Government Videos Wiki List Experiment

Last year I created a simple Google Spreadsheet (essentially a wiki list) for Canadian public servants to input their organization’s mobile website and/or app so that others could see who was doing what. I made this spreadsheet public, allowed anyone to edit, and housed it under the “mobilegovernment.ca” URL. Since that time, many government folks have let me know that thanks in part to this resource (and a subsequent presentation I put on SlideShare) , they were able to build a stronger case within their own department to address the rapidly evolving mobile space and content consumption habits of Canadians. I’m glad I could be of assistance.

This year,  I have decided to create a Google Spreadsheet (following the same kind of template), for Canadian public servants to input their favourite Government videos that have been created specifically for the web. The URL is “governmentvideos.ca”

Upon creating the spreadsheet template today, numerous challenges popped into my mind, hence why I am calling this an “experiment” at this point. Essentially, the problem is that unlike government mobile apps and websites (which are still in their infancy),  there are now thousands of government videos that have been posted on-line. It would make absolutely no sense and would be of little value to anyone to start entering them all in. Additional reasons for this include:

• Some are wonderful, others horrendous
• Some are long, others are short
• Some are merely recorded interviews and/or presentations
• Some were originally made for TV and then posted on-line
• Some are made in-house , some by professional firms
• Some are useful to niche long-tail audiences, others are useful to everyone
• Some come from larger departments that have multiple videos under multiple playlists
• Some are entirely computer generated and/or animated, others include filming actual people
• Some are original concepts , others have been modelled on previously successful videos of other firms