Government 2.0 - two cheers for the romantics?

We had a great session on "government 2.0" at the just-completed Nobel Public Services Summit in Stockholm this week.

Speakers included Geoff Mulgan (The Young Foundation, founder of DEMOS in the UK and Tony Blair policy advisor), Joanne Caddy (senior policy analyst at the OECD with a focus on citizen engagement), Hugh McPhail (leader of the eGovernment team in New Zealand’s State Services Commision) and Tom Bentley (senior advisor in the Dept of Premier & Cabinet in Victoria, Australia and former advisor to current UK PM Gordon Brown).  We also had great input from two senior officials from the IT Directorate of the European Commission, Henrik Hololei (Chef de Cabinet for Commissioner Sim Kallas, Commissioner for Administration) and Francisco Garcia Moran, Director-General of the IT Directorate itself).The backdrop for the session was the astonishing rise of social networking and the collaborative Web, which is generating some lively debate about the impact of the new tools of so-called Web 2.0 on the business of government.  Politicians making announcements on YouTube and setting up their own pages on MySpace or Facebook, government agencies discovering the joys of wikis and even, with some trepidation, blogs and online forums – there is no shortage of evidence of interesting experiments with these new capabilities.

But we started with the view that it remains an open question as to whether and, if so, exactly how this more collaborative phase of the Internet is going to change the structures and processes of government and the way politicians, bureaucrats and citizens behave and interact. 

More to come on key issues, insights and implications...