Use of social media tools in the public sector is in its infancy in Sweden. In a study conducted by the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce in 2009 (PDF) , around 12% of agencies reported that they were using social media channels in their communication. In another study by the Swedish Public Relations Association 75% of PR managers were evaluating the use of social media but only 5% had involved social media in the communication strategy. Many agencies are trying out new tools to see how they fit in their communication strategy. Most are using them as a news feed (one-way communication) and do not reply to questions. The number of followers varies greatly. Some examples:

Some agencies have also started using Facebook. The National Heritage Board (Riksantikvarieämbetet) on Facebook has close to 1200 fans. They have also used Flickr to increase access to parts of their archives. Currently the images are low-res only but that may change in the future.

Municipalities on Twitter

Many municipalities have started using Twitter to push information to citizens. Most are using it as a one-way communication channel, but some are engaging in dialogue. The number of municipalities on twitter is increasing almost on a daily basis. In my list of swedish municipalities on twitter there are currently 71 (out of 290). Many of them are not publishing any tweets and may only have registered the account to get a proper twitter handle.

In he following visualization you get an overview of how the municipalities compare with regards to number of tweets, followers and “early adopter”-status (“Age” as in number of days on twitter). Uppsala (north of Stockholm) has over 500 followers and published 941 tweets in their 367 days on Twitter. See here for a larger chart.

Observations

Some organizations are following citizens on Twitter and may not have realized that people may feel uncomfortable having an agency following them.

There are also some fake agencies on twitter. Swedish national authority for signals intelligence, FRA, has a twitter feed (with the correct logo), but looking at the tweets it is likely a fake. How should agencies relate to this? The police has several twitter feeds it seems. But they are not managed by the agency itself. How can citizens trust the information in these channels when it is difficult to see if they are managed by the agency or some personal initiative?

Recommendations from the government

On March 23 the government published a proposal saying (my translation):

Social media tools create new possibilites for communication with citizens and businesses. The E-government delegation will create guidelines for the public sector use of social media tools.

This means that we will likely see more agencies trying out social media channels in the future.

Do you have more information? Please comment!

The processing code for time lapse captures through the iSight camera with a static centered slit looks like this:

import processing.video.*;

Capture cameraSource;
int capwidth = 1280;
int capheight = 1024;
int outwidth = 1024;

int currentColumn = 0;

boolean keepDrawing = false;
boolean isDone = false;

void setup()
{
size(outwidth, capheight);
cameraSource = new Capture(this, capwidth, capheight, 30);
cameraSource.crop(capwidth/2, 0, 1, capheight);
}

void captureEvent(Capture cameraSource) {
if(cameraSource.available()) {
cameraSource.read();
}
}

void keyPressed() {
keepDrawing = true;
isDone = false;
}

void draw() {
if(keepDrawing) {
if(currentColumn<=width) {

image(cameraSource, currentColumn, 0);
currentColumn++;
}
else {
keepDrawing = false;
isDone = true;
saveImage();
currentColumn = 0;
}
}
}

void saveImage() {
//yeah I know…

String d = String.valueOf(day());
String m = String.valueOf(month());
String y = String.valueOf(year());
String h = String.valueOf(hour());
String mn = String.valueOf(minute());
String s = String.valueOf(second());

save(“scan” + y + m + d + “-” + h + mn + s + “.png”);
}

Via Jim Carlberg’s Finstilt.se.

Processing is an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and sound. Processing is developed by artists and designers as an alternative to proprietary software tools in the same domain.

I have been dabbling with it for a while and have come to like it’s simplicity. The downside is that it sometimes demands a lot from your computer’s processing power.

How it works

The link data for this sketch was collected with a Python script. 250 government web sites were crawled and links to other web sites on the list were recorded. This generated some 2000 links which were fed to the Processing sketch.

The resulting visualization applet can be viewed here. Please note that it will require some processing power to get it running smoothly. You can also view a screenshot of the sketch in action.

Every site starts out as a small disc at the bottom of the screen. More incoming links makes the site grow. Larger sites float to the top of the screen. Smaller sites move out of the way for larger sites. Hovering with your mouse over a site highlights outgoing links from that site to other sites.

Findings

• Most inbound links go to the central government web site www.regeringen.se.
• Clusters are formed for museum web sites that link heavily to each other.
• Java 2D is slow.

The next step is to try PyOpenGL and see if speed can be improved when drawing hese simple 2D primitives. Initial tests looks promising.