Renewal. But why is my blog blocked more than their's? I don't know...
  
• I am actually amazed by the level of access to my sites An Inconvenient Renewal and the group Bottom-Up Renewal. But then it makes me wonder why the participation on those sites in non-existent (I will come back to this in tomorrow's posting).

The methodology I used is obviously flawed, and I won’t argue with that. The numbers presented above probably reflect a best-case scenario. Given the relatively small number of responses I received, the results of the survey need to be interpreted with great caution; so please don’t go around quoting these numbers as facts!

With the recent launch of GCpedia (accessible to federal public servants only), these results promise to generate quite a bit of discussion. Coincidentally, Jason Ryan and Mike Kujawski just made some postings related to the use of social networks and Web 2.0 in government.

Please feel free to discuss the findings below.

More results coming tomorrow!