Do you want control, a megaphone or real participation?
Early eGovernment history is littered with examples of implementations by departments who were struggling to work out what it meant to provide an online service.
Many of those early sites did little more than provide you with a form that you could download, print, and then drop in the regular mail once it was completed. Others needed you to go and visit a building to pick up a password before you could go online… and so on.
Much of the gov20 activity on the web today feels pretty similar, but as I have mentioned before has the added complexity of an extra layer of participating stakeholders in the form of citizens and businesses.
There is a phenomenal amount of discussion about the high level of participation citizens might enjoy in a gov20 world, yet when look at some of the early projects neither government nor citizens seem to be heading in that direction.
From the side of the citizens I’m witnessing a push for more control of their elected officials and civil servants. As an example, a group called Sunlight Labs are running a program that they call “Apps for America”. It is a terrific program, encouraging developers to build tools that use the increasing amount of data that is being published on data.gov to enrich their civil experience.
There are some fantastically useful apps that are appearing, but the type of functionality that is offered by those tools tells an underlying story about how people are perceiving value in the data that is being published. Many submissions appear to be tools that will ultimately offer the public more control over their government, not necessarily mechanisms to participate in their government’s processes.
Trending officials voting patterns, monitoring their expenses, looking at who they meet with and how they are connected with external organizations… all useful stuff, but not exactly participation.
From the other side of the fence, the government side, there are equally good examples of a lack of two way communication. In many cases departments have not yet managed to muster the resources or design the processes that will be needed to really take advantage of bi-directional participatory gov20 tools.
Instead we see these tools used as huge online megaphones, shouting information out to as many people as possible while spending very little time listening to what those people have to say in return.
Of course, as with many issues that governments have to solve, there is no simple solution. In the example of the Whitehouse twitter feed, just how would you listen to almost a million voices all shouting back to you at once.
Over time, as both sides begin to see the real value in participating together on day to day issues, I’m confident that we will start to see real solutions to these challenges, but for now at least we appear to be some way away from realizing the goals that are front and centre in gov20 discussions and planning…
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I think you’re right on target with your discussion, as well as with your optimism.
A typical social media adoption chart shows broadcasting first, then slowly developing a way to actually discuss and engage.
That’s definitely the way it’s happening at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. We have a range of projects underway, some of which are broadcast and other, newer ones, which are more 2-way.
I’m confident, like you, that’s a one-way street and we’ll see more and more true engagement over time.