I think part of the reason that it may have failed to gain full traction is that there seems to be little appetite for real transparency – and the transformational power of real accountability. UK government isn’t used to providing it and UK citizens aren’t used to demanding it.

If Gov2.0 is just another way of saving money – then it fails against its own principles. How and how much public money is spent is absolutely important – but really this is about the inherent value of democracy. If you can’t buy into that it’s just tinkering around the edges.

I think I’ve said this before but Gov is actually doing quite a lot (particularly here in the UK), possibly more than the corporate social responsibility folks at a bunch of our blue chip companies. Tesco might be on twitter but they don’t see them doing much eConsultation around new store openings or where they source their Bananas.

I share the sentiment of my fellow community ambassadors that we now risk neglecting the “traditional” channels in the scale of attempts to divert resources into improving digital ones.

Give me more citizen centric design, now.

Happy Xmas All

RT @davebriggs: Whither government 2.0? (in the UK) [link to post]

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RT @davebriggs: Whither #gov20? (in the UK) [link to post] [beginning to soften my line on this one. Perhaps we just need to do it?]

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Whither government 2.0? (in the UK) [link to post]

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RT @davebriggs: Whither government 2.0? (in the UK) [link to post] < - now with comment from me (once Dave mods it :))

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If that is the case then a term I’ve been playing with in a paper I’m currently writing is ‘microgovernment’, a concept where people drive government rather than vice versa.

It also has the advantage that, as a term, it isn’t a bolt-on to government but represents the fundamental change that is now possible.

Say hi to me via @problybored if you’d like to see a draft of the paper!

There should be a single basket but I don’t believe that Government needs to own it, it just needs to participate in it. Until we can see a way forward with this we won’t get to seriously tackle the issues of identity and accountability that will need accompany the changes.

You touched on this generic issue with you post on ‘tool-specific’ social media sessions. In the particular case of gov2.0 I can’t see what desirable atttributes it brings with it, esecpailly when you look at the era of web2.0 hype (indeed with the open data work governments are showing some ankle on web3 before web2). bill eggers book on web2.0 was mainly what in the uk we would recognise as transformational government.

I speak as someone who has come up with labels in the past (inc transformational government) and learned through experience.

That’s what makes me nervous of the use of such terms more generally. I ranted recently – at http://publicstrategist.com/2009/09/e-government-is-government/ – on my dislike of “e-government” as a word. Ithink pretty much the same objections apply to “gov 2.0″ – it makes all this look as though it is some technocratic sideshow, rather than being about radical change to the whole thing (I am repressing the urge to write “paradigm shift” somewhere in that sentence). Gov 2.0 has a particular further problem because it is, in effect, an analogy: gov 2.0 is to gov as web 2.0 is to web. Which may be powerful shorthand if you know what web 2.0 is, but almost certainly isn’t if you don’t.

That, of course, is not an argument against the usefulness of a collective noun, and it certainly doesn’t counter your very important point that seeing them as a group may be one way we manage the risk of overlaps, gaps and general confusion.

But that still leaves me without an idea of what that collective noun should be.