[OLR] Exercise 9.2 Research and evaluation in Government 2.0

Ever since our state and federal politicians began using tools like Twitter, Linkedin and Facebook, the 'mashup' of social networking with politics was inevitable. Now all over the world there are summits on Government 2.0. In Australia, The Gruen Report is due in late 2009. Here is an intersting audio to explain about Participatory democracy, Web 2.0 and the Government 2.0 Taskforce

Summarise the use of:

1. Wiki drafts of papers for public discussion

Government 2.0 is an attempt to provide more effective processes for government service delivery to individuals and businesses. Integration of tools such as wikis could potentially be used by governments to provide information to people in a manner that is more immediately useful to the people concerned. Consider that governments are generally notorious for bureaucracy. Even simple articles and briefs often take government agencies months to write, when they should take no more than a few days. In effect governments are in the position of trying to provide present day information services using only tools that date back (or predate) the 1970's:

• Circulating drafts for review and comment
  
• Emailing or conference calling
  
• Holding meetings
  

These methods do not take advantage of the collaborative possibilities of the Internet. By contrast, Wikipedia is the seminal example of those possibilities.

A tools like wikis have demonstrated that they can scale up to very large numbers of users. Consider Wikipedia:

• 6 million contributors
• 9 million articles edited together without scheduling meetings, trading emails, or holding conference calls.
• Articles start small and grow organically into authoritative pieces.

Wikis have features that allow contributors to quickly collaborate and develop ideas being discussed:

• A single working copy anyone can edit
  
• A forum to discuss controversial issues
  
• The ability for anyone to revert to previous versions of articles
  
• Email alerts to "watch" articles
  
• The option to "lock" articles so changes require approval

Logen, Coby (2008). How to Make a Wiki-Government. .govWatch. Accessed online here.

2. Twitter in Government

Twitter in government seems like a sound concept because it would provide a way of fostering discussion and awareness of the business of government by citizens and also raising the awareness of government of the mood of people regarding specific situations. Perhaps this could be of more benefit to local members so that they get a better base of knowledge concerning their electorate. However there's a lot of 'noise' out there and many issues get swamped at a superficial 'what people think right now' level. Government isn't just about gauging the mood of the people. It's about leadership and making long term, often unpopular and frequently misunderstood decisions. Twitter's all about 'right now'. Would a government have the courage to follow the 'right course' if all the tweets (a form of polling?) were against that course?

3. Did you see yourself as a supporter of Government 2.0? If so how did you benefit?

This is a tough one. In principle I see many reasons to be a supporter of Gov 2.0 because, at its core Gov 2.0 is about participation, collaboration and efficiency in government (http://www.gov2.com.au/) and Web 2.0 tools do offer technological solutions to do things in new ways and make government more visible and accessible in ways that encourage thought and participation about politics beyond the 3-yearly ''day that you vote / participate' election cycle that seems to define our present democratic involvement.