Gov 2.0 – nothing new under the sun.?
Having watched the fuss and momentum that now propels any latest fad Gov 2.0 is the current vogue theme for the analysts and industry watchers to postulate on. Well in that case here’s my own take.
The concept of 2.0 obviously derives from the next evolution of the internet – in particular the participative aspects of the web. Definitions, there are many go back as far as 2005, but the areas that are of interest to government are those which allow deeper interaction with citizens, gathering and making sense of opinions and leveraging the social tools evolved to enable peer – peer discussions on in addition as well as top down engagement between government and citizens.
The political blog is now mainstream in the UK, from only 2 in 2003, nearly all national elected officials have blogs, and the first ‘blog scalp was reported by the BBC in 2008. At a more local level we have still to see how the political web will evolve but it could be a badly needed link to restore the level of engagement around local democratic issues which is often much less active than those at national level.
One place close to my heart is Scotland where with the re establishment of the Scottish Parliament 1999, which was the first state opening of parliament to be webcast live – not just as a gimmick but through a desire to be as close the the people as possible, which was the aim of the parliament before its dissolution in the 1707 act of Union.
Since the opening, like many parliaments now webcasts of proceeding and debates are part of the normal course of output from the chambers and halls at Hollyrood. Another 2.0 first from the same body was what was known as the e-petitioner system, effectively an online forum to allow the public to petition parliament and take part in opinion shaping and was awarded a good practise award from the EU in 2005.
Another online community first from Scotland was the development of the National Youth Portal YoungScot, which is an extension of an ‘offline’ community organisation to promote social development healthy lifestyles and financial responsibility to the young aged 11-26 group. Advanced in its day the site allowed for regional subsites allowing young people to take control of content they want to share amongst their local community, as well as personalisation and blogging.
Further afield we have cited the communities of StMary in Jamaica with new technology models for delivering web based information and Waterloo in Belgium with its city TV service.
Whist these early 2.0 initiatives have showed the value and use of embracing the next generation of web based technology they share one common constraint – they were all government initiated projects to extend e-government to beyond the transactional in to the more social world.
I was discussing this with a colleague in South Africa last week whose view was that web 2.0 will be as fundamental as the mass availability of the Personal Computer itself. Following his analogy if 1.0 was the development of the technology and 2.0 is the democratisation of it – then we are more likely to be just at the beginning of the phase, where to echo Andy Warhol’s 1968 prediction on the media that “one day everyone will be famous for 15 minutes”, then with Web 2.0 who knows how many famous people there could be.
Certainly it positions e-gov technology as one dimensional, transactional and top down, and fortunately reflects the very necessary social and participative dimension that fundamental to any healthy system of political accountability. We have seen early impacts at a National level , in particular the Obama campaign has been much commented on, however my greatest interest is how we can leverage these tools to affect the local public policy and services that we use every day. That would be a real 2.0 change.
