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The final post in my series of none scientific reviews of gov20 adoption will focus on citizens and consumers.

It is worth asking friends and family what they think gov20 means to them, and how they think some of the ideas that gov20 puts forwards can help both democracy and individuals. My none scientific research in this area over the last couple of weeks has resulted in a lot of blank looks.

When I look around for examples of government using gov20 services to broad effect there only appears to be a limited set of examples, but a wide array of experimentation.

It is worthwhile highlighting a couple of examples that I thought were interesting.

The first one is simple, I clipped it from my Facebook stream a few days ago. It is a statement put out by whoever manages Obama’s Facebook page. (click to enlarge)

For me the comments say it all. A little over an hour after the article was posted an engaged citizenry, participating in our gov20 utopia had two things to say. “first”, as in I managed to post before anybody else and “you suck” as in, well, whatever complex policy contribution that was intended to provide.

My second example is a post that Stephen Collin’s contributed to the ABC website earlier this week. Those that follow Stephen’s work know that he has spent a long time thinking about gov20 and all that it implies, he has written a lot on the topic, has been very active in making it a reality and is seen as an authority on the topic by many. As you would expect his article is well reasoned and reflects views that many of us who have been working in this area over the last few years would jump to agree with.

As with my first example, the comments on the ABC article tell a story and are worth a careful read. At first glance some of them left me feeling a little defensive, but there is always value is getting past that and instead looking for lessons that we can take away from the responses to the article.

Some examples of how we could interpret the comments on both of these examples (although there isn’t much to work on in #1);

• We might decide that those guys simply don’t get it, they’re not thinking big enough and they lack understanding of the challenges and the opportunities involved. Anybody working with the gov20 ideas knows the value, we can articulate it and we have nothing to worry about. The neophytes making comments on that article are living in the stone age, they need to wake up and smell the coffee.
• We might decide that our key marketing messages for the gov20 need more work. Obviously if the strategy is right it must be the case that we’re simply not articulating it in a form that outsiders can grasp and adopt.
• We might decide that it is worth revisiting some of those early assumptions about organizational change, the role of social media and the need for open data. I’m not suggesting that any of the assumptions are necessarily wrong, but it is possible that we have an incorrect weighting on those topics when balanced against the needs of the wider community.
• We might decide that we have a significant amount of testing to do with “users” (citizens) before we go too much further, it is always possible that a relatively small group of people (call them gov20 enthusiasts) have persuaded themselves that they understand the challenge, fully grasp the role that technology will play in our open and transparent governmental future, and have most if not all of the answers worked out.
• …. and so on.

In many ways I see a reflection of a lesson we learned during some of the early eGovernment projects. We built a number of services in the UK that technologists were very excited about, consumer research that we did after those services had been live for a while told us that most of the electorate just didn’t care. The UK then undertook a combined program of research to help inform the government about what was expected from their online services, and marketing that helped citizens and businesses understand what was being delivered.

As I see it, we have a lot of work to do before citizens start to see some of the ideas put forwards in gov20 discussions as ones that are of substantial benefit to them.

For this post I didn’t bother trying to highlight where I felt citizen and consumer uptake sat on the technology adoption curve. Despite the success of a handful of services, in many ways I think we’re only just getting started.

For the second of my none scientific posts about the adoption of gov20 I thought I would look at the progress that has been made by elected officials and government employees.

This is a little harder to take a single view on, I see dramatically different levels of adoption in different geographies. So, as this is an unscientific study I’ll take the liberty of generalizing.

As with the other segments I think there are a number of distinctly different tracks that we should think about;

1. Politicians using social media to work with their constituents.
2. Politicians and government officials who see the power of open data as a component of their policy making work.
3. Departments and/or government officials who have embraced the idea open data as an important part of their ongoing projects.

My overall view is that it is early days on all three fronts, and some earlier than others.

There are a growing number of examples of politicians and senior officials using social media to engage directly with constituents, over the last couple years we have seen the technologies increasingly used as part of election campaigns, as well as a tool to carry on conversations after an election. Much of this activity has been between a political party (or a US president) and the electorate though, I still only see a handful of elected officials using these tools to perpetuate an ongoing and direct conversation.

Some of these innovators (I mentioned Senator Kate Lundy from Australia or Clare Curran, MP from New Zealand as examples yesterday) will set the stage for what comes next. Their success, or otherwise, with social media will help a broader bench of politicians calculate the risk of following in their footsteps.

I can only find a small handful of examples of my second point for this post, politicians who see the benefit of open data in their policy making activity. I have mentioned one of my favourite examples before on this blog. It comes from Bill English (NZ Deputy Prime Minister) when he talks about something he calls “inside out government”.

As an example, in a speech last year to The Institute of Public Administration in New Zealand, he said; (my highlighting).

A second concept for the future is “inside out government”.

Government holds a wealth of information.  Some of it – quite rightly – is sensitive and access should be strictly controlled – tax records for example.

But in other areas, I see no reason why we can’t turn government inside out, so to speak, and make the same data and information available to those outside of government.

Government can tap wider resources in the community to analyse and use government data to help solve problems and produce insights. A ministerial committee is exploring this concept.

Inside out government also requires government to be open to good ideas from business.

We want to see ideas generated in the private sector and NGO sector genuinely considered and appraised – not simply ruled out on the basis that these sectors might not understand all aspects of government.

To make this approach truly valuable it is important that we are able to analyse not only local data but also compare that data with other international sources. It would be powerful to be able to compare the costs of building a mile of road, managing a hospital bed, operating a prison cell etc. across jurisdictions and then to use the knowledge gained from that to optimize local policy in an informed way. Making this a reality will involve both an evolution in the way that policy makers think, and some solid work by the technology and standards communities to find common ways to evaluate published data.

Finally, while I know they must be out there, I’m struggling to find solid examples (from ANZ) of departments that have embraced the idea of open data as an essential component of their day to day projects. With the current public appetite for open data and the applications that we see spring up every time a new data set is published I am sure it is only a matter of time before we see the topic become an integral part of every departmental project planning process.

Overall, looking at governments use of gov20 technology I still see much of the activity as sitting in the “Innovator” segment of the curve. Lots of work to be done, and lots of opportunity waiting to be tapped.