Government 2.0

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.

Slumber, Austerity and Twitter Chatter!!

A mail from a dear friend woke me from my slumber. The mail simply said:

ABHI
IF you keep a blog then update it!!!

And I did realize that it has been quite some time that I was away from blogging. Well, I should rather say that I had mastered the art of postponing things. Within no time, Today becomes tomorrow and tomorrow becomes never. Then, suddenly on a working-long-weekend-Eid, the command came from my boss that I need to go to Patna for a meeting and here I am up at 38000 ft, with my laptop, keyboard and fingers working in sync, without a cell call or FB alert or Intercom command disturbing the chain of thoughts!!

The newspaper, the official airline, (it can be only Air India and none else), provides has stories on the austerity drive launched by the Government and every Tom, Dick and Harry columnist is taking potshots at the move. Well, it was a move that was loaded against the word go. Like the one which says that we can fly Air India only. My Patna visit has to have a night over as there are no return AI flights to Delhi in the evening. And since I have no desire to spend the night in Patna, I am forced to travel to Ranchi by night train and have Jharkhand review meet there and catch the afternoon flight back to Delhi. So much for austerity.

And the fuss over Business Class and Economy Class has other classic apsects that no one notices. Government books all its tickets through Balmer laurie, the sarkaari travel agency. And these guys excel in booking full fare tickets. So if you dont check, a 5000 buck Delhi-Mumbai will cost 15000 bucks with these guys. I remember last month, I had gone to Vietnam for WITFOR 2009. These guys gave me a 59000 Rs Economy Class ticket. My other colleague who had booked the tickets through a regular travel agency travelled on the same flights on a 40000 Rs Business Class ticket!!!

By the way, this trip, these guys did something more funny. My office had asked them to book me for Hanoi, Vietnam. Hanoi airport is called Noi Bai Airport and there is no airport called Hanoi. So these guys booked me for Vientaine, which is actually the capital of Laos. I had no clue as noone noticed this blunder, even the Ministry of Civil Aviation, authorised to allow non AI travel allowed me to travel on Thai airways on a flight going to Vientaine, Laos for a conference happening in Hanoi, Vietnam. I even crossed the immigration gate with a Visa for Vietnam and ticket for Laos. Only in Bangkok, when I realized that my colleague has a morning flight and my flight was only in the afternoon, I asked the Thai Airways counter if they could put me also on the morning flight. They said there are no morning flights. I said, there is and 682, is the flight my colleague is travelling on. Pat came the reply, that 682 goes to Hanoi. I said, so am I, and then she gave me the shocking news that actually I was flying to Vientaine, Laos and that too without a Visa and would have surely got declared a persona non grata and deported back by the next flight. Fortunately, I could get the Vientaine legs cancelled and get a fresh ticket for Hanoi by the morning flight and attend the conference.

So Austerity drives need to look at the larger picture. otherwise we will get mired by the Twitter Chatter which jumps to conclusion on hearing the Cattle word. If it is cattle, it got to be derogatory and insulting to the entire human civilization, without realizing what the cows - holy or otherwise - think of we looking down upon cattle. Anyways, such stories will make the twitter man wiser. He should consider himself lucky that most of these morons have not read his classic - A Great Indian Story - else he could have been called Anti Gandhian - for his Mango Yatra take and other interpretations from the anecdotal history of modern India.

Anyways, these stories and chatter will continue. The stewardess is asking me to shut down electronic devices and close the trays and sit up for landing. So this story comes to an end, thanks to AI.

Till then lets think of more austerity measures!!!