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.