Government social networks - comparative analysis

In the last two years we've seen an uprecedented growth of Gov2.0. One of the most vivid expressions of the collaboration and sharing by governments through the tools of Web 2.0 were social networks of government employees and communities. I am talking about special type of government network that are open for all Internet-users, and in principle, anyone who is interested in Government 2.0 can join these networks.

Today there are 3 networks of the national governments:
American government community Govloop,







Australian public servants and community OZloop,





and Israel public sector social network Ovdeimedina.

Probably, there are more such networks, and if you happen to know them, let me know. But in this post I will relate only to the above-mentioned networks.

Govloop

It was the first soical network of any national government. It was created in 2008, and since then succeded to become a real phenomenon of Gov2.0 in the US and abroad. It created a lot of excitement in the web 2.0 community, and served as an inspiration for other such networks.

Today there are more than 24.000 members in Govloop and 670 different groups. The groups represented on this network are agency or interest-based. The biggest and the most active group is "Government 2.0 Club", with more than 1300 members. Among other active groups with membership of 400 members and more are: Communication Best Practices, Acquisition 2.0, Twitterati, Knowledge Management in Government and many others. Agency-based groups are in general less active, and among the leading groups are State Department, Homeland Security and Department of Defense.

Another interesting thing about Govloop, is that it encouraged government employees from other countries to open national groups on the network. That's why we have there Government 2.0 Australian, Govloop Canada, Brazilian Government 2.0, Government of Israel 2.0 groups.

Govloop is based on Ning platform like other two networks I discuss.

OZloop

Australian public servants social network was created on August 2009. It has 140 members and 17 groups. The most active group is Australian Public Service with 20 members. The territory based groups are still to be expanded.

OvdeiMedina

Israel Public Sector social network, was created also in August 201o. It has very decent membership numbers - 127 people, and 12 groups. The most active groups are agency based: Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Israel Police. Another active group is dealing with Public Diplomacy.

Network creators - great minds think alike...

Govloop was created by Steve Ressler who worked for the US Department of Homeland Security. OZloop was created by Steve Davies from the Australian Taxation Office. I created Israeli network with my good friend Alex Gafni from Israel Police.

When I discovered the Australian network, I was surprised to see that it was created at the same time as Israel's... So may be not all of us are great minds, but Gov2.0 is definitely in the air!