What is Government 2.0 anyhow?

Since the launch of this blog, a few folks have asked us what this whole social media initiative is all about. We like to point out that we’re at the forefront, in Oregon, of what people are referring to as Government 2.0 or Gov 2.0, for short. Much of the time that response begs another, equally important question: what is government 2.0 anyhow?

To gain further insight in to what Gov 2.0 is and what that means for us here at the Secretary of State’s office, let’s take a closer look at Gov 2.0; starting with a primer on the Web 2.0 ‘revolution’ and ending with a discussion on some of the ways Gov 2.0 can move government communication and accountability forward, while delivering concrete savings to Oregonians.

From Web 1.0 to Web 2.0: An internet revolution

To really understand the impact Web 2.0, we have to be perfectly clear that before its epoch, there was just ‘the web’. That is to say, Web 2.0 changed the way people communicated over the internet so drastically, the term Web 1.0 had to be used in order to describe what things were like ‘in the good ol’ days’. As the image to the left shows, Web 1.0 was essentially anchored around the web site, which organized and shared information about an online entity in a centralized, static fashion; the  equivalent of someone delivering a sermon or a speech. Organizations were connected to customers through email and telephone lines, but that was about the limit of interaction between the organization and the end-user.

Web 2.0 didn’t redesign the wheel, so much as it the re-worked the function of the wheel. It transformed the internet from a collection of websites to a platform for participation.

This transformation happened in a few waves, starting with the advent of Social media portals like Myspace followed by Facebook and LinkedIn, which allowed for previously unheard of networking online. Next, weblogs or blogs exploded onto the scene, creating a publishing platform that allowed the code illiterate to write about anything from a detailed recounting of their dinner date to substantive information and analysis on politics, news, or business; the possibilities were endless. Newly networked users quickly took advantage, becoming active contributors, content creators, and collaborators across a host of web sites and platforms.

With this boom of new content also came the need for new means of tracking and wrangling all of this information together. This was accomplished with through web syndication technology like RSS (Real Simple Syndication). Nearly every blogging platform and social networking site adopted an RSS feed. Once the RSS feed is in place, users  subscribe using news feed software like google reader and voila!, by visiting one site users could see everything going on throughout all of their favorite sites.

Web 2.0 also changed the way users discovered this information, introducing the term folksonomy to the internet vocabulary. Folksonomy refers to the system of collaboratively classifying content through the use of tags. An example of this can be seen in this search for all blog entries on the WordPress website for ‘Elections’:

Here we see the first search result and at the very bottom of that result are a number of tags, created by the author. In this example we have Lebanon, Advertisement, Campaign, etc. By clicking on any of those tag links, a user is presented all websites which share that tag. Were you on Maya Zankoul’s blog when you clicked the tag for Lebanon, you would find every entry on her blog that she tagged as Lebanon relevant.

With all of this, the transition looked like this:

Web 2.0 to Gov 2.0: Will Government ‘get it’?

We now have an idea of what Web 2.0 is. That brings us to Government 2.0 , the raison d’etre for our social media initiative here at the Secretary of State’s office. So what exactly is Government 2.0? And furthermore, why should government agencies use Web 2.0 to engage its constituents?

Put (perhaps overly) simply, Government 2.0 is a framework, which affords government agencies the use of Web 2.o social media tools in order to communicate with constituents in a dynamic, transparent and participatory way. It transforms the paradigm of Government’s online presence from a collection of bureaucratic, informational websites to a participatory conversation about what the government is doing. In concrete terms of communicating with our constituents, it shifts our mode of communications from the old governmental norm of ‘need to know’ to an unprecedented level of transparency and from the top down bureaucratic approach to a bottom up approach that favors agility and timeliness.

The move to Gov 2.0 benefits our customers, the public, as well.

First and foremost, it allows the public to engage this agency in a conversation about our function. That is really what we’re aiming to do with our own social media strategy. We want to educate the public on some of our core functions and some of the interesting stuff we do, but we also want YOU to get involved and let us know what you think. The idea here is that we open the discussion and you react. As interest in the blog and twitter feeds grows, we hope to give users the opportunity to contribute topics to the conversation.

Secondly, utilizing web 2.0 portals makes us more nimble, which in turn helps us more efficiently deliver key information from our divisions to the customers looking for that information. This streamlining of delivery will also save staff hours and resources. It’s a win-win.

We hope this little tutorial has been a helpful introduction into what we hope is the future of government communications in the State of Oregon. Now, we’d like to open the floor to you. What would you like to see the Secretary of State’s Office do with this new initiative? Get registered and drop us a comment!