Whenever any set of ideas gets a label or a brand – ‘eGovernment’,
“Government 2.0′ – you can be sure those ideas are bound to lose some of their value. What happens is that people trade in the brand and forget to keep in mind the complexity of the ideas and concepts. Perhaps it’s an understandable shorthand, but risks degenerating into the kind of simplistic either/or discussions which Andrea’s initial post was trying to resist I guess. So in that sense, a useful addition to the discussion which all too easily can get distracted by slogans and rhetoric (this is all about politics, after all!).

There is a very big issue underlying this conversation which i think needs much more scrutiny. And it is this – that we are witnessing some profound adjustments in the definition of what it means to be “public” or to be engaged in “public” work. It is worth reflecting that there is an answer to Andrea’s earlier question about unemployment benefits. He noted that as a provider of last resort, government is the only one who can pay people when they are out of work. It simply isn’t true. There are those who will argue strenuously that the welfare state and the advent of large ‘industrial’ government replaced a thriving and growing mutual movement. Now, the discussion will inevitably get around to questions of scale and scope, that’s true. But the point remains true – there are other ways to be ‘public’ than to rely on the the state.

So one of the intriguing ‘back to the future’ possibilties inherent in the Govt2 discussion, I think, is the opportunity to reinvent models of ‘public’ action which are no owned and controlled by the state but which harness the ‘small pieces’ of civil society action which can be ‘loosely joined’ with others to create a perfectly good ‘public’ system without being run by a government agency.

There may be other examples, but the key point is to avoid (much like the discussion about regulation) the risk of assuming that our current and relatively recent notions of ‘public’, which we tend to conflate with ideas of ‘government’, are themselves not fixed. It may be that the platform-enabling potential of the new social technologies are acting as a solvent on some of the assumptions about whta government and what it should do which we sometimes asume are rusted on.