Andrea DiMaio

I have been invited to participate in the upcoming iGov Global Exchange, which will take place in Singapore between June 15 and 19. I will be speaking in one of the parallel tracks on June 15, about Strategic Sourcing for E-Government Services. As the track description makes reference to collaboration between government and industry through public-private partnerships, it occurred to me that what is changing with web 2.0 is the emergence of new forms of partnership that government organizations can leverage.

So when I was asked to send a title and synopsis of my short intervention, this is what I wrote:

Toward Citizen-Driven Government: From Public-Private to Public-Public Partnership

The engagement of third parties in electronic government service delivery has been considered by many as a significant ingredient for e-government to succeed, recognizing that people interact with a number of other organizations besides government for most of their critical life events. Public-private partnerships, while being a brilliant idea, have often fallen short of expectations, usually due to lack of maturity on both sides. Today governments are confronted with challenging opportunities for partnering with new intermediaries, such as self-organized groups of citizens who exchange information and provide peer support through social media. Governments need to engage with these communities and understand how they operate in order to strike a balance between serving and leveraging social networks to both improve service levels and increase operational efficiency.

For those who know how difficult it is to make a public-private partnership work for government service delivery, the concept of partnering with organizations that are not even established as legal entities may look inconceivable.  But these won’t be partnerships between institutions: they will be partnerships between individuals, be they citizens, professional intermediaries, government employees. These partnerships will cut across organizational boundaries, will be fluid and agile, bounded only by norms and not by processes. The key role for government organizations and their employees will be to make sure that these dynamic partnerships create mutual trust with constituents and take place within the relevant regulatory boundaries.

This will not happen overnight, and there will be failures, setbacks, incidents, like with any innovation. But the fundamental difference with this transformation is that citizens are in the driving seat and will inevitably set the pace.