Dept eyes social media policies

Reports by HELEN TARAWA

Social media and its influence on public service were among the challenges that Pacific Public Service Commissioners discussed this week.
Department of Personnel Management Secretary John Kali told a press conference yesterday that social media was a challenge for the public service and that policies would be developed for guidelines.
“We will be looking at specific issues like impact of social media on transparency and the role of government,” he said
“Social media has been very influential in the way the governments have been run, so as a public service we want to look at how we can develop a policy around those issues.
“Citizen centric policy development, where we want to engage the public in terms of influencing policy, and how we capture the citizen and public perception of the public service.
“We are looking at the role of public servants and what role they must play in the social media.
“These are the perimeters that we must establish and provide some guidelines as public servants,” Kali said.
He said another major concern was service delivery through value and ethics-based leadership.
All leaders of the public service must have strong values and must be ethical in their conduct to be role models in service delivery.
The values include honesty, integrity, accountability, respect responsibility and wisdom which are universal and enshrined in the PNG Constitution.
“We’ve identified those issues as we move forward in addressing social media, gender and violence to remove from the work place,” Kali said.
Samoa Public Services Commissioner Vaosa Epa said the conference looked at ethics-based leadership framework that PNG had developed.
“The values that are being enshrined are going to be applied in all the different jurisdictions across the region as a guide to ethical leadership,” she said.