Who leads Gov 2.0

May 30, 2010

David Osimo,  who has been mentioned here before as a colleague of Professor Paul Foley, has made an interesting observation or two on his blog – Benchmrking e-government – web 2.0. The first is that e-government or Gov 1.0 was techie-led and hence failed for that reason. He is concerned that what he describes as policy wonks lead Gov 2.0 and it will fail due to them not being the general population. His big hope seems to be that the techies, wonks and hippies will take over the world.

I think I have to disappoint David, the world is full of Bart Simpsons and we have to create tools that they will want to use. Failing that we still have to employ the channels that Barts want to use.

In fact, I see the outcome as a combination of both and there will still be a big chunk of people out there who won’t, can’t or don’t.

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E-government dependencies

September 20, 2009

Computer Weekly of the 15th September 2009 includes a piece by Ian Grant on Dr David Osimo’s presentation to the European Network and Information Security Agency summer school under the title “E-government success depends on external expertise”

Coincidentally, Dr David Osimo is a managing partner at tech4i2, a consultancy founded by my friend Professor Paul Foley, formerly of De Montfort University which examines a range of practical issues around electronic government, so I was interested to read it.  Especially as I was attending a meeting with members of the Local CIO Council at Sunningdale on the subject Public Sector Network (PSN) at the time.

Osimo points out that ICT has not fundamentally changed government in Europe with 50% of services fully interactive and only 9.3%  of citizens using them. The answer to which he sees as Web 2.o solutions being delivered by people outside of government, my favourite of his examples being Patient Opinion.

He then goes on to propose a model for Tao government, with which I have no arguments but rather than being anything “techie”, this is a change to democracy and government as we’ve known it and, without a revolution, I don’t see it becoming much more than a facade that citizens will soon tire of.