Andrea Di MaioEarlier today I had a very interesting conversation with an executive from a local government about their digital society initiatives. These include the development of broadband infrastructure to provide Internet access to residents, and the development of a number of web applications to visualize information about traffic or real estate use as well as to make tourists reserve and pay for hotels, public transportation, access to museums and other amenities online (this jurisdicrtion gets significant revenues from tourism).
Individual components of their strategy are quite intriguing, as they have a clear vision about citizen engagement and participation, and in their various applications they have used (or plan to use) quite a few Web 2.0 characteristics, ranging from mashing up external content to supporting non-moderated comments (something very bold for a public sector entity).
I thought I had found the perfect example of a local government that was getting it right: approach based on small pilots, willingness to take risks, vision about to combine political priorities with citizen service. Admittedly, most of what they’ve done is still tagged as “beta” and they claim they worked following intuition rather than a fully-fledged strategy. This also seems wise, as it is difficult to anticipate how information and services will be consumed (how many e-government programs fell short of expectation in terms of uptake, although their managers thought they knew it all?).
The only aspect that made me raise my eyebrows was that all the web applications they showed were carrying the local government logo. Nothing wrong, of course, but I asked how they were expecting to make this evolve so that people – both residents and tourists – would be able to access these through their channels of choice (such as a travel site or a social networking one). I made my point – which I know is still controversial with some more traditional constituencies – that a government-owned web site or portal is unlikely to be the most successful conduit for such a wealth of information and services. People may wish to combine (indeed mash-up) information in different ways.
So, while the local authority had focused on building applications that would mash up external content, I was not sure whether they were planning to have their own information “mashed-up” and their web services invoked by external web sites.
At that point, the executive took a slightly more defensive attitude, in striking contrast with the openness shown until that moment, and started citing “numbers” about how many daily hits their web sites receive. i do understand that he was very proud of his accomplishment so far (and rightly so). but he could not accept that whatever they have developed would be more successfully leveraged through different aggregators and intermediaries than local government itself.
He seems just too smart not to know that the secret for a sustainable success of their initiatives is to just “give up” channel control and rather focus on information and service quality. But, pretty much like in e-government 1.0, it is not easy to let it go. Government web sites or portals carry a brand, and assemble information the way the administration likes. Of course some widgets or gadgets can still be branded, but web services providing back office functions, such as reservations or access to local information about traffic or environmental data that are then mashed-up with somebody else’s data, would not.
This is one of the basic problems with Web 2.0 and citizen-driven government, and particularly so with democratic-labor-left wing administrations. A constant dichotomy between using the public sector lever (information, services, technology) to stimulate private sector initiatives, and the willingness to retain control and be visible. After all, what’s the political return of a mashup? Users who get value from a mashup will recognize the brand who actually did the mashup (the masher) much more than the brand of the “mashee”.
Let’s think about a future where all it’s left of the city portal are a set of widgets and web services that can be used in whichever context intermediaries as well as users see fit. This would probably lead to the ultimate user experience, overcoming many of the issues that government portals still have as they struggle with fictitious “life-event” or “one-stop-shop” model. Assuming those widgets provide access to services that actually work and deliver constituent value, the “invisibility” of government should become a political asset.
But, then, how do you brand it politically? How do you put your mark, as the politician who made this happen, once the channel is no longer yours, once people don’t see your city, county, state, or agency logo any longer?
Category: web 2.0 in government Tags: local government, mashup, portal, social networks
5 responses so far ↓
1 MyPage Builder July 15, 2009 at 9:20 am
[...] more here: A Local Government Tale: A Portal Away From Web 2.0 [...]
2 Ingrid Koehler July 21, 2009 at 3:29 am
This is a really interesting perspective. A lot of what government does is in the background, building infrastructure, making connections – but other services are very much delivered openly by government. And the same strategy needs to be used in Gov2.0, too. (I think that’s what you’re advocating here.)
In some cases, sourcing and branding data from the local government can add some validation to the information (e.g. traffic and road information, access to services – loads of examples really) and in other cases it probably wouldn’t add much. I’d probably feel more confident about gov-branded tourist information related to museums, civic events coming from local government than hotel reservations – even though they may be doing a great job at supporting the local hospitality industry.
3 links for 2009-07-21 « Policy and Performance July 21, 2009 at 7:03 pm
[...] A Local Government Tale: A Portal Away From Web 2.0 Really interesting perspective on branding, control and successful gov2.0 implementation from Gartner consultant Andrea DiMaio (tags: government2.0 gov2.0 tourism web2.0 localgovernment branding) [...]
4 PaulGeraghty July 22, 2009 at 10:24 am
What a well observed piece, thank you.
I knew about and documented “My Silo” thinking now I have a new one “My Silo 2.0″.
What is risible about (most) local government’s attitudes to ‘their information’ is that it is not their information at all, they are getting it from somewhere else (never mind that their tax payers are funding it).
Take your example of Hotels and guest houses – it is not the council’s information in the first place. The information came from the Hotel – they are the ones furnishing it and having to continually check their records are up to date etc.
By not opening up the data the Local council is doing a disservice to the Hotel – who are encased in endless SEO (search engine optimisation) efforts and costs trying to find business.
Ask the Hotels if they think the APIs should be open.
If you think about it hard (or you have worked in local government) you may come to realise that examples of data hoarding and/or obfuscation are far more common than that.
Take information about your bin-day pickup, or the failure of it on a particular occasion.
Waste services are generally provided by a contractor.
The contractor keeps a record of when bins are emptied, in a computer.
They also know within a short time when a road has been missed.
That information at some later date (overnight?) is somehow then radio-ed to the council who may, or may not deign put it on their website – or at a very outside chance – email that information to you – a resident.
What councils should be doing is negotiating with waste contractors to open up their data – so that as many views as are needed can be made of that data.
Sure, they can have a view on the council website (if anyone can then find it – then great) but others in the community can create their own views of the information e.g.
- geeks (who then in turn make rss feeds etc)
- the public
- local papers
- bloggers
- microbloggers
Can also find and use it.
Its high time we stopped thinking in terms of ‘council data’ – and started breaking the barriers between the ‘data holders’ and the public.
Councils should not feel threatened by this, they should be playing the role of ‘content negotiators’.
(Perhaps even central government should step in and mandate the data to be made open – its going to be a lot easier to convince ~30 waste contractors to liven up their IT system than hundreds of unwilling councils – most of which would not know where to start)
I look forward to the day when i get the equivalent of this:
“Oi, Cement lorry blocked yer road off today. Back on saturday. #binfail”
I can be sitting on the train to work and be informed of this fact – via a method of my choosing – and perhaps my council tax will have gone down thanks to the cut in administrative waste.
Find the data, liberate it, tell the public then, councils, GET OUT OF THE WAY
5 Moving From Me To We.com » Blog Archive » Making Your Town Feel More Like a Community September 20, 2009 at 7:36 pm
[...] your cash-crunched town use online and mobile technology to reduce costs, become more efficient or offer you more value or make it [...]