While no central guidelines for the use of social media by Danish civil servants are required - blogged on 16 June 2010 (by Morten Meyerhoff Nielsen) – the USA taken a different but not an unfamiliar route to Denmark.

The US approach:

With the aim of supporting the government mandate to make Federal Government more effective and efficient through information technology, the General Services Administration (GSA) in early-2010 launched the FedSpace initiative through its Office of Citizen Services (OCS).

Specifically FedSpace springs from President Obama's Open Government Memorandum and Open Government Directive which direct Federal Agencies to increase collaboration within organisations and between them.

To meet the objectives of the Open Government Directive discussions in January 2010 led to the development of a secure intranet and collaboration workspace for Federal employees and contractors FedSpace is designed to be "for Feds by Feds" enabling civil servants to work collaboratively across Federal agencies, through Web 2.0 technologies like file sharing, wikis, a government–wide employee directory, shared workspaces, blogs etc.

According FedSpace itself the initiative is inspired by past Federal successes such as Intellipedia, Spacebook, and MAX Federal Community, as well as the benefits that commercial and non-profit organisations have incurred through similar collaborations.

FedSpace specifically aim to improve business processes, increase cross–government collaboration, and drive innovation and discovery. This is facilitated by allowing Federal employees and contractors to:

• Share ideas, best practices, and knowledge
• Connect with other Federal employees
• Collaborate on projects

The benefits hoped for including:

• Provision of a usable, useful, and compliant collaboration space enabling intra- and inter-agency teams and small agencies (often with limited options/space) to collaborate
• Community building, increase collaboration, assistance with questions
• Solve everyday problems such as large file transfers, coordinate meetings across work groups or provide remote access to work

The Danish approach:

While the 15 June 2010 announcement by the Danish State Employer’s Authority (an agency within the Ministry of Finance) that there currently is no need for additional central guidance governing the use of social media by public sector employees. This implies a continuation of existing guidelines governing civil servants right to express their opinion in a private capacity whether through traditional channels or social media such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs and debate fora. But it does not mean Danish civil servants do not have a collaborative for intra- and inter-organisational projects. Launched in late 2009, by the National IT- and Telecom Agency, Digitalisér.dk is the new common entrance to the digitization of all authorities, suppliers and others who wish to participate in the development of the Danish information and knowledge society. Digitalisér.dk therefore is designed to make it faster, easier and more enjoyable for you to share and find relevant ICT tools and resources.

Based entirely on open source code, Digitalér.dk is the single entrance to public IT architecture, standardisation, digitisation, innovation and development. Any private or public sector employees - or citizen – have access and can contribute and engage in dialogue and cooperation with other interested parties on a voluntary basis.

To ensure user-friendliness Digitalisér.dk is organised in different searchable dimensions with resources and tool following the criteria that makes sense in different contexts, and to enable both the resource owner and other users to add mark-up and descriptions - combined with automatic mark-up.

Digitalisér.dk thus emulate social media and other Danish and international digitisation websites, news media and applications with all relevant content accessible through the browser, RSS feeds and web services. In addition users are encouraged to comment on the features and structure of the forum for future improvements.

In conclusion:

Both FedSearch and Digitalisér.dk share a number of similarities. These include inspiration by other fora for intra- and inter-organisational collaboration, social media and Web 2.0 tools. What the two initiatives also share is the encouragement of civil servants to openly discuss issues and potential solutions across organisational divisions to ensure a more efficient and effective in the public sector.