Government 2.0, Phase 3: Stable Solutions
I've written before about the three phases of open government, or government 2.0 – Surprises, Experiments, and Solutions. Basically, from about 2007-8, open government had a lot to do with "surprises," being surprised that blogging was useful, or using Twitter was okay.
From about 2009-10, the area moved to a phase of experiments, in which it was okay to experiment with new media and other emerging technologies like cloud and mobile, and see how these might enhance government missions ranging from public affairs to intelligence analysis to cross-agency collaboration.
And starting about now and basically 2011-12, I see a phase of solutions. People are finding that (say) Twitter alone, or (say) a Facebook Group alone are not in themselves providing holistic solutions to government challenges. There may be cybersecurity issues, or reliability issues, or interoperability issues, and so forth.
Long term reliable solutions will require a reliable foundation that provides a secure way of doing things but can also interweave new and even unreliable or untested new media or other technologies. To this end, a new white paper called Gov 2.0: Promoting Inclusive, Open, and Transparent Government through Technology White Paper sponsored by Microsoft has been published by HiSoftware.
I wasn't involved in writing this paper, but I did just read it, and it seems to take a more "phase 3: solutions" point of view of government 2.0, one that requires a foundation of something like SharePoint software so that people can be social but also safe. Feel free to disagree, or debate, but I think it's worth a look as a nice contribution to the open government literature.
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