Given that Web 2.0 is a term that means so many different things to people, I thought it might be helpful to try and nail down some of the principles that might be critical to Govt 2.0. If nothing else, to serve as a common frame of reference as we start the discussion.

I think that there are (at least) five principles to Govt 2.0 (but I am open to suggestions), which while not direct correlates with O’Reilly’s seven principles, are significantly influenced by his thinking.

The five principles are:

1. Data web
2. Personalisation
3. Open source government
4. Search
5. Authentication

Progress in each of these strands alone would significantly improve the .govt.nz namespace, deliver more value to both agencies and their publics and, importantly, align user experience in this space with best practice on the rest of the web.

Data web

As I have previously noted, the real issue for Govt 2.0 is around the data: who owns it and how is it managed? Microformats, semantic markup in general, and the approach that agency content is a resource to be shared are critical enablers to moving government web interactions beyond the current limited model.

Imagine you are building a new website for your agency. Do you view the content you are publishing (and/or aggregating) as being your agency’s IP, or do you see it as just a part of the wider mosaic, contributing to the whole namespace? If the latter, then you need to build in interoperability, web standards and some forward thinking about how the web might evolve so that the system benefits from your site.

Personalisation

Users across the web expect to be able to tailor their experience to their own requirements. Government is no different. The use of folksonomies, collabularies and the ability for users to create, for example, their own government homepage – to manage different agency accounts from the one place – would be a good indicator of a move towards Govt 2.0.

Ideally, users would also be able to save particular searches (see below), access records of their email, IMs or telephone calls with agency representatives and choose to release (or not) this information to other agencies. They would also be able to sign up for personalised RSS feeds that notified them when their rates/licenses/consultation documents are due. Essentially, enjoy a one-to-one relationship with government as a single entity.

Open source government

I don’t necessarily mean that government will be running on open source software (not a bad thing, in my view) but that individuals, communities and businesses are able to interact with government web applications in ways that are useful to them. So, we build web applications that allow the people who have funded to them to build, deploy and access their own APIs.

Sites like TheyWorkForYou, and MAPLight.org are managing to do this sort of thing almost in spite of the way most government sites are currently built. With a little more imagination, and a lot more structured data, most government content could be accessed in so many more ways: mashed up with maps to provide geographic context/information, syndicated to community built portals to capture information of specific interest to farmers or small business operators, etc. The potential to distill disparate sources down to content interesting and useful to an array of niche interests is just waiting to be tapped.

Where applicable, government could share the APIs with groups to assist them to develop their own. If you want to drive economic transformation, give people the tools to discover information both relevant and useful to them, and give them a way to use that information.

Search

This should really have been higher up in the list in terms of priority, but as part of the narrative it sort of sits beneath the other three. The information must be discoverable. And once it has been discovered, it has to be able to be repackaged according to user interests. So, if I search newzealand.govt.nz for, say, information on a driver license, I should not only see the top returns, but the most followed links, feedback from other users in which pages were the most useful, recommendations from LTNZ about which pages may be of help and perhaps some contextual links to related searches.

Once this is in place, it becomes quite easy to create portals based on vertical or horizontal search. Government won’t need to keep putting up taxpayer dollars for sector or issue related websites, it will all just run off search.govt.nz.

Authentication

All of this, of course, will be pointless unless we can move high-value transactions online. Being able to share my tax returns with a new accountant, or medical records with my GP, stuff that is dependent upon me establishing my identity with the agency and being sure that the party I am about to release my information to is who they claim to be.

We already have a government logon service where you can manage your usernames and passwords for government accounts (or credentials for higher level authentication, such as two-factor). This year will see the pilot of the Identity Verification Service, which will

provide government agencies with a high level of confidence regarding the identity of the online user, while placing people in control of the transaction and protecting their privacy. This is the online approximation of a person presenting a passport or other proof of identity document in-person to an agency.

In many ways authentication is both the culmination of this story and the starting point. If we really want to deliver transformed government to New Zealanders, then adding an identity layer to the Internet here is the first step.

Conclusion

Whether or not I am right about these five principles, what remains abundantly clear is the fact that for government to be responsive, to engage effectively and to deliver value to New Zealanders in the age of Web 2.0 will require a reinvention of the way we think and work.

And, to be clear, this is not about technology: it is about developing solutions for social and governance challenges. The fact that it is happening on the web is just a reflection of the way that our culture is changing. In ten years time, most Kiwis will regard the Internet with the same sense of awe that they regard the television. The question we need to ask is, do we have to wait that long to deliver Govt 2.0?

Photo: tsak_d

Before we get to the report itself, by way of an introduction: if you are not entirely sure what this whole Web 2.0 thing is, then you should probably have a look at this seminal article by Tim O’Reilly, What Is Web 2.0.

Back to the Gartner report. The opening sentence summarizes the nature of the analysts’ thinking and conclusions:

Web 2.0 will affect several industries, but none will feel such a pervasive impact as government.

I would argue that the first half of the sentence is already looking anachronistic (Web 2.0 is not just affecting industries now, it is driving them) and, given this, the second half doesn’t necessarily augur all that well for governments.

Why not? Because most governments are still trying to come to terms with Web 1.0, let alone adapt to the rapidly changing expectations of citizens who are experiencing seismic shifts in personalisation, data control and accessibility in their dealings with Web 2.0 businesses.

And this ‘expectation gap’ will manifest inside agencies as much as it will in their dealings with citizens. I have already posted about the importance of agencies evolving into the sorts of workplaces that match younger generations cultural expectations, but I can’t stress how important this is.

Governments, like every other employer, are desperate to attract and retain quality staff and ensuring that employees work in an environment that is socially and technologically similar to their existing experience of the world is critical. You wouldn’t expect a young public servant to work without a phone, why would you expect them to work in an environment where they can’t IM, blog or collaborate with colleagues on a wiki?

This strikes me as one of the shortcomings of the Gartner paper: there is no consideration of how Web 2.0 technologies will influence the internal processes and cultures of agencies. I would expect that internally driven change was just as significant a contributor to transformed government as changing citizen expectations.

Gartner go on to predict (I believe, accurately) that mashups will provide government with opportunities to operate more efficiently and effectively:

(Examples of mashups) requires governments to rethink the way they make their data and services accessible to external consumers, be they constituents or intermediaries.

This is the real crux of the implementation of Web 2.0 for government: who owns the data? And how do we manage it? I started to cover this when I wrote about microformats, and their potential for government. By making the data available for syndication and reuse, we are essentially saying to people “this is authoritative, go out and use it in ways that will make it valuable for you.” This could mean mashing up geo data with contact details (hCards) and agency address (adr) to provide a map of agency contacts that would be updated in realtime as the respective agencies updated their websites.

As Tim O’Reilly observed in Wired this week:

A lot of people still think, “Oh, it’s about social networking. It’s about blogging. It’s about wikis.” I think it’s about the data that’s created by those mechanisms, and the businesses that that data will make possible.

And the more of that data that is structured, the more that is semantic, the greater the payload of value that government will be able to deliver; both in terms of increased efficiencies and effectiveness, and in terms of opportunities for businesses and communities.

Of course, this requires a fundamental change in the way agencies view the data that they collect and maintain. It amounts to, in many ways, the open sourcing of government. Is that a step that we are ready (or able) to take? Will we have a choice?

The Gartner paper acknowledges this as a risk, stating:

As far as re-intermediation — which is where greatest potential benefit of Web 2.0 may lie — regulatory, privacy and data issues and politics must be considered. Much data that could produce benefits is not sharable. Different jurisdictions are struggling with how to produce the requisite policy/legal changes.

What does this mean for communicators?

The vanguard of Web 2.0 in government is social media. And as communicators we are at the front and center of managing this change process. Understanding social media, and successfully implementing it in your agency, is an important step towards Web 2.0, and it is one that will largely rest upon your shoulders.

We may be only taking the first, tentative steps towards Govt 2.0, but our publics will increasingly expect more personalisation, more responsive and agile government. Our fellow public servants will increasingly expect a work environment that reflects their interests, their networks and ways of communicating with their colleagues and peers. And all of this represents a tremendous opportunity for us to reinvent the way that government serves the people. Who wouldn’t want to be a part of that?

Smart move. Why would you want to cater for your audience when it is the advertisers that are clearly your cherished relationship?

The reason that I bring this up again is a post on Read/WriteWeb that looks at the adoption of Web 2.0 by MSM.

What is clear from the article is, more than anything else, the fact that for the organizations that they looked at (and it is by no means a representative sample), all of them offered RSS feeds. In fact, that was the only point of solid convergence. 12 out of 12 offered RSS feeds, and even those sites that weren’t offering any of the more recent social media services at least offered feeds.

The Bivings Report reaches the inevitable conclusion:

RSS has definitely gone mainstream. For just about any new website, having an RSS feed has become a basic type of feature.

I couldn’t agree more. RSS is no longer an ‘nice to have’ or a tech gimmick on a site — it is a basic constituent of a modern, well-designed and usable website.

The social media services, however, are still maturing. The Herald implemented these features in their rebuild. On most pages there is a bar like the one at the head of this post inviting you to submit the article to social media like del.icio.us and Digg. Scoop recently put Scoop It into alpha, suggesting that the appetite for social media in NZ is enjoying the sort of upswing that we are seeing across the globe; but it is not quite primetime yet.

So, I have two questions for you:

1. Do you use the buttons on the Herald site?
2. Why don’t Fairfax get it?

Realistically, I only expect answers to the first, because I think that there isn’t an answer to the second…

What does it mean for us?

RSS has matured and is now a big part of the game. Once IE7 becomes the ubiquitous browser – and that is probably only months, not years, away – then we are going to see feed stats on all our sites go through the roof.

As communicators, we need to be well ahead of this curve. If you can’t get a reader on your desktop, subscribe to an online one NOW. If you still don’t grasp the whole RSS thing, follow the links on the resources page and get started. You won’t look back.

As the name suggests, it is a wiki for quotes — well, sort of a wiki. That’s right, rather than pay someone to laboriously enter all those quotes into a database, they have decided to harness the power of collective intelligence. So, once you sign up, you can add quotes, tag them and add them to your favoutites.

You can also vote for quotes, which introduces the digg factor, an important element in any social media start-up’s business plan. And, to round out their Web 2.0™ credibility index, they also have a blog and a podcast.

I don’t want to sound too cynical, but do you think that this is really going to take off? To me, it seems a bit too much like a cash-in. Having said that, I have signed up anyway…

…act on your behalf by contacting data hosting services and requesting the removal of any materials that threaten your good social standing. Any web citizen willing to pay ReputationDefender’s modest service fees can ask the company to seek and destroy embarrassing office party photos, blog posts detailing casual drug use or saucy comments on social networking profiles.

My first reaction on reading this was w00t! I’m in the clear you are kidding, right?. Then, upon more considered reflection, I decided they were not and, while RD are unlikely to crack the sort of Web 2.0 jackpot that YouTube managed, they will probably do very nicely preying on that wonderful mix of human frailty that is a combination of gullibility and youthful indiscretion.

We all have had those moments that we would like to forget or, more importantly, have forgotten. Unfortunately, now many of those moments are published on the web, generally courtesy of people we loosely refer to as “friends”. Now, thanks to the good people at RD, you can rest easy, knowing that those pictures of you and your colleague doing the “lambada” at the christmas party will no longer appear when you egosurf.

Apparently, the business case for the firm rests on the interesting statistic that

26 percent of hiring managers say they have used search engines to research potential employees, and one in 10 has looked on a social networking website.

26 percent? I would have thought that would be a conservative estimate. If I was in HR, I would pretty much restrict my quality control to googling – why deal with the mundane (ie, actually reading the rank fiction that is passed off as a resumé or the fulsome praise of an employer who is only too keen to offload a freeloader) when you can cut straight to the tawdry and the scandalous?

Will this service really help anyone? Who knows. Why should we care? It is about reputation management -albeit an odd sort of retroactive variant- and it is a reminder of the changing environment in which we work.

Oh, and for the record, as I have noted before, in the age of Google, once it is posted, it is there for good. So before you hit Enter, make sure that you are happy for whatever it is to stay there for a long, long time…

So how does it impact upon public sector communicators? Or maybe the first question should be, what is it? For a quick intro, read this quickstart guide. Running an RSS aggregator allows you to keep track of multiple websites -and in some cases the discussion threads on those sites- from one application, either on your desktop, or in a web browser.

This means that, rather than visiting 30 or 40 websites and blogs a day, you just open your RSS aggregator and scan through the ‘headlines’ of what has been recently posted to each site [see screenshot]. Clicking on the headline (2) displays the feed item (3) which can be a full text or partial text feed, depending on the source. You can then make an informed decision about whether or not you want to visit the site and read the article.

Trust me, this will save you hours over the course of a week.

Once you have settled on your regular line-up of daily feeds, it means that you can get a real feel for what is engaging the blogosphere at any given time. It also means that you can begin to identify bloggers, commentators, or other media that are relevant to your organisations – people with whom it would be worth your time engaging.

Of course, we are only talking about consuming RSS. You should also be thinking about using it to syndicate the content on your websites (and I think that this was the killer app that Russell was alluding to).

Using RSS, you can syndicate your web content to almost any other website – and we are not talking rocket science here. It would help if your content was well structured and semantically marked up, but given our widespread adherence to the Government Web Guidelines, we should all be in pretty good shape…

This means that, as public sector communicators, we need to stop thinking in terms of publishing to a particular site, and start thinking of publishing content that can be displayed anywhere and used by anyone. Now that is open government.