Government 2.0 Trends
Last week I was invited to be a panel on Government 2.0 and what it means in the Indian context. Government 2.0 has become one of the new buzz words specially with the Web 2.0 tools becoming ever popular in way ICT dominates lives of people. When you interact with different people, as was even the case with the panelists, you find that people associate different things with Government 2.0. This is also in line with the changing paradigm of Government and Governance itself. Governments today are becoming more connected and open. From an objective of delivering public services to citizens the goal today is more on improving efficiency and effectiveness with a focus on outcomes. With the greater use of Public Private Partnerships for Government projects, increasingly there is more synergy between the Public and the Private Goals. There is a transformation happening in the way Government engages citizens also. From a scenario, where the prime focus was on delivering services to citizens and making information available to citizens through portal and RTI, the shift now is engaging citizens proactively in the process of policy formulation.
Such a shift in Government’s role is part of the global trends of Governments using citizens knowledge, expertise and ideas to ensure that the right policies are formulated and all concerns are addressed. The role of engaging citizens in oversight and accountability is becoming overarching. Web 2.0 tools are enabling Governments to benefits from getting information promptly and taking the right action. In San Francisco, the City Hall can get an instant report on an overheated train car from a citizen through an application called SeeClickFlix. Cities across the world are releasing more and public information to the web and mobile application developers are creating “mash up” applications to make it easy to use. This has a great potential in ushering a new era of grasssroots democracy. This has led to redefining the role of a citizen in a Gov 2.0 world. It offers a way to bring in true participative democracy with the citizens having a say in how their tax money is being spent. In Washington, the DC 311 i Phone application allows users to take photos of graffiti, potholes, etc., and send them to a city database that straightaway sends teams for the various work requests. The photos are linked to a GPS location so that officials as well as other citizens can see the problem. The potential of such an application with regard to non functional signal lights, missing manhole covers, overflowing garbage bins in our country is immense. It can really enable municipal corporations to focus more on rectifying the faults rather than finding the faults.
However, the role of a citizen in today’s world can be more than a mere fault finder. There has to be a more positive and constructive way to engage the citizens rather than just conducting oversight. The citizens can be involved more in dialogue with the Government that ensures participation of citizens in policy formulation. The recent debate on BT Brinjal or the MNIK controversy demonstrated how forums like Twitter can express public opinion effectively. This is part of the global trends like the Obama Open Government initiative which is engaging citizens around issues like transparency and collaboration.
Government 2.0 can help citizens be better informed about issues. This is where citizens can gain a broader understanding of the implications and tradeoffs in making big decisions, or even local decisions. Involving citizens through Web 2.0 tools can also help in providing ideas and solutions. People with different perspectives can solve problems at times better than even experts. The concept of crowd-sourcing is becoming increasingly popular. This is where a problem is sent out to a group of people asking for contributions or possible solutions to a problem.
In essence, the way to bring about the concept of Government 2.0 is by following a step by step approach. To begin with government employees and elected officials at all levels need to be allowed to access and use social media tools like blogs, wikis and social networks to connect with their constituents. Subsequently government agencies need to use social media tools like blogs, wikis and social networks strategically to achieve their objectives and solicit citizen feedback to improve their processes. This would also enable creation of a participatory platform that engages citizens in policy debates and voluntary service at all levels of the government. As these systems mature, all non-sensitive and non-personal government data can be made openly available so that citizens can use it and third parties can build Web 2.0 mash-ups on top of it. Ultimately, a stage can come where Government agencies can use crowd-sourcing by institutionalizing a process that directly uses the aforementioned participatory platform as an important input into government functions, including policy formation.
5 comments:
It is quite heartening and refreshing to see a young IAS Officer ponder about using expertise and ideas from outside Government to further better governance.
Governance faces multiple challenges in the context of a growing and vocal middle class to enforce greater accountability and efficiency in its functioning. ICTs have a small but useful role to play in helping the Government bureaucracy re-orient itself to the 21st century needs. However, it is for Officers like the author of this blog to take the lead and engage constructively for defining the change, before any Consultant or Technology can play a useful role.
Also claims of synergy between public policy goals and private sector goals have, at best, a limited validity. PPPs yield the desired benefits only if there is a suitable incentive structure for performance for all stakeholders. Given that the responsibility for administrative reform by Government functionaries continues to be non-binding and largely indirect, Government 2.0 remains a distant aspiration. At the present pace, Government Version 1.000001 is a more likely outcome in the next 4 years.
With improved efficiency, effectiveness and focus on outcome, delivering public services to citizens through the Government 2.0 trends is a North bound direction. 'Crowd sourcing' certainly will add value, however, the catch is implementation reliability, monitoring process with accountability.
It's a nice step to increase people partnership in the governance and it's very important too. RTI is surely a step in this direction.
But governance 2.0 is still a far cry in the country when majority of the government officials even lack a public email id's( atleast i tried to get some of them but didn't get).
Proper IT training of personal is necessary at each level of entry.
Also accountability of the officials is also necessary for these steps.Government need to speed up the buildup IT infrastructure of the governance and I think 'UID' is a good step in this direction.This will surely increase transparency in the governance.
Also we should take care that the impact should not be limited only to a small group of people and it should go the the mass level.
I think people having vision like you will surely change the things (lets say you can introduce a email based problem solution system for your local governance. At least the problem can be forwarded to concerned official personal and get a report in bounded time..a small step to your vision of governance 2.0 )
Sir….First of all, I would like to congratulate you for your impressive blog on Gov 2.0. Sir, as I think, Gov 2.0 may take a little time to reach India effectively but a start has been given to this. Now citizens want an interactive and responsive government and even they demand for specific services / facilities from Government. I think, RTI and Community Radio are two live examples of Citizens demand from the Government.
Presently, most of the states are in very basic form of governance or may be at Gov 1.0 stage and it shall really take some time in Indian context to come with Gov 2.0 or so on….. In present context where citizens are not aware about their rights, problem with literacy (forget digital literacy), don’t know basic governance / e-governance and Government officers are not useto with internet and in many cases wont have a email address then obviously an interactive governance system / Gov 2.0 tools like blogs, wikis, social networking channels etc shall be taking some time …..but, I believe, a way has been paved toward Gov 1.0, Gov 2.0 or so on, through NeGP in India….
Thank you for the wonderful insight, Mr. Singh. Government 2.0 certainly is an entirely new and promising 'apparatus' which I suspect is to reconcile plebeian needs with the hoary ethos of the unfulfilled welfare-ism - by glazing over it the popular principles of good governance which even the hardened skeptic is prone to falling for. A political citizen will always fall for such a promise - we all need it. The louder the assurances of "good-governance", the greater the tendency one will forget that government and the citizen are two entities that have no interface to connect them to the other.
It is a reflection for how low government-people interface have sunk to. I am given to understand 2.0 is an attempt to be the 'connector' not just a 'facilitator'(and I still hold in deep appreciation your eModop system, Mr. Singh)
And as Mr. Satish Tyagi has pointed out, improved efficiency, effectiveness and most importantly "focus on outcome" will be the 'humane' aspects that would ensure the citizen is the 'beneficiary.'
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