Al Gore addressed the San Francisco audience at the Web 2.0 Summit with an urgent appeal to assign a purpose to Web 2.0 tools. His address focussed on three themes:

* the democracy crisis: television has removed the democratic view of truth, and interactive Web TV – (Current tv) has the potential to restore it.
* the economic crisis: how to stimulate the economy by undertaking a 10 year project to transform the economy with a national infrastructure project aimed at eliminated America’s dependance on foreign oil by focusting on 100 % renewable and “0 carbon” power sources
* the climate crisis: how to as Gore said, “use Web 2.0 for organizing an imminent rescue of the earth’s climate balance which is now in great jeopardy”

Gore began by addressing Web 2 Summit Attendees, “The election of Barrack Obama would not have been possible without you, the empowerment of individuals to use knowledge as a source of power that has come with Internet.” Gore was referring to the proliferation of blogs and social commentary including the interactivity or user-generated content, social networking and new collaborative projects like Current.tv ‘s interactive projects with Digg.com and Twitter.com to “Hack the Debates” and provide interactive election night coverage on cable TV and the Web.

Web 2.0 has given us all kinds of power to do “gee-wiz” and “wiz-bang” stuff but according to Gore, Web 2.0 is largely operating without a clear purpose. His presentation was a call to the social media community to use Web 2.0 tools to restore democracy and take on global challenges.

 Read full post

See also one of my earlier posts on Dail and Seanad Eireann Webcasts-  Just add Twitter..

Quebec’s open-source software association is suing the provincial government, saying it is giving preferential treatment to Microsoft Corp. by buying the company’s products rather than using free alternatives.

The lawsuit by Facil was lodged with the Quebec Superior Court on July 15 and made public on Wednesday. In it, the group says the provincial government has refused to entertain competing bids from all software providers, opting instead to supply public-sector departments with products bought from proprietary vendors such as Microsoft and Oracle Corp.

Government buyers are using an exception in provincial law that allows them to buy directly from a proprietary vendor when there are no options available, but Facil said that loophole is being abused and goes against other legal requirements to buy locally.

“It shouldn’t be the rule,” Facil president Mathieu Lutfy told CBC News. “It goes against the public markets policy of the government, which requires them to stimulate competition and look for local alternatives. It’s really an absurdity.”

Between February and June, the Quebec government spent $25 million on software from Microsoft, Facil said. The group estimates the government is spending more than $80 million a year on licences for Microsoft’s Windows Vista operating system alone…

…Facil said the provincial government, as well as its federal counterpart, is woefully behind the rest of the world in terms of adopting open-source software in the public sector. Governments around the world are looking to lower their costs and reliance on specific software makers. France, for example, migrated more than 400,000 public-sector employees to open-source software in 2006, while the Netherlands recently banned the use of proprietary products in government.

“A strategic free software utilization in public administration could create thousands of jobs as well as a significant decrease in software licensing costs,” Facil said in a press release. “However, Quebec’s public administration refuses to even consider and evaluate these options.”

Read entire article..

recounting how he recently attended a meeting of four graduate students and four executives from a provincial Crown corporation. The topic was e-government and how Web 2.0 can improve customer and employee engagement and thus improve performance. The discussion was lively…

Students left impressed with the executives’ knowledge and usage of such terms as wikis, RSS feeds, and other buzzwords of the day; the managers, in turn, appreciated the insight and enthusiasm of the students, eagerly awaiting their analysis and eventual recommendations.

Such is the ideal scenario of e-government and public sector renewal – senior managers open to change, willing to listen, and prepared to empower younger workers within their organizations to lead renewal efforts aimed at the nexus between digital and organizational innovation. Such is a key to both government relevance and renewal in the coming decade.

Conversely, a more ominous scenario may be taking shape, one driven by widening concerns about a massive exodus of the senior management cadre across the federal and most provincial governments. Such departures, according to some, can only mean a critical loss of talent, knowledge and organizational memory at a time when the public sector confronts increasingly complex and managerial challenges…

Governments are thus beginning to at least consider the prospect of incentive packages for people to stay (a dramatic reversal of the mid-1990s program review era). New mechanisms, such as external audit committees (called for by the Federal Accountability Act) will also provide venues for many retired senior officials to exercise influence…

…Web 2.0 is a mystery for most senior officials in government today, a necessary evil for a smaller group of architects responsible for e-government generally and service delivery especially. No doubt, there are even a few techno-champions in the midst of this latter segment, social innovators determined to swim upstream since the public sector mindset toward embracing new technologies is mainly incremental: study, pilot and carefully roll out modest changes while doing what one can to minimize risk.

Although there are good reasons to emphasize stability and caution in a public sector realm involving partisan politics and critically important services and programs, the dilemma faced by governments is how to balance such continuity with an intensifying need for more radical innovation.

Web 2.0 personifies the latter, and especially the spreading culture of personalization, instant communication and speed. Witness Robert Reich’s new book entitled Supercapitalism, or Michael Hirschorn’s observation in a recent issue of The Atlantic that his six-year-old son cannot understand why a song heard on the radio cannot be instantly replayed.

Read the full post here..

Cambridge, Maryland recently played host to a panel discussion involving the United States, the U.K., New Zealand and Canada (at the Interagency Resources Management Conference) , countries that it should be apparent from reading this blog, are all leading the way in the adoption of new technologies in improving government and enabling e-democracy.

From the FCW article

“It is Government 2.0, not ‘Web 2.0,’” said John Sullivan, the United Kingdom’s chief information officer, at the conference

The reason to make the distinction, is that the collection of tools that people think of as being part of the Web 2.0 family are tools, he said. Government 2.0 is a business approach revolving around the idea of opening the workings of government more directly to citizen involvement and input. How a government organization accomplishes that might or might not involve Web 2.0 technologies, he said.

All of the countries involved in the discussion have taken significant steps. In the U.K., citizens have the right to petition the prime minister’s office on any issue, Suffolk said. Now they can do it online. In New Zealand, the government created a wiki so that citizens could offer their opinions on the rewriting of a longstanding law, said Laurence Millar, New Zealand’s CIO.

The wiki drew much larger response than earlier efforts to solicit comments on social networks Facebook and MySpace, he added. The ability to build directly on what others have said seemed to make the difference.

Karen Evans, administrator of e-government and information technology at the Office of Management and Budget, said the overriding goal of Government 2.0 should be “taking government back to the citizens.”

However, there remain some difficult issues, Millar said. One is the trend toward incivility among Internet posters. Shielded by the anonymity of an alias, some people choose to launch profane personal attacks rather than contribute to reasoned debate.

“You can get some fairly vicious comments made,” he said. “We’re seeing maturity on some sites, but we’re still seeing a lot of the infantile invective that bedevils us.”

FCW Article

Interagency Resources Management Conference

During the discussion Nine themes emerged:

1. Self organisation
2. Youth
3. What should governments do?
4. The Body Politique
5. Open APIs for Government
6. Levels of Government.
7. Past technological paradigms
8. What does geo-spatiality mean to government?
9. If there really is a new paradigm in government emerging – a government 2.0 – how can such a change occur?

Don blogs about the discussion in Canada’s Globe and Mail Newspaper (last Saturday 26th January 2008)

Read the full blog entry 

Governments have been taking tentative steps towards establishing a presence in the virtual world. And while the business case may yet to be proven, there is potential for the public sector to utilize virtual applications such as Second Life, says analyst Alison Brooks.

Second Life is the increasingly popular online universe created entirely by its “residents”.

Brooks, senior analyst for government insights at Toronto-based IDC Canada, says that there’s some piloting of Second Life going on across the world with the U.S. government using it for immigration and educational forums. “The Center for Disease Control uses it as an educational tool,” she says.

Brooks says that governments are never usually the first to get into the game or adopt a technology, and tend to hang back and pick up something that’s already been tried and true, so it will take time for governments to move into the virtual world.

Link

The Canadian government is scrambling to deal with social networking and other Web 2.0 technologies that are spreading like wildfire across the nation, particularly amongst young users. Some say social media can revolutionize government communications, while others say they are enormous time-wasters.

Ontario’s position

Ontario’s recent ban of Facebook and YouTube for government staffers was a play for time, explains Karl Cunningham, head of e-government at Ontario’s Ministry of Government Services (MGS).

“We’re in the process of developing a comprehensive Web 2.0 strategy,” he says. “We anticipate doing a review of policies and procedures, likely for the summer of 2008, as we go through an exploratory process.” Although the current policy considers the use of social networks for personal reasons on government systems as inappropriate, it does recognize and allow access if there are legitimate business reasons, he adds.

Link

Social networking tools, like wikis and blogs, will have a place in what the CIO of the Government of Canada is calling a paradigm shift towards a Government 2.0 workplace. It’s all about changing the way people work and collaborate, with Web 2.0-based technology enabling this transformation. Ken Cochrane recently sat down with Intergovworld.com editor Mari-Len De Guzman to share his thoughts on the changing face of public service, the aging workforce, and government’s green initiatives.

Q: A major theme at the GTEC 2007 conference is the government’s shift towards what’s called Government 2.0 and a significant component of that is transforming the workplace. What do you see are the biggest hurdles to attaining these goals of transformation?

A: Government 2.0 is really a concept; it’s a substantial shift from where we are to a different mode of operation. The reality is we are already starting to move toward that direction. Government 2.0 is about a number of things: it’s about the right environment; it’s about the right tools; it’s about the right management. There are some key challenges, and one of them is that we don’t just focus on technology, we focus on people and culture and to operate more effectively as an organization. We really need to focus on how we work together, how we use the tools in the workplace more effectively.

One of the things we’re doing is we’re using some of the Web 2.0 or social networking tools to help us solve problems in a very interactive fashion. So trying to get (staff) to use social networking software like wikis and blogs is difficult. I think our challenge is to get people to work with tools differently, to collaborate in a different fashion.

Link