'Government 2.0' has a little way to go, says the Government

The blogging habits of David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, are well-known. Rather less documented are the Government's - or at least the civil service's - other attempts to embrace the web 2.0 age.

Today the Central Office of Information (COI) - which runs the communications for the whole of the civil service - revealed a little more about how it is attempting to reach the MySpace generation in a speech given by its director of digital media, Jamie Galloway. (Or former digital director. Mr Galloway recently left the organisation after an eight-year stint to set up his own digital agency.)

Among the government schemes about which Mr Galloway spoke  were an instant messaging component of Frank, the drugs advice campaign aimed at young people, which allowed children to install a 'virtual robot' on their phone which would answer drugs-related questions via IM.

He also gave details of a Royal Air Force recruiting drive which involved a serviceman blogging about his experience on the front line in Afghanistan, and - perhaps most innovatively - of a climate change awareness campaign involving a youth-focused virtual world called Dubit.

In the latter, the COI joined Dubit, which is similar to its better-known competitor, Second Life, and 'installed' a virtual glacier. COI representatives masquerading as virtual penguins then set about distributing messages to the world's inhabitants about the perils of environmental degradation. (Are you still with us?) The two-week campaign culminated in the glacier melting and the entire world flooding, which Mr Galloway demonstrated with slides showing a virtual music festival clogged with mud and water - a scene reminiscent of Glastonbury.

"It certainly got the message across," he said.

But, he added, the civil service still had a long way to go before it properly grasped the potential of web 2.0, especially in comparison with the US, where presidential candidates such as Barack Obama had raised vast sums of money by reaching out to the so-called 'long tail' of voters - people who would contribute $5-10 to his campaign - via the web.

"When I joined the COI no one wanted to talk about digital, but now a lot do, and I think you're going to see a lot of the lesson from the US in the past couple of years applied here," he said. "We've had ministers blogging, but gradually more decades-old processes are being turned on their heads by the reality of being able to share information more easily."