Uses of Web 2.0 in e-government

From E-Consultation Guide

In her paper at EGOV07, Sarah Fogden of the UK Cabinet Office laid out the two main drivers of transformational government, from the local government white paper. It must be an efficient way of delivering what people and communities want. The Cabinet Office is developing performance targets for customer satisfaction.

So when looking to use Web 2.0 to improve government, there are potential efficiency games, but even more opportunities to respond to citizens and empower their communities. In the words of the Power of Information Taskforce report:

The public sector can play a valuable role in adding expert advice to support discussions online as long as it respects the context of the discussion. This is a culture shift for people who work in public services and for civil servants in particular. The Taskforce makes recommendations to help this culture shift and make more transparent the public sector’s attempts to engage online, which we think public servants should do as a matter of course. ... Now is the ideal time for the public sector to acquire new skills and practices required to follow through the innovative approaches the Taskforce recommends.

Internal knowledge management

• Communities of practice
  • These bring together people faced with the same problems,
  • often from different agencies or departments.
  • They form learning communities, in which one person can learn from the experience of another.
  • They share tacit knowledge, beyond what can be written down in procedures
  • E.g. Dutch police in different forces discuss how to close down a cannabis farm on an e-mail list.
  • E.g. NIPS officers share stories while waiting in the back of a van.
• Web 2.0 technologies can support CoPs.
  • E.g. collaborative notes written by an e-business class at Queen's University Management School.

Inter-organisational joint projects

• Collaborative work, including project planning, budgeting, joint report writing
  • E.g. when setting up shared services
• Technologies: collaborative writing using Lotus Notes or wikiwiki software, CRM and project management portals, Google spreadsheets, version control software (cf. services for software developers at Sourceforge).

Engaging with stakeholders

Public sector contexts include:

• Complaints and compliments
• Public consultations
• Supporting the work of councillors and assembly members
  • e.g. councillors blogs
  • e.g. Irish Parliament's pilot e-consultation on the Broadcasting Bill
• Neighbourhood forums, planning circles, ...
• I.e. every time when government learns from people outside government (-> organisational learning)

To understand this better take a look at:

• Technology matching for E-consultation, which shows how consultation and participation processes can be understood as a mediation process.
• Technology classification gives decision trees to find the best ẗechnology to meet the knowledge management needs of the consulters, and the communication preferences of the consultees.

In the private sector we also find:

• Market researchers analysing postings in on-line communities
  • to get feedback on product or service satisfaction
  • to measure depth of engagement with a brand
    • (from never heard of it, through important for me, to I always tell everyone I meet how good my BMW is)
• Marketers try to stimulate on-line discussion about a product, brand or service
  • Using e-communications to extend the reach
    • Viral marketing, paid postings, PR buzz, text messages
  • and web 2.0 rich media to extend the richness of communications
    • e.g. YouTube videos, Second Life events.
• Better to combine both, setting up an on-line dialogue where customers views are incorporated into new products or channels to build a loyal following (at any price, e.g. Apple iPhone, Ducati).
• Aim for virtuous circles