We have just published an entire spotlight on government and Web 2.0. Through our research positions throughout the year, we have constantly tried to shift our clients' perception of Web 2.0 from its most visible (and somewhat hyped) social and participative dimension to its business impact, in terms of mashups and composite applications.
We have been trying to collapse the multidimensional impact of Web 2.0 into a single, powerful statement, and the closest we have come up with is "Web 2.0 will blur all government boundaries."
Today, governments mostly look at how Web 2.0 can help them better engage their constituents in policymaking, so they are indeed exploring how the existing boundaries between governments, citizens and established stakeholders in policymaking (such as political parties, associations, unions and so forth) get blurred. In fact, it is not the individual citizen's opinion expressed through an e-participation tool or a blog that makes the difference. It is the collective opinion of a group of people, some of whom are also represented by business or consumer associations, parties or other nonprofit organizations, who get together into a transient, virtual community gathering similar opinions about a particular subject. This raises a fundamental question about how loud the voice of such a community would or should be with respect to established stakeholders. Policymaking processes offer multiple opportunities for blurring boundaries, such as using wikis to collaboratively create a draft policy across different minister cabinets or even different tiers of government, to engage virtual communities in the earliest stage of policy design.
However, we believe that the most interesting area of Web 2.0 impact will be service delivery. User feedback and service rating, user-tagged or user-created content, and user-driven service design can have a formidable impact on both improving service delivery and triggering a genuine and sustainable interest in being engaged. The use of mashups and composite applications to allow government services to be accessed (and improved) through nongovernment channels will be very important. If one reflects on the deepest implications, assumptions about which data governments should own or manage and which processes they should really be responsible for get challenged. What if constituents could choose where to store their own personal data, possibly with a service provider that grants them fine-grained control of who can access their data and under which conditions? What if all the discussions about where governments should source their data were challenged by citizens claiming the right of making that choice? In another research note, "The Real Future of E-Government: From Joined-Up to Mashed-Up," we explore how deep the consequences of mashups could be.
This opens a new set of "blurring boundaries" scenarios, between identities managed by government and personal data stored somewhere else, between legal requirements to access data and the right of citizens to retain control, and between the use of data to perform government transactions and the ability of external service providers in different industry sectors to add value to their clients by mashing up that data. Indeed, many claim that privacy laws may make any of these scenarios hardly possible: On the other hand, if one looks closely at what data protection laws really say, many of the constraints that have made data exchange so hard even inside government are a matter of restrictive interpretation and - even more - often an excuse to defend existing turf and boundaries.
Another very interesting area where boundaries will be blurred is within the government workforce. The way case workers will process and solve cases in areas as diverse as human services, taxes and justice will be very different from how it is done today. Social networks inside and outside government will become one of the most important knowledge sources for government workers to process their cases. The boundaries between employees in different departments and - even more - those between employees and the citizens they serve will gradually disappear, and communities holding critical expertise about how to solve cases in different areas will take a leading role in how those cases get processed.
We are completing a survey about the use of Web 2.0 in government to better understand how deeply government organizations are reflecting about the use of Web 2.0.
I'd love to see Gartner's work on Web 2.0 and government. Any chance? Also, what are you seeing/thinking about government's use of virtual worlds. I know Gartner expects much greater use of them, but in what areas and what besides 2nd Life and use of private virtual worlds by the military and intel community is going on?
Gartner notes are available to clients only, but you can find an accurate summary at
http://www.readwriteweb.com...The correct link for the article I mentioned above is:
http://www.readwriteweb.com...
