Weeks 1–2: Communities Off Line and On: Why do we form social networks? What forms do social networks take? How do we manage social networks to increase the possibility of positive outcomes?

Weeks 3–4: Information as Online Currency: What is information? How does it function online? How can it be managed in an age where every possible viewpoint is expressed and reinforced online? Can we ever achieve consensus?

Weeks 5–6: From Information to Action: How do we encourage participation through social media?

Weeks 7–12: The Capacities and Limits of Social Media: What can be achieved through social media—with regard to collaboration, transparency, and citizen participation—and what are the limitations and even perils that social media must confront?

Most likely, by the end of this course, attendees will have a fair understanding of potential and challenges of social media. I just wonder whether they will be given the right perspective and the course will be courageous enough to explore the employee-centric view of social media, according to which social media succeed in delivering business value if they deliver personal value to each and every individual who is supposed to be engaged.

One reason for caution is the target audience, which is supposed to be composed by government professionals who

• • Aspire to positions with a heavy social media component;
  • Are given responsibility for an office’s social media strategy, activities, or training,
  • Are new to social media and want a deep and thorough understanding of the tools; and/or

These are profoundly different audiences, which will use social media in very different ways. According to the common wisdom, the former two categories overlap. People who are excited about social media do see its use in communications and citizen engagement. But the most important category is the last one, i.e. everybody else: people who have no aspiration to make a career out of social media, but may find value in using it as personal working tools to become more effective and efficient at what they do (assuming their primary role is not communication).

It would be best to run separate courses, because the first two categories should look at the corporate use of social media, while the latter would focus on employee-centricity, BYO (bring your own) device and/or community. Of course there is some common ground for the basics, but 12 weeks are a too long a time not to make a clear distinction between different audiences.

So, while the initiative deserves much praise, let’s hope that its execution does not fall pray of the conventional corporate-centric approach.

The book makes a great point about the different nature of social media endeavors, recognizing that some of them are top-down while others are bottom-up. It does provide useful advice about how  to better plan for top-down initiatives to make them more successful, and how to create an environment that better aligns bottom-up initiatives to corporate objectives.

I would recommend reading this book to anybody who is struggling with articulating the full value of social media and wants to have a comprehensive view of what it takes to make it an effective corporate tool today.

However there is an important question that the book, in my humble opinion, leaves unanswered: what is the right balance between top-down, corporate-driven activities, and bottom-up, personal activities?

The center of the book is the enterprise and how social media can create value for the enterprise: Anthony and Mark did a great job at describing how the principles that support community building and mass collaboration relate to management principles, and how managers need to be more guides than managers.

But little is said about the critical link between the personal purpose and the corporate purpose, despite their invitation to ask the question “what’s in it for participants?”, as a key point to assess whether a community purpose is sufficiently magnetic to keep individuals together.

I believe that the future of social organizations will be one where the organization recognizes the power of the individual and accepts that individuals – be they customers or employees – will always see themselves, rather than their organization, at the center of a community or a collaboration endeavor. Communities will not be sustainable because they are cool or well designed or well managed: of course all these elements will play an important role, but the key ingredient will be to make community building and participation a tool for individuals to  succeed in their personal endeavors.

For all those who are not convinced with this position, just think about the fact that social media still is a relatively new phenomenon. People using it will be moving from one job to another, from one organization to another, over the years, and the links they establish, their social networks, the communities they participate in, will be part of their personal assets. Next time they move into a new job, they will assume (and not just expect) that those assets will be available to them and that they will be both exploiting and further developing them during their jobs.

Nobody really knows how future, community-empowered workers who are used to play across organizational  boundaries will fit into any current or foreseeable organizational structure where management principles can be successfully applied.

I am sure that some of us do realize the inherent conflict (I do think we need a stronger word than “dynamics”) between individuals and organizations, be they commercial corporations or government agencies, that social media can fuel. However we prefer not to stretch our imagination and discover even greater social media risks for organizations than those they already face today. We do so because adding more risks to the plate would paralyze the initiatives that many organizations are piloting to better understand and get value from social media.

Books like “The Social Organization” help articulate a mid-term roadmap, plan and execute successful project, but do not try to capture the longer-term future. A future where the very concept of organization as we know it might be subsumed by different ways in which individuals decide to self-organize around particular purposes. A future where what we call “enterprise” today may just live the short space of a fortnight and then be dismantled, A future where entire middle management layers may be replaced by technology and behaviors that allow communities to self-discipline.

Personally, I have no crystal ball. But I bet that the best way to figure out how that future might look like is to think more about the “social individual” than about the “social organization”.

My first reaction was to stress the importance of being where people are and of structuring the content in smaller, easy-to-consume chunks that would attract the interest of people and drive them to participate. We discussed about the trade off in engagement effectiveness between providing content and streaming meetings on their web site, as opposed to using YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.

After a while they told me that they were not really after citizen engagement, but after citizen access. This is a very important distinction. Access means giving people who have an interest in participating an easier way to access content and provide input and comments. Engagement means also reaching out to people who would not normally participate, making a conscious effort to make government content easy to understand and consume, and creating better alignment between what people are looking for or are passionate about, and the way to deliver content.

For instance, citizens who want to access the council meeting but cannot due to distance, want to have access to preparatory papers, the ability to comment and submit questions, and real-time streaming of the actual meeting, with some ability to participate as appropriate. This is access.

But citizens who have limited interest in what the council does, or just don’t know, will not connect to the streamed session, nor will they look at the agenda or the minutes. But they may be contributing to one of the items in the agenda if that item was delivered in a way and on a channel that is most natural to them. This is engagement.

Providing access implies using enterprise technology on the government web site. Ensuring engagement may be achieved with consumer technology. However the client is convinced that the latter would be more expensive, requiring resources to understand where and how to deliver content, not to mention the records management nightmare, as tools are not mature and there is a fair amount of manual work involved.

So the impression is that limiting the effort to “granting access” and forgetting about “engagement” would be cheaper and easier to manage.

But is it? If citizens or the executive leadership calls for “better access”, this can mean a lot of different things, ranging from streaming video, to having more online services, to having open data, and so forth. It is likely that any effort done to increase access will be seen by some groups as insufficient or not in line with their expectations.

And even if one has a very clear view of “access” priorities and can prioritize investments accordingly, are we sure that everybody has the same interpretation of the boundaries between access and engagement? If the new access captures only – say – 10 or 20% of the population, but others do not engage, is this enough? Of course one can always say that the channel is there for people to access, but won’t somebody ask what is being done to engage the remaining 80%?

Reality is that engagement is inevitable. The question is whether and how rapidly it can be turned from a cost into a benefit. After all, citizens can provide a very effective platform for governments to operate and innovate.

• Social Media in Government: High Level Guidance, targeted to organizations that “are trying to decide if they should use social media in a communications, community engagement, or a policy consultation context”; and
• Social Media in Government: Hand-On Toolbox, targeted to practitioners “who are setting up social media profiles and using the tools on a daily basis”.

As those who happen to read my posts on this topic probably know, I am always quite critical with governments as they come out with social media policies and guidelines that are full of good intention but usually fail to meet the intended goal of stimulating its use by erring too much on the side of risk management and institutional presence.

These documents are different, almost a breath of fresh air. They provide very down-to.earth, actionable decision frameworks that give both communications professionals (i.e. those who are in the business of managing the official face of their agency on social media) and any other member of the staff, including managers, enough information to formulate their own decisions about whether and how to venture into social media.

Both guidelines do not speak to organizations, but target individuals, be they public affair officers or line managers or employees in whatever capacity. They focus on principles that are valid for any role, and stimulate a thought process that leads to determine whether and how the use of social media is worthwhile in one’s own role.

There are a few shortcomings, such as the lack of a clear upfront distinction between organizational, professional and personal roles,  too long a business case template, and insufficient mention of the tactical and temporary nature of most social media engagements. But they do not detract from the overall value of these guidelines.

These are must-reads for any public sector organization that is struggling with social media.

Here are a few highlights about each of the documents.

High-Level Guidance

In the first document, I love the passive-active-engaged approach.

Your organization doesn’t have to jump in boots and all on the first day. You can start with a passive involvement and move through to becoming more active and finally fully engaged with the audiences you have identified.

Passive: One of the first things your organization can do in social media is simply to listen. What’s being said about you? […]

Active: Once you’ve listened for a while and understand the tone and concerns of a social media community, you can begin becoming more active. You can post links to information to help people answer questions they have, or you can actively correct an inaccuracy on a blog, forum or a wiki […]

Engaged: Finally, your organization can become fully engaged. You can set up a group on a social networking site and regularly introduce content for discussion, or you can establish a Twitter profile and begin contributing and actively posting and answering questions.

This looks so reasonable and yet it is not what most guidelines say, as they try to urge organizations to establish a presence even without any clear understanding of their audience’s expectations.

When describing the “active” phase, the guidelines offer another pearl:

This sort of activity can be done in ‘other people’s houses’ – that is, in the blogs, forums and wikis that others have established.

This is what I have been telling clients for quite some time. People who feel passionate about something and have already established a forum for discussion want you to join them on their turf and to play according to their terms.

The document expands the three phases above into five activities: monitor, signpost or support, respond, discuss and debate, and suggests objectives, benefits, risks and risk management techniques for each of these activities.

There is a very clear association between the code of conduct and the use of social media.

…the Code of Conduct for your individual agency apply to staff participation online as a public servant. Staff should participate in the same way as they would with other media or public forums such as speaking at conferences…

Once more, this is so obvious and yet I have not seem many guidelines that state this in such a simple manner. The document add some interesting perspectives, such as:

If you are participating in social media on behalf of your agency, disclose your position as a representative of your agency unless there are exceptional circumstances, such as a potential threat to personal security. Never give out personal details like home address and phone numbers

If you’re using social media in a personal capacity, you should not identify your employer when doing so would bring your employer into disrepute

Always make sure that you are clear as to whether you are participating in an official or a personal capacity. Be aware that participating online may attract media interest in you as an individual, so proceed with care regardless of what capacity you are acting in

This is much welcomed common sense, treating employees like adult and responsible people, and giving the the tools they need to make their decision. And, when in doubt, “take advice from your manager or legal team”.

Hands-on Toolbox

At first sight the document may look too prescriptive, as it looks at different types of social media (social networks, media-sharing sites, blogs, wikis and forums) and for each types looks at strengths and weaknesses. But it uses a very interesting approach to describing how to find relevant media, how to assess their relevance, how to participate in different roles (contributor, moderator, user), and how to track them. There are loads of useful nuggets that help prospective users understand how to approach social media, how to get the most out of it as well as how to understand when to pull the plug.

I found quite a few similarities between this approach (as well as the passive-active-engaged above), and the one we described in a note published back in 2008 (login required), where we introduced an approach to engagement based on six phases (seek, observe, complement, involve, assess and leverage, which make the acronym SOCIAL).

There are also good sections on reporting, records management, and measurement. These areas are still work in progress for many, and the guidelines recognize this:

Evaluating the effectiveness of a social media component in a strategy is an emerging art. For web metrics, it took time to evolve into commonly understood measures that could inform decision making. Social media is going through the same process

The guidelines suggest quantitative and qualitative measures, but do not pretend they can offer the ultimate solution. As they say in the introduction, they are “not meant to be read from start to finish, but rather to be used as a reference when facing specific issues or using specific tools”.

One attendee shared that, despite the success their communications people were having in using social media, they could not get much success internally, and others confirmed they were through a similar struggle in picking the right platform or have employees make sustainable use of an existing platform. As we looked at the difference between the external success of that first client and their difficulties on the internal side, it became apparent that – once again – “purpose” is what makes the difference. Information shared by that agency on social media is about the weather and – let’s face it – almost everybody cares about the weather. But then, if you turn your head inside the organization, not everybody shares the same purpose, unless occasionally or perhaps in small teams.

This is because social media is about people, primarily a tool for employees to do their job better.

Which leads to the other point we debated: the need for a professional identity on social media platforms that is distinct from personal identity. One participant said that employees are actually encouraged to create a separate professional-only identity on Facebook and other consumer social media platforms if they want to use those for work-related purposes. However this may conflict with the terms of use of the platform and – anyhow – the way people will use social media and manage the boundary between personal and professional will be theirs and theirs only (notwithstanding the relevant social media use policies and codes of conduct).

Unless government organizations understand that what really sets social media apart is the word “social” rather than “media”, and that they are people tool and not corporate tool, most attempts at developing effective strategies will be futile.

I was scheduled to speak after the Milan city manager, and a number of executives from media and technology providers,on the topic of “Social Media in the New Normal”, as the so-called New Normal was the theme for the event. Previous speakers covered municipal wifi investments to boost a digital market, how a major media company uses social and mobile, and the favorable outlook for mobile apps.

I was a bit concerned that pitching the secondary role that communication and marketing folks should have with respect to the rest of the business, would clash with their belief that they have to control the use of social media in the enterprise as tightly as they possibly can. In fact, I could see a few faces staring at me during the first few minutes, but then the compelling examples of how even an industry as boring as government is using social media warmed them up. In a conference where there had been a very quiet Twitter activity to that point, I started seeing people retweeting and reinforcing some of my quotes. There was a negligible fraction of skeptics and, more importantly, none of the self-appointed social network experts who animate TV and radio talk shows and have zillions of followers said or wrote anything. This surprised me since, as soon as I arrived, I was told by the organizers that one of them had promised he would grill me with questions: but although somebody told me he was around, he did not show up or introduce himself. Next time, maybe.

It seems that several commercial enterprises are going through the same struggle as government agencies in finding out the real value and the most appropriate governance approach for social media.

Although I cannot derive too much from half a day, it seems to me that some governments are asking themselves tougher and more timely questions than their commercial counterparts. As I said at the beginning of my speech, there is a lot that commercial enterprises can learn from government agencies. While use that line almost as a joke to empathize with the audience, it looks like that is really the case.

While I was there, looking at the beautiful paintings on walls and ceilings, I noticed several people, of all ages, sitting and praying or simply meditating. Their status deeply touched me. Not because of any religious fervor, but because their quiet demeanor, their lack of urgency, looked so natural there and yet in striking contrast with how we seem to be living our lives today.

This made me reflect about how much things have changed during my lifetime. When I was a kid in downtown Milan, the city was almost quiet, with many fewer cars, the small shops where people would spend more time chatting with the owner than actually buying what they needed. My day had clear boundaries: time to go to school, time to eat (at relatively fixed times, as the whole family would eat together), time to go out and see friends. There was very little or no overlap. There were no videogames, computers, ipods, there was no TV during the day and TV was just B&W. So sometimes we had even time to get bored and to figure out ways to make a better use of our spare time. A branch would become a sword or a gun, a little piece of carton between the spokes would turn our bikes into “roaring” motorbikes, a piece of paper turned into a ball would make us play soccer or volleyball matches during the breaks in between lessons at school.

My kids live a different, more hectic life. They have Facebook open while doing their home assignment, and jump from posting the solution to the class group to chatting about a new song almost seamlessly. They cannot stand being bored as they fill all those little gaps in between their (many) activities with electronic toys, compulsive sharing and socialization.

Things are very different also in our work life. My father would come back from work and switch off from being a bank employee to being a father and a husband, and at most he would gripe about work during the first course over dinner and then talk about something else. Week ends were sacred too. For me, well work and personal life overlap all the time, as I may be traveling for business over a week end or have a team call at dinner time.

The whole pace of life has accelerated like never before. Just look at how stock markets react almost instantly to negative or positive news, how the reputation of individuals is impacted by social media gossip, how global supply chains are optimized by using quasi real time information.

The history of the world have made it faster, especially through the technology advances of the 19th and 20th century: combustion engine and electricity and all that came with those, from cars, trains, planes, to telecommunications, computers, and the Internet. The pace keeps accelerating and our business and social models have adapted accordingly. We have seen more wealth, the progress of new parts of the world. even more global collaboration across many countries to face challenges and solve problems.

On the other hand, it is not all gold that glitters. The attention span of consumers as well as kids is shortening to levels that make meaningful interactions and learning processes very hard to function. My wife, who has been a teacher in high school for many years, witnesses decreased performance of new students hitting 9th grade year-over-year. People seem increasingly impatient when they have to queue and tolerance for even minor disservice has become very low: I, for one. often complain on Facebook about all sorts of glitches with government or financial services, things that I would easily tolerate ten years ago and I would never think about sharing instantly with hundreds of friends.

I am no Luddite and I have always been working in or around innovation. But as I look at how rapidly situations and sentiments swing as a consequence of 24×7 connectivity through most of the world, I wonder whether and how we can distill some of the experiences from our previous life.

Little things like pausing before responding an email or an IM. as we would if we had to hand-write a letter, buy postage and mail it. Things like taking a little time for ourselves to just reflect about what we are doing it, without falling hostage to the compulsive need for being up to date and visible at every single instant of our life. Things like teaching our kids that boredom is an important – better – an essential component of their becoming adults. Things like trying to teach human science like literature, ancient Greek, Latin, history, without being obsessed with how to make them immediately applicable but valuing that through those disciplines kids will learn how to learn and will set foundations that will come to fruition when least expected.

Let’s set ourselves apart from all those loungers who have been riding the Internet revolution from the “new economy” at the turn of the century to the “social enterprise” today, and do nothing else than cashing on those phenomena and trends. Let’s digest what’s happening around us, pretty much like we digested philosophy or arts or Latin or advanced math, and use all these as tools to help us understand and shape the future. Let’s listen before talking, let’s learn before teaching, let’s establish our identity before having it established for us by others.

This is not dissimilar from what so many previous generations before us have done. And they are the ones who built sanctuaries, buildings, symphonies that stood the test of time.

Whereas there is no such thing as a widely recognized and “standard” sets of metrics, people use metrics such as number of followers, richness of social network as well as tools and sites like Klout.com. However, like all metrics, also social networking metrics should be taken with care. Here are a few points for reflection:

• Different people have different attitudes to how they use social media. Some accept or actively seek a high number of connections, while others are more selective. Should the former be considered better than the latter?
• Different people use different degrees of visibility of their social media activity within their networks: some show everything to everybody, others use circles and groups far more carefully. Should people less concerned with privacy and more concerned with self-promotion be considered more trustworthy?
• Different people use recommendations (such as in LinkedIn) and similar mechanisms in different ways: some actively seek and trade recommendations, while others do this more selectively or do not do it at all. Should I trust a reference-hunter?
• Different people produce and relay content in different ways: some post a lot of links, retweets, etc, while others post relatively little and mostly personal views. Should I value a content relayer more or less than a content author?

Given the diversity of use, it is pretty tough to make comparisons that hold across such a inhomogeneous user base. And yet there are people who claim clout and authority out of their hectic FB, Twitter or Friendfeed activity.

So, there is no substitute for carefully reading what people say, for looking for references about what they did in real life, for forming one’s own judgment about the trustworthiness of a person based on good old brick&mortar metrics (even if digitally-enabled) rather than trusting numbers and indicators.

The good news is that in my experience and in the field I cover, the vast majority of people are trustworthy. However they also happen to be people who I know in real life or are trusted by people I know and trust in real life.

Beware of emerging self-supporting networks, where people reference, congratulate, recommend, repost each other. They may be perfectly fine groups and individuals, but they may equally be people who would have absolutely nothing to say if they were not (at least for the time being) on the cool side of the digital divide.

Usually this leads to calls for greater spending in IT, possibly through investments and grant funding by international, national and local government organizations. These programs assume that injecting money that businesses and governments can spend on technology will ultimately improve a country’s situation.

Irrespectively of whether this is true or not, current challenges call for a much more targeted and, to some extent, ruthless use of IT. Recently, I have been involved in a few conversations about the need for a Digital Agenda in Italy, and I clearly expressed my doubts that this may turn into little else than a waste of money.

On the other hand, there are major problems that technology can solve, although I doubt most people would like to see them solved. One that has proven very challenging for several decades is tax evasion in Italy.

Nobody knows exactly how much money escapes the taxman every year in this country, but figures I have seen range between 60 and over 100 billion euro per year. Enough money to significantly reduce public debt and possibly bail out a couple of smaller countries.

There are many reasons for this. Many people in Italy are self-employed, so they are not subject to a pay-as-you-earn system like employees do. They are reluctant to invoice their customers, and lure them by offering discounts if they do not ask for an invoice, or just remind them that if they do, they’ll be charged with a hefty 10 to 20% VAT. Consumer clients, who are unable to deduct many of these expenses anyhow, go for the cheaper option and do not ask for the invoice or accept to be invoiced for a lower amount. Take into account that this applies to builders, plumbers, electricians, small shops, as well as to doctors and specialists, and many more categories, and you get how pervasive this can be.

Add all those workers who are almost invisible, as they work without any regular employment contract (home carers, nurses, private teachers, as well as temporary workers in the agriculture or construction businesses), and you can realize the size of the problem.

If you visit Italy, you will notice that there is disproportionate use of cash with respect to many other countries. Just take a look at the highway toll booths, where drivers queue to pay cash rather than use the very comfortable automatic booths where you can pay by credit or debit card. Or go to a mall and look at how many people pay cash for an expensive plasma screen, a five-people family grocery bill or a 2-week luxury travel package.

This is a very thorny problem, because potentially everyone is an accomplice and because the customer who does not pay the VAT is as much in non-compliance as the supplier. Also, the tax structure in Italy is particularly cumbersome and tax rates are very high, at least if compared to the level of public service we receive. Therefore certain political parties almost justify some form of self-determination in how much small businesses and self-employed individuals pay in taxes, with the excuse that if they paid all their dues, they would probably be out of business.

Therefore this turns to be a classical chicken-and-egg problem. The state cannot reduce taxes due to the huge debt and massive evasion, and taxpayers allegedly cannot pay all taxes without putting their business’ survival a risk. In all fairness, if Italy has not suffered dramatic consequences from the global financial crisis and recession is also thank to its “healthy” black economy and invisible savings coming from untaxed activities.

What can technology do to make you pay taxes? Actually a lot. By answering three fundamental questions:

• Who is not paying taxes?

• How are my taxes being used?

• How can we reduce tax rates?

Who is not paying taxes?

Technology is already being used to fight tax evasion, mostly by mashing up data from different sources – tax files, land and building registry, car and boat registry, and so forth – to identify cases of non compliance. However, given the scale of the problem, the tax agency will never have enough inspectors to investigate suspicious cases.

So why not crowdsourcing this? In 2008 the tax agency published income and taxes for all taxpayers relative to year 2005: while this sparkled privacy concerns and allegations that it may provide useful information for criminals to decide who to target, it also drove quite a few people to report about suspicious cases. I appreciate this is not ideal, but for lack of a better compliance process, there is nothing wrong in asking people to help. This may be done by putting incentives in place for people who flag cases, with concrete evidence that triggers an immediate investigation. Or by allowing people to report about service providers who refuse to invoice (or invoice for a lower amount) giving them immunity in return for their report. People may be encouraged to use devices like smartphones, mp3 players, tablets, to record conversations that prove tax-related wrongdoings, in exchange for tax breaks. Also the application development community could be engaged, by launching contests and hackatons for them to come up with smart apps that use – among other things – open data to help catch non compliant taxpayers.

This does not sound like a nice approach, does it? But when a problem is so huge and so hard to solve, radical measures may be the only option.

How are my taxes being used?

I still have vivid memories of the first letter I got over 15 years ago from the city of Brussels , where I was living at the time, with a very simple local tax form. On one side the amount of local tax I owed, with a couple of fields to fill, and on the other side a detailed breakdown of how that money would be used for various city services. Actually, it does not take rocket science to print the budget breakdown on the back of your tax form, and yet this does not happen in Italy.

Technology can help visualize that information in a much more meaningful way. Think about turning your taxes into how many antivirus shots can be paid, or how many millimeters of a bridge you are helping with, or how many students get a free book, or how many kilos of waste get recycled.

Creating a clear line of sight between what you pay and what you get can go a long way in explaining people that taxes are not just to fund an extravagant lifestyle by certain politicians, but are the fuel for any public service.

How can we reduce tax rates?

After compliance and transparency comes participation. Many people feel strongly about the fact that there are too many taxes, and they are too high. As they start paying them and having a better appreciation of what they are for, they may contribute their ideas about how to simplify the tax system.

Traditional participation techniques, including idea collection and rating, blogs, wikis, fora, could be blended with more innovative ones, such as serious games, i.e. the use of a gaming paradigm to solve real problems. Given the overwhelming success of social games like Farmville, why not something like a Taxville, where participants collaborate to develop a better system?

Beyond Italy, and taxes

We are way too used to consider government 2.0 as something that improves the way citizens access government service and information, and cannot easily conceive its use to make people comply with laws and regulations. Sure, we accept that law enforcement authorities use social media to fight crime, protect our kids from pedophiles, prevent acts of terrorism. But we would probably invoke privacy and personal freedoms, should government start spying on us or – equally – encouraging others to do so.

Unfortunately many of the issues that governments have to face going forward will be unpleasant in nature, dealing with spending less and asking more to citizens: more compliance, more taxes, more involvement in service delivery. The signs are clear: defaulting sovereign debts, declining budgets, shrinking workforce.

There is no more time for complacency and for looking at government 2.0 as a nice to have rather than a must have. There is plenty of application areas, but very few will be about better services and greater participation: most will be about helping government become more efficient and effective, and compliance will be an important part. This will go well in countries where people are used to play by the rules, but less so in countries where there is traditional distrust for government, often combined with ways to cut the red tape in ways that are not always entirely legal. The same approach described above for Italian taxpayers could be used to fight corruption, negligence, low productivity. For how uneasy moving from the “wisdom of the crowd” to the “snitching of the crowd” might feel, it may become a necessity.

Some will claim that this may lead to social unrest or even some new form of civil war. Recently I debated on Facebook with a few folks who support the idea of slashing taxes. My point was that compliance with current tax laws should prevail over an attempt to bail out repeated tax offenders and reduce their tax bill: they had quite a vocal reaction, suggesting that my attitude would be conducive to excessive animosity between employed and self-employed people.

Let me be very clear here. I am all for personal liberties and civil rights, including the sacrosanct right to privacy. However, just to quote what an Italian rocker said at a concert I attended yesterday night, “freedom is not for granted, we need to earn it every day”.

Those who leveraged their own freedom to the detriment of others (be it by evading taxes or making reckless investments or risking somebody else’s money) may have to feel the pinch of a new flavor of government 2.0, if we want things to get any better.

Also, those who fell in love with the idea of open government and a wonderful new economy powered by petabytes of open data, may have to accept that the most immediate value of those great ideas may be realized by government themselves, rather than citizens.

The client I was having lunch with had been struggling with figuring out how to engage citizens online to plan changes to quad bike tracks in a nearby park: should they create a community? Should they create a Facebook group for interested people to join? My reaction was that, prior to doing that, it would make sense to figure out whether and where quad bike fans gather online and join them on their turf.

At that point, the senior manager in charge of policy planning had an epiphany and said: “Of course! Actually I am planning to drive a quad bike in the bushes with a group of supporters in order to have a first hand exposure to their issues. Isn’t what you are suggesting the same, just online?”. Sure it is.

It is remarkable how often people forget that what works offline may actually work online too. I suspect that we need fewer social media consultants who offer great Facebook presence strategy and services, and more common sense. And common sense is not a resource that people working for the public sector have in short supply.