While the timeframes for developing and distributing publications, media releases, and even website news items is extremely well understood by government departments, often there is a much lower understanding of the level of effort (in time) required to engage communities online via different channels.

Fortunately there are now several guides available to provide insight into the timeframes required and therefore the resourcing a government department may have to allocate to do justice to online participation.

The chart below is from the Museum 2.0 blog post, How Much Time Does Web 2.0 Take?

It demonstrates how much effort out a a week different types of engagement legitimately take - from a Twitter stream (under an hour per week) up to a running a community (over 10 hours per week). Of course if you are doing multiple activities along the line there are some efficiencies - by automatically posting new blog notices to Twitter and a community and by reflecting themes and materials across channels.

Another chart is from Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits can use Social Media, in the post How Much Time Does It Take To Do Social Media?. This discusses online participation by level - from listening (5 hrs/week) through participating (8 hrs/week) up to community building and social networking (20 hrs/week).


My own experience is that I spend around 4-5 hours per week maintaining a (mostly) daily blog - of course as it's my personal blog I do not have to go through multiple approval levels and the level of comments is reasonably low which reduces the amount of screening time (though I'd appreciate more comments).

If your agency is participating online, what has been your experience of managing these channels?

And do you feel that your time is well spent?

eGov AU

eGovernment thoughts and speculations from an Australian perspective
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