Lots of Gov 2.0 learning still to do…
Anna York is a second year Masters in Public Policy candidate at the Harvard Kennedy School, where she is co-Chair of the Government 2.0 Professional Interest Council and Executive Editor of the Kennedy School Review. Before enrolling in her Masters, Anna worked in the NSW Government, and she is looking forward to returning to Sydney after her graduation in May 2010.
As a Masters student at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, I have been very surprised at the relatively limited discussion about the principles, challenges and opportunities of Government 2.0 on my campus.
It seems that for many of my classmates and faculty, the idea that technology might revolutionise the way government works is a strange and distant concept. Or perhaps the underlying principles often touted as the foundation of Government 2.0 – openness, transparency, democracy, and engagement – are a little threatening to students being trained in traditional forms of bureaucratic management.
In an effort to broaden the discussion about Gov 2.0 and expose more faculty and students to these ideas, my classmate Yasmin Fodil and I have started the Government 2.0 Professional Interest Council at the Harvard Kennedy School. We have been working over the last few months to invite Gov 2.0 experts and practitioners to campus, facilitate debate and discussion and help students develop the skills they will need to be able public servants in the context of a growing innovation culture in government.
As more citizens seek their news, information and access to government services online, it will be increasingly important for public service leaders of the future to be well equipped to respond to – and take full advantage of – the challenges and opportunities new technologies present.
Indeed, I recently had the opportunity to meet the former Australian Public Service Commissioner (and now head of Medicare) Lynelle Briggs, who articulated this view forcefully in a speech about the future of the Australian Public Service:
The modern day world is requiring some new styles of leadership to be blended with those that have often been the norm in the public service. Leaders will have to become more innovative, actively seeking, encouraging and leveraging ideas from all quarters.
I hope these are issues that the Government 2.0 Taskforce can address. If Harvard is any measure, these are questions US educational institutions are just starting to grapple with.
Don’t get me wrong – I am not a technology evangelist who believes that social networking tools and multi-purpose databases are a panacea for every ill experienced or perpetuated by each one of the world’s governments.
But I do agree with the US General Service Administration’s Darlene Meskell’s argument (PDF):
The arrival of the Internet created new opportunities for citizen engagement through its powerful ability to organize. Online town meetings, social media, chat rooms, bulletin boards, deliberative processes for e-rulemaking, and feedback mechanisms for soliciting citizen input. All of these tools have a positive impact on public policy development because when people get involved everyone learns from each other, relationships are built, trust is established and the final outcome is improved.
I also believe that as new technologies are developed that can help make government services and administration more efficient and less costly, there will continue to be large scale investment in these new tools. We might as well get on board and exert influence to ensure these investments support enhanced democracy and improved citizen engagement – in addition to the eternal promise of cost savings and efficiency.
In the meantime, there is much that countries who are starting to take the less travelled Government 2.0 road can learn from each other.
As part of our Masters requirements, my classmate Yasmin and I are working with the US Federal Communications Commission to support their research and recommendations regarding how the national roll-out of broadband infrastructure can support improved civic engagement.
Many of the questions being raised by the Australian Government 2.0 Taskforce are simultaneously being considered by the FCC’s National Broadband Taskforce. In particular, we will be looking to international examples of national level governments have successfully deploying social media tools to enhance citizen engagement and participation. (If you have any interesting leads along these lines, please don’t hesitate to contact me!) I also hope that our work might be of use to the Australian Taskforce as it develops its final report.
While there are countless exciting prospects and many daunting challenges ahead as we work to improve the quality of our governments and strength of our democracies through the deployment of Government 2.0 principles, there are also opportunities to collaborate in learning across boundaries, borders and jurisdictions.
It is also important that we properly equip our public service leaders of the future with the skills and experiences they will need to harness the potential of true innovation and engagement in government.
Now that our Gov 2.0 group is up and running at the Kennedy School, we would love to make contact with other faculty, student and university groups in Australia and around the world working on these issues.
Do you know of tertiary institutions – courses, clubs, curricula – that are dealing with Gov 2.0 issues? Are there other opportunities for research students, faculty and government to work together on shaping the future of government? Do you agree that future leaders in public service will need different skill sets – and if so, what are the educational models we can look at to prepare them? We’d love to hear your thoughts!
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Thx for the post Anna.
Couple of things that struck me (and great post – thanx).
Not sure how I feel about the prospect that Harvard isn’t yet buzzing with the Govt 2.0 debate. Maybe that’s inevitable and for an institution like Harvard it’s still too early to know if this is ‘fad or future’. But it did strike me as at least noteworthy that one of the world’s premier training grounds for smart and capable public administrators is not more ‘tuned’ to this discussion. A bit like teachers’ colleges consistently failing to integrate the ICT dimension into training new teachers.
On the citizen engagmeent front, the real issue is not whether it is happening or not ot whether it is happening eletronically or not, but why it is happening and what is changing as a result. Would be good to focus your research on the ’so what’ dimension of a discussion that often seems to be dazzled with evidence that online engagement is happening at all, failing as a result to ask some tougher questions about impact and value.
Martin,
I wouldn’t read too much into it.
Universities in Australia have struggled to keep up-to-date on new media developments and, having investigated getting a piece of paper to acknowledge my ‘hard knocks’ knowledge, they still lag by 3-5 years behind current industry developments and are only useful for a ‘101′ understanding.
Gov 2.0 is sufficiently new that I don’t expect to see universities anywhere in the world in the same book – let alone on the same page – for several years yet.
What he (craig) said,
It’s probably informative to keep track on MIT, so far as watching how ICT is being used to reinvent the institution (of education). “The change in media is not a fit subject to be studied (anywhere), particularly if you want a job in “the industry” at the moment. All those poor young (journo/reporting) students & AV producers thinking they are going to get a job.
At least we know that the progressives are giving away their course materials, so info (papers and reports) is being devalued, as the web inflation (duplication) continues. MIT won’t care very much, as akamai (as one) socks millions into the MIT research pots. Might as well cater to ancient .edu and .gov institutions who just love spamming one another with yesterday’s National and departmental habits.
Some thought leaders are challenging the squeaky unis to think outside their national boxes. Although, then they run back to the safety of presenting their papers and reports to their PLU’s. E.g.
I just love this comment.
Does it not occur to students of e-gov or e-edu that they share their learning (in real time), and by doing so reinvent the media(s)? Or must “students be trained in traditional forms of bureaucratic management” because the world might fall apart if they aren’t as prejudiced as their lecturers?
“run a (global) social network?, who’s going to pay for that?” Next thing you’ll be suggesting is that the Web is world wide. Sorry Anna, but you got to laugh, no?
Don’t you think we should be trying to educate people to be good (global) citizens before we train them to be half good (national) bureaucrats? Your Masters is a beauty, and you’d have a bunch of playmates down south and in a few other countries. And there are some fab tools we could use, if only we could get the unis out of their silos.
As an HKS/MIT alum, I am very happy to see this focus at HKS (much more than existed in the 90s when browsers we just being commercialized). Technology can play a very important role in setting and executing public policy – as long as we remember that good policy is the “ends” and “Web 2.0″ is one of MANY “means” to achieving this.
I would love to collaborate on this. My similar work can be found http://tinyurl.com/om4p4y and http://www.the-corner-office.com/tag/gov20/
Jim,
Thanks for this. You’re quite right about http://www.the-corner-office.com/2009/07/what-i-took-away-from-the-inaugural-open-government-innovations-ogi-conference/, especially with gov 2 having a lot of learning to do.
We’ve already been throgh it in this domain, with one submissions, being a script,being stillborn because this domain is hosted on a .gov.au server.
It’s even more impossible here in Oz because the talk about clouds is largely absent. I’d be interested to know if your thinking is the same as mine, and that having a Single Sign On for all citizens is the key to the civil clouds. (bottom of page)
We have a department in Federal government called socialinclusion, (out of the PM and Cabinaet office) which appears to be the logical focus for developing this civil areas. But we really could use some help in figuring this one out. Every community will want some different combination of tools of course. But if culture counts for anything, you might want to go through this Aussie tool and see what happens when a social domain is manned by moderators from different companies (agencies?). People learn by imitating others (at least in the first instance), No?
My own belief is that the edu space which Anna and her global peers are investigating (in) is going to be the natural domain for the growth of an interactive area between the hard nuts of gov networks and their common open webbed communities. Thoughts?
This Aussie tool