Is WEB 2.0 a revolution or just good marketing?

Web 2.0 has become a ubiquitous term (for definitions there is an extensive entry in Wikipedia). For many millions it means the networking of Myspace, Bebo and Facebook, which have spread with great speed and will probably disappear with equal speed in the not too distant future. It is in many ways the natural evolution of many other trends of the network world, reaching back to the original Darpanet, rather than representing a sharp break. Here I look at what web 2.0 might mean for governments and the world of public policy. So far it has meant little more than politicians posting videos on Youtube or growing supporter networks on Myspace. But it will come to mean much more, and we can expect energetic experiment not only in high politics but also in the everyday world of public services. What follows is a list of a dozen fields of discovery – fields where web 2.0 could contribute a lot:

1. Web 2.0 provides new ways for governments to manage their own internal projects, linking project teams into the same software for project plans, collaborative discussions, work in progress, email exchanges – building out of the tools already provided by Lotus and others.

2. A stage on from there lies the potential for linking project teams that cut across agencies and tiers of government into temporary communities working on similar issues: again, sharing plans, work in progress, early ideas on topics such as secondary education, water planning, or carbon reduction. These have the potential to become sophisticated, allowing communities to poll themselves, to test their temperature, to form new coalitions, or to align budget plans. As in other web 2.0 spaces relatively junior people can more easily become influential sources of ideas than in traditional bureaucracies. This may unnerve some bosses – as does the idea of ‘doing policy naked’ – but the potential is for better informed policy design and implementation, faster learning, and for a wider consensus over what is to be done earlier in the life of a policy or strategy.

3. Project based methods of this kind may also overlap with collaborative projects out in the community. School children are increasingly doing projects beyond the school walls as part of their education (for example, monitoring energy useage and emissions). Community groups will increasingly use web 2.0 methods to organise their own projects, offering new roles for public servants to engage as observers and participants.

4. These various networks will overlap with narrower networks for professionals and others working in different fields to exchange ideas and experience. In these personal reputation will be all important. Artichoke.typepad.com in schools is a good example.
5. The next category of potential is for new feedback channels to allow citizens to communicate to service providers and each other about what they experience and what they want. The website Patient Opinion provided an important demonstration of what this could achieve (and much of the feedback turned out to be positive); it has effectively been nationalised by the UK government through the Healthy Choices website. Fixmystreet is another example, allowing citizens to communicate about broken infrastructures – with their messages going straight to the relevant local council officials while also being visible to others. There are also school feedback sites that go beyond the crudeness of ‘rate your teacher’ (like schoolsnet).

6. A new category of personal record may be taking shape, between the formal, and wholly private and the personalised space of a Facebook. Many pupils already have records of achievement. We can imagine that these could soon evolve so that they can be accessed and contributed to by parents, mentors and others. Health records could evolve in the same way allowing some trusted third parties – like health trainers and gym coaches – to gain access.

7. Next come citizen to citizen sites. The expert patients programme is a good example in the NHS – empowering patients with chronic conditions to support and advise others. The new website Horses Mouth has extended the model enabling people who have been through difficult life challenges (like depression, alcoholism or caring for a declining parent) to share experiences and counsel.

8. These merge into what could be called ‘Citizen to community’ services – online media of civic journalism including local versions of Ohmynews, Pledgebanks and Pledgebank walls.

9. A more formal space will be provided by citizen to representative channels. These have been pioneered by mySociety in the UK; the Scottish Parliament is one of the assemblies that has opened itself out to citizen petitions, as did the No 10 Downing St website in 2007, with dramatic results when 2 million citizens petitioned against plans for road charging. The UK parliament has now committed itself to exploring ways for citizens to petition parliament.

10. Web 2.0 will encourage the trend to more open problem solving. Innocentive in the US is the best known example and now has a community of well over 100,000 contributing technological solutions and being paid for their efforts. The Rockefeller recently started working with Innocentive offering incentives for technological ideas that could contribute to development. Expect to see governments and others offering rewards for non-technological ideas, and, perhaps, encourage collaborators to work together to design them. A good field might be getting rid of unnecessary red tape – the public, and small business, will not find it hard to make proposals, and simple rules could at the very least require officials to justify why some need to be preserved.

11. Governments collect and own vast collections of data – official statistics, geographical information, and health information. Some of this is public, some of it is intensely private. Over the last two decades the trend was for Treasuries to insist that agencies maximised their revenue from this data. But many now argue that it makes better economic and social sense to put as much data as possible out into the public domain, including anonymised health information, to allow others to match and mine it.

12. Good government depends on the public coming to wise views about the big choices. We are very familiar with debates in the media, and television has dipped its toe into the use of focus groups, deliberative polls and citizens juries. The web now makes possible much wider and richer public deliberation, supported by tools to allow groups to explore alternative scenarios. A good example was the World Without Oil alternative reality game with US broadcaster PBS. There are also many models making it possible for people to play at alternative budget allocations (www.demgames.org www.cyber-budget.fr

These are just a few examples. We should expect the whole field of web 2.0 to become more self-conscious, more aware of knowledge about knowledge (like http://opennet.net which has surveyed what is censored or blocked on the web). We should also expect more learning about what makes web collaboration easy: higher trust cultures will probably do better than low trust ones. So web 2.0 is in part a marketing slogan, that combines many elements with long histories as well as some new ones. But it’s also a space in which a lot of healthy innovation is likely over the next few years.