Five years ago Tim O’Reilly coined the phrase “Web 2.0”. Now, in this post at TechCrunch, he argues it’s time for “Gov 2.0”.
Gov 2.0 is about more than politicians using Facebook or Twitter or whatever, more than increased transparency, more than the government moving into the ‘cloud’.
Too often, we think of government as a kind of vending machine. We put in our taxes, and get out services: roads, bridges, hospitals, fire brigades, police protection And when the vending machine doesn’t give us what we want, we protest. Our idea of citizen engagement has somehow been reduced to shaking the vending machine…
Imagine if the state government were to reimagine itself not as a vending machine but an organizing engine for civic action…
“In this model”, he argues in a separate article, “government is a convener and an enabler–ultimately, it is a vehicle for coordinating the collective action of citizens… That’s Government 2.0: technology helping build the kind of government the nation’s founders intended: of, for and by the people”.
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