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Government 2.0 - Fad or Future?

This specialist session looked at the impact of Web 2.0 on the public sector and explored of issue of how government change as a result of the collaborative web and whether it really would change. On the basis of a set of starting propositions, drafted by session organiser and facilitator Martin Stewart Weeks, four distinguished commentators presented their perspective on Government 2.0. Discussions were then continued in a number of smaller subgroups.

Some Starting Propositions  (DOC - 30 KB)

Geoff Mulgan, director of the Young Foundation, suggested that government had always been about power and knowledge and so the collaborative web was a destabilising threat. He saw a lot of potential scope for the impact of the web but thought the final effect was more likely to be around government rather than fundamentally transforming government itself.
Geoff Mulgan podcast – duration 7.22  (4 MB)

Hugh McPhail, E-government Strategy and Policy Manager, New Zealand State Services Commission, saw the key change as being the radical ways in which information was being opened up so that government could no longer function as a gatekeeper, but had to start working in a more participatory way. There was a lot of scope for innovation but the worry was whether government would respond to these changes quickly enough.
Hugh McPhail podcast – duration 13.37  (8 MB)

Joanne Caddy, Policy Analyst at the OECD's Directorate for Public Governance and Territorial Development, emphasised that governments were facing problems that they could not solve on their own – they needed to engage citizens if they were to drive social change. The collaborative web offered many opportunities to do so, but there were significant obstacles – starting with denial – that were holding governments back from grasping these opportunities.
Joanne Caddy podcast – duration 8.00  (5 MB)

Tom Bentley, Executive Director for Policy and Cabinet in the Dept of Premier and Cabinet, Victoria, Australia, was perhaps the most sceptical of the panellists. He wondered how ready government was to change and listed a set of deep-seated forces that he felt would limit moves to a more transparent and collaborative approach.
Tom Bentley podcast – duration 9.45  (6 MB)

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