Rialtas.net – Government 2.0

Very interesting article by Florence Olsen (FCW) on the District of Columbia’s adoption of Web 2.o technologies. I have excerpted some highlights here but please read the full article

Link to the original article

The District of Columbia’s 33-year-old chief technology officer, Vivek Kundra, wants to bring government procurement into the world of wikis and YouTube videos

The test case is fairly straightforward. The city needs a vendor to build a 100,000- square-foot evidence warehouse for the police department, so as always, it issued a request for bids. But then it gets more interesting.

The city also created a wiki to host the solicitation documents. Along with the request for bids, the wiki has an interactive question-and-answer section and a link to complete video coverage of a presolicitation conference for potential bidders. The video link takes bidders to social-networking Web site YouTube…

..Kundra belongs to an emerging generation of government leaders who want to make government more transparent and are comfortable with a collaborative management style. Policy experts say that solutions to major national and global challenges cannot be found without collaboration among federal, state, local, nonprofit and private organizations…

…Should other CTOs and chief information officers worry about Web 2.0 and the increasing irrelevance of traditional government bureaucracies? The answer depends on how leaders respond to those trends, said Frank DiGiammarino, vice president of strategic initiatives at the National Academy of Public Administration.

“I cannot conceive of a single traditional government function that won’t be affected,” said Lena Trudeau,NAPA’s program area director for strategic initiatives.

…NAPA’s initiative will create a community of government leaders at all levels to share new collaborative approaches to governing.

The Environmental Protection Agency is a founding member; the Office of Management and Budget and CIO Council are also involved.

…Public policy experts at NAPA and Government Futures view Web 2.0 technologies as necessary, though not sufficient, for solving some of those national and international problems. And they agree that CIOs should not be afraid of the interactive Web, which includes technologies such as wikis, blogs and social-networking sites such as YouTube.

“There’s no controlling it, and if you’re spending all your time and energy trying to control it and centralize it, you’ve already lost,” Trudeau said.

NAPA officials want the Collaboration Project to be a proving ground for using the interactive W eb for innovative approaches to governing. The project will try to answer questions that government leaders should be asking, DiGiammarino said….

…By bringing together leaders who are experimenting with the interactive Web, NAPA can accelerate its adoption among other government leaders, DiGiammarino said. “We think that leaders who aren’t looking at this are missing out and are not leading.” …

New Paradigm’s (a Toronto think tank) leaders see four converging trends with the potential to transform government as we know it.

• The availability of Web 2.0 technologies as a platform for institutional collaboration.
• The coming of age of the Net generation, the first generation to grow up using digital technology.
• The nearly universal use of social-networking sites by college-age students.
• An organizational revolution based on collaboration that extends beyond traditional organization boundaries…

…Washington’s chief technology officer said CTOs and CIOs should play a leading role in the transformation of government. “Part of a leader’s job is to find an innovative path,” Kundra said.

Traditional CIOs will think they must establish a new security policy and a new governance body to oversee their agency’s use of interactive Web technologies. “We did the opposite,” Kundra said. “We asked, ‘Which policies need to be changed to enable this?’”

Link to the original article