Web 2.0 and the public sector

Web 2.0 offers new models of user participation that will have profound consequences for how politicians and civil servants communicate with the public. Eric Woods thinks the public sector needs to grasp the ramifications of a world in which information sharing, collaboration and open dialogue are becoming the norm.

It can be hard to get your bearings in the midst of all the hype surrounding web 2.0. In particular, many organisations are struggling to understand the opportunities and threats presented by the rapid expansion of social networking sites and applications.

This includes public sector organisations trying to assess the impact of web 2.0 on political communication, e-government and internal information sharing.

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Web 2.0 is best understood as the latest phase in the evolution of the internet and the web. We are now seeing how an open, standards-based global network can enable people to communicate and collaborate in a myriad of ways.

The interest in social networking sites such as Facebook and Wikipedia, the wide-scale use of blogging and the rapid deployment of new mash-up applications are moving us nearer Tim Berners-Lee's original vision for the web as 'anything being potentially connected to anything'.

These developments cannot be ignored by the public sector. In particular, the emphasis on participation in web 2.0 has important consequences for government. User-generated content, online collaboration and diverse forms of community interaction have implications for political engagement, policy development, service delivery and operational efficiency.

The question is whether public sector organisations can find the right way to engage in these conversations to enhance citizens' experience and their perception of public services.

Politicians are gradually realising the importance of these new channels of communication. Political blogs, YouTube videos, and Facebook groups are all becoming an accepted part of the political landscape. But few politicians can claim to have really engaged with the interactive and collaborative elements of the web 2.0 world.

The ethos of open, frank and robust dialogue that characterises the best of the social networking world can sit at odds with the tendency of politicians to want to control the context of communication and tailor the spin around their messages.

The use of such participatory models in the design and delivery of public services offers even more complex challenges. Web 2.0 can take the evolution of e-government in new directions but not necessarily ones the public sector will be comfortable with.

The move towards citizen-centric government takes on a new meaning when we have the facility for large-scale feedback and dialogue on government policies or on the quality of services.

Attempts are being made to understand what such an engagement entails. A range of pilots run by the Ministry of Justice and the Hansard Society have explored how citizens can contribute to the development of new policies and offered new platforms for government officials to communicate on key issues. The Food Standard Agency's chief scientist's blog is a good example of an attempt at more open and interactive communication.

More ambitiously, the Foreign & Commonwealth Office has recently launched a series of blogs, including one by foreign secretary David Miliband and another by a new graduate recruit to the department. While the aim may be to prove the openness of government, the challenge could end up being preventing any dialogue being hogged by special interest groups.

There must also be concerns about digital exclusion. The rise of social networking has the potential to exacerbate the exclusion of disadvantaged groups from a key forum of public debate and dialogue. As we have seen with e-government services, public sector agencies will increasingly need to consider the balance between different channels of communication.

The rise of social computing also has important implications for the way the public sector works internally. The availability of simple, relatively cheap tools to support new forms of collaboration, information sharing and knowledge management should be a boon to a public sector trying to become more adaptable, innovative and responsive.

Social computing models also offer advantages in terms of joined-up government, providing a loosely coupled approach to collaboration across government silos.

Wikis, for example, with their emphasis on transparent collaboration, shared authorship and strong audit trails have many benefits for internal public sector information sharing.

In the US, the intelligence community has created Intellipedia, a wiki that allows for the easy sharing and validation of information across different agencies - a long-standing problem that more sophisticated technologies have failed to solve.

So what does the rise of web 2.0 mean for public sector IT departments? As ever, concerns over security and compliance will be paramount but these should not be exaggerated. If the intelligence services can see benefits that outweigh the risks, then other information-centric parts of government should be following suit.

A more important challenge for IT will be the change in user expectations that web 2.0 is driving. Corporate IT can appear slow, unresponsive and inefficient compared with the self-help world of blogs, mash-ups and wikis being developed on the web.

The ease of use of many social computing tools is exacerbating the frustrations felt by users with the information sharing and collaboration tools available within the corporate firewall.

The danger for the IT department is that it either alienates users by being too restrictive or it loses control over the deployment of this new and exciting technology. We thus get caught once again in the to-and-fro between centralised and decentralised IT.

To avoid this dilemma, IT needs to look closely and with fresh eyes at the benefits web 2.0 brings. Above all it should welcome rather than fear a new generation of free or relatively cheap solutions with low implementation costs that can change the economics of small and medium-scale collaboration projects.

Avoiding the agonising, and largely wasted, efforts that goes into return on investment and business case development for such projects will be a boon to all involved.

Instead, the focus should shift to realising business benefits through low-cost, easy-fail projects from which lessons can be learnt and applied quickly in a process of incremental development and improvement.

In the web 2.0 world, users discover the best way to use tools to solve the business problems that they understand. Solutions emerge from the user community and are not designed top-down by IT. It is important that IT is seen as enabler of this process not a barrier to change.

One reason that this is so important is that future improvements in public services depend on the capacity of the public sector to collaborate better and to respond to change more quickly. Web 2.0-based social computing has the potential to release immense energy in terms of citizen and employee participation.

If business and IT leaders in the public sector can harness that energy then a collaborative public sector becomes a possibility not just a fantasy.

Eric Woods is Government Practice Director at Ovum