Government 2.0 – From E-Government to E-Democracy
From Throwingsheep
Much of the debate about the Web 2.0 revolution – including in Throwing Sheep in the Boardroom -- has focused on its impact on social interaction, consumer markets, and organizational behavior. The Web 2.0 e-ruption is now coming to the way governments interact with citizens – or Government 2.0. When the Web first emerged, governments began following the trend already under way in business, and thus seized on the Web as a conduit for “pushing” information at citizens in a top-down dissemination model. Early e-government efforts mainly involved managing the websites of state agencies, making documents available online, publicizing public sector services, providing practical information, posting press releases, and so forth. A great deal of the government information was put online. Much of it, however, had an unmistakable “PR” spin, such as biographical details about elected officials and positive accounts of their many good deeds. Citizen feedback or input was rarely, if ever, actively solicited. This “Web 1.0” e-government phase nonetheless gave citizens unprecedented access to vast amounts information that previously had been virtually impossible to obtain.
Early thought leadership on e-government was coming from the private sector, too, especially big management consulting firms. Accenture, for example, started publishing e-government reports in 2000 and was soon issuing country rankings based on performance benchmarks in the provision of online services to citizens. Accenture’s annual e-government ranking was topped annually -- with the exception of high-performing Singapore – largely by industrialized liberal democracies like Canada, United States, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, United Kingdom, and Japan.
The tiny Baltic country of Estonia, with a population of only 1.4 million, deserves special mention for its commitment to e-government. Estonia, in fact, has elevated e-government to the more ambitious goals of “e-democracy” and “e-society”. In 2000, the Estonian parliament entrenched free and universal Internet access as a constitutional right. The same year, government cabinet meetings switched to a paperless system using a Web-based document system. As a joint INSEAD/World Economic Forum case study on Estonia’s e-government initiative noted: “E-leadership has proven to be instrumental in helping Estonia through the painful transition from centralized planning to the model of modern governance it is today…This is especially remarkable when one notes that the nation was ruled by foreign powers – Denmark, Germany, Sweden, and Russia – for centuries. The merger of e-leadership and political vision has been one of the critical factors in its economic growth, the spreading of democracy and its resulting accession to the European Union.”
While e-government policy fashion produced some outstanding examples like Estonia, most state-sponsored initiatives were focused on improving efficiency of service provision -- mainly in bureaucratic procedures like car registration, passport applications, birth certificates, building permits, and the like. Many of these e-government initiatives were remarkably successful. The U.S. government site, Gov.com, was – and remains – a model of open-access information policy for an entire citizenry. Still, government websites were mainly posting and processing information, not empowering citizen participation. They were stuck in Web 1.0 think.
It didn’t take long, however, for Web 2.0 evangelism in the corporate world to bring the public sector into the picture. In the United States, the most articulate e-government vision came not from the public sector, but from a Silicon Valley brain trust inside Cisco Systems. In 2004, the Cisco Internet Business Solutions Group published an e-government manifesto titled The Connected Republic: Changing the Way We Govern. The authors confidently stated that virtual networked organizations promised to take government back to pure forms of democracy known in ancient Greek city-states so that citizens can “reconnect with each other, with their elected leaders, and with their public institutions.”
The Connected Republic described its guiding principle as small pieces, loosely joined, a reference to Cluetrain Manifesto co-author David Weinberger’s book of the same title. The Connected Republic authors shared Weinberger’s vision of “a world in which meaning and value increasingly derive from the ability to connect people, ideas, and organizations in new patterns of communication and collaboration. This implies a radical shift away from hierarchy and centralized control.”
The pragmatic dimension of the Connected Republic vision was pure Web 2.0. Its action plan was based on constructing government as a “Networked Virtual Organization” operating according to three imperatives: using networks as platforms for collaboration and creativity; making the best use of expertise by “empowering the edge”; and harnessing the “power of us” to create knowledge, solve problems, and deliver better services. The models for networked platforms were GoogleMaps, YouTube, MySpace, and Flickr.
“Grasping these opportunities is not going to be easy,” acknowledged the Connected Republic authors. “The scale of the transformation is huge. Furthermore, it involves not just organizational change, but the development of new and different cultures. As the e-government project has illustrated, there are limitations to the speed with which major change programs within government agencies can be carried out.”
In Britain, former Prime Minister Tony Blair put technology at the centre of his boldly announced “transformational government” policy. The UK’s transformational government initiative claimed to put citizens, not bureaucracy, at the centre of an IT technology-driven reform aimed at improving efficiency. In announcing his vision in 2002, Blair called for “a new relationship between citizen and state”. Yet when the UK e-government initiative was finally spelled out in a Cabinet Office report in 2005, it was hardly a revolutionary e-government vision based on citizenship participation. It was a nuts-and-bolts approach based on harnessing IT tools to maximize the efficiency of what Blair called the “business of government”.
The UK’s technology approach to e-government came with the usual hype, spin, and window-dressing. The centerpiece was the government website DirectGov, launched in 2004 as a portal to all UK government information and services. The Blair government also created a new cabinet portfolio held by a Minister for Transformational Government. In 2008 the minister, Tom Watson, favorably compared Google to the Great Library of Alexandria in 300 BC.
The UK e-government initiative, despite some successes, has been given a mixed report card. The DirectGov portal was mocked by e-government activists for its poor search engine capacities, and they even launched their own site, dubbed “DirectionlessGov”, powered by Google. The criticism appeared to confirm the belief that governments are notorious for overspending on under-performing software. As The Economist noted in early 2008: “The story of e-government has been one of quantity, not quality. It has provided plenty of reason for skepticism and not much cause for enthusiasm. Whereas e-commerce has been a spectacular success, transforming industries as diverse as travel and book retailing, e-government has yet to transform public administration.” The British government, added the magazine, had wasted $4 billion over the previous seven years on e-government projects that were later cancelled and written off.
We would like to learn more about concrete case studies of e-government in action – its successes and its failures. And most importantly, what are the factors behind its success when it works, and what the pitfalls are when e-government falls short or fails abjectly to meet its goals.
