Your rehearsal of the changes we’ve seen in the past 10 years and the relatively quick uptake, at least in some parts of the public sector, of the new tools of Web 2.0, is a timely reminder that undiluted pessmisim is not warranted. I can go now, for example, to the main website of the Victorian Government in Australia and find, as a matter of coure, a ‘rate this site’ button as well as twitter feeds and a couple of RSS options. At that level, at least, you can’t deny evidence of progress.

So why the pessmism? Well, because there are still levels of resistance to some of the more interesting potential changes that Web 2, especially, could bring about. And it is also still possible to witness discussions about the need for more energetic and sustained reformation in government agencies (structure, systems, skills etc)whihc are full of overblown rhetoric and scant evidence of genuine follow through. I think also too much of the wokr that is being done – like the ‘rate this site’ button and the RSS feed on the Victorian Government home page – comes without any decent analysis of whether or not it is achieving anything. What exactly do users of the Victorian Govt website get from the added features? Is their experience of government and their interaction with the governing process any the better for these relatively superficial additions?

I was part of an wonderful discussion this morning between the Australian Government Task Force on Government 2.0 (www.gov2.net.au) – of which I am a member – and Beth Noveck, author of “Wiki Government” and currently Deputy CTO in the White House for the Obama open and transparent government strategy. Among many notable insights, Beth made the point, in response to a heartfelt question from one of our public service Task Force members about the difficult of overcoming resistance to change inside the bureaucracy, that in a large and distributed enterprise like government, it was always possible to find plenty of people willing and keen to be involved in true, ground-breaking change. The task is to find them, bind them together in new communities of influence and practice and then highlight the great results they achieve. In other words, Beth Noveck’s advice seemed to be to ‘accentuate the positive’, I guess and and the risks of overdoing the pessmism.

Makes sense…

The focus of this post is primarily what was going on in UK central government in the early part of the decade. It’s already a bit hard to remember what life was like back in those dark ages. There were no blogs. Well that’s not true, there were some, but it was a bit like the early days of Yahoo, you could pretty much list them all. I got my first feed reader in 2001, and I was a very early adopter. My Society was still several years in the future. The tools which now make playing games with government data straightforward did not exist. A ministerial blog would have been laughed at; a departmental twitter account would have been unimaginable. There was not much of an external community of interest at all, either supporting or challenging, with people such as Stephen Coleman being more the exception than the rule.

But above all, the complacency and disinterest you refer to was an order of magnitude stronger then than now, in part because it was based on genuine ignorance and the absence of any experience of web services of any kind. This was a time when it was possible for people to have extended conversations about the exotic excitement of having bought a plane ticket online.

I am not for a moment suggesting that the golden age has arrived. My optimism is that the direction of travel is basically the right one and that I cannot see it fundamentally changing. Looking back a decade, we have come a huge distance. Looking back a month or a year, the pace of change remains painfully slow.

We talk blithely about the wonders of co-creation (and I am one of the blithest of the lot!) and then witness the miserable torture that many public servants have to endure as their managers and supervisors seek to stop them doing simple things like blogging from work or getting involved in public discussions about policy or service design.

I think we are miles away from the kind of tectonic shifts in culture, practice and governance that many seem to think we need (and Donald Kettl’s new book is a recent addition to this dispiriting literature) but which few seem either capable or willing to execute.

Mick http://greatemancipator

One possible measure was public value/social capital hence my posting of the ESRC proposal!