@davemosk a few of us have been working on this, Dave. Watch this space.

@lightweight That sounds promising, Dave. I'm going to be helping out with a discussion paper to MBIE on allowing use of social.govt.nz as a domain for this - can we include your work in that paper? @davemosk

Nice one @donkey! I'm talking to political parties about a presence on the Fediverse prior to the coming election. @davemosk

@lightweight That would be awesome! And that’s exactly the sort of thing I’m thinking for the social.govt.nz instance - central and local govt agencies, parties, MPs etc - all on an official govt instance - less need to worry about impersonators etc.

@donkey @lightweight @davemosk I saw a reference in another reply to you about the German Information Commissioner hosting the instance for German government departments. We should consider Archives NZ hosting the NZ government instance so it ensures compliance with the Public Records Act from the start. Since Archives NZ is a branch within DIA it should be able to draw on their capabilities too. cc @jet

@openpolicynz That’s a really great idea - our discussion paper was going to propose having the instance hosted on #CatalystCloud so it remains within NZ borders. Having it actually looked after/administered by Archives is very cool. I’ll add that to the list of ideas. :) @lightweight @davemosk @jet

@donkey @openpolicynz @lightweight @davemosk interesting! Re the scope of what it is used for, there is a thing in here about being party political or not. There’s no way, for example, a political party can show up on a .govt.nz domain. And I assume individual MPs’ social media accounts are treated as political comms rather than the voice of government, whether that makes sense? On Twitter they had the “authorised by” thing yeah?

@jet @donkey @lightweight @davemosk Yes, I’d see a .govt.nz Fediverse instance as being only for public servants and Ministers in an official capacity. Ministers in a party political capacity, and non-minster MPs could be on a Parliamentary instance.

@jet @donkey @lightweight @davemosk However, they’d also need to have pretty tight integration with departments’ records of who is employed by a department, otherwise people could create an account while being employed by a government agency and it would still exist after they left. Would also need to handle people moving to a new job in a different department, so accounts are only temporarily suspended not deleted during such moves.

@openpolicynz @donkey @lightweight @davemosk keep it role based and update the profile fields if needed? It would be quite a change to things now if public servants had a named social media presence. Not commenting on whether that’s good or bad, just saying the norm now is an anonymous department or perhaps function account

@jet @donkey @lightweight @davemosk True - would most likely be agency or function accounts to begin with. I was getting ahead of myself. 😉