Why a declaration?

The most important political outcome of this event is a joint declaration by all ministers. The ultimate purpose is to task the European Commission with a set of initiatives (and related budget) to launch projects of common interest and facilitate best practice exchanges. Notably e-government is not one area in which the EU has any regulatory authority, hence the importance of the declaration to empower it to take initiative.

This is an important factor in explaining the apparent lack of balance of this year’s EU Ministerial Declaration on E-Government on the topic of Government 2.0.

Main Themes

In its initial part the declaration sets four main themes for 2015:

- Citizens and businesses are empowered by eGovernment services designed around users’ needs and developed in collaboration with third parties, as well as by increased access to public information, strengthened transparency and effective means for involvement of stakeholders in the policy process,

- Mobility in the Single Market is reinforced by seamless eGovernment services for the setting up and running of a business and for studying, working, residing and retiring anywhere in the European Union,

- Efficiency and effectiveness is enabled by a constant effort to use eGovernment to reduce the administrative burden, improve organisational processes and promote a sustainable low-carbon economy,

- The implementation of the policy priorities is made possible by appropriate key enablers and legal and technical preconditions.

The first theme is about government 2.0 and is the most innovative part of the declaration, while the other three objectives relate to initiatives that the European Commission and Member States have already in place (such as large pilot projects for identity management, e-procurement and implementation of the service directive, as well as a large program for the reduction of administrative burden).

Is This the Dawn of Government 2.0?

The first theme is articulated in the five objectives:

Improve eGovernment services to cater for the different needs of users and deliver them in the most effective way. We will develop user-centric services that provide flexible and personalised ways of interacting with public administrations. We will develop multi-channel strategies in order to deliver eGovernment services in the most effective way. We will develop inclusive services that will help to bring down barriers experienced by digitally or socially excluded groups. Efficient eGovernment services built around the needs of users will increase trust in government and contribute to higher user satisfaction whilst achieving efficiency gains.

This first paragraph has little to do with Gov 2.0. It is more about the continuation of traditional user-centric e-government initiatives, as they are measured and celebrated by a series of benchmarking report, the last of which has been issued in conjunction with the declaration

Invite third parties to collaborate on the development of eGovernment services. We will actively seek collaboration with third parties, for example businesses, civil society or individual citizens, in order to develop user-driven eGovernment services. Collaboration with third parties will stimulate the creation of innovative, flexible and personalized services, increase the overall effectiveness of services and maximize public value.

This second paragraph is way more interesting. Although it does not mention communities or social network, it suggests to reach out to third parties and introduces the concept of user-driven services. I hope that this has been somewhat influenced by Gartner positions on citizen-driven vs citizen-centric

Increase availability of public sector information for reuse. We will increase availability of public sector information for reuse, in accordance with the spirit of and the conditions established by Public Sector Information Directive 2003/98/EC. We will encourage the reuse of public data by third parties to develop enriched services that maximize the value for the public. New demand-led information products and services enabled by the reuse of public sector information will support the transition of Europe to a knowledge-based economy.

This paragraph clearly may prelude to the development of something like www.data.eu and the endorsement of similar public data access channels in member states, to facilitate mashups.

Strengthen transparency of administrative processes. We will explore how we can make our administrative processes more transparent. Transparency promotes accountability and trust in government.

This is a rather generic call for greater transparency, which is somewhat subsumed by the previous objectives. And finally:

Involve stakeholders in public policy processes. We will actively develop and promote effective, useful and better ways for businesses and citizens to participate in the policy processes. Increased public engagement through more effective methods at all levels enhances government’s efficiency and effectiveness and improves the quality of its decisions and services.

This last paragraph is consistent with previous calls for increased citizen engagement. It does not say anything about how different the “more effective methods” will be and to what extent they will leverage existing avenues, such as social media or service delivery itself (as citizens are more likely to be engaged while they are already interacting with government in service delivery mode).

An Asymmetric View of Government 2.0

Not surprisingly the declaration confirms the asymmetric view that many have about government 2.0: information flows from government to citizens (through reuse of public information) while engagement flows from citizens to government. However, as indicated in a previous post, the reverse flows are equally if not more important. Information must flows from existing communities and social media to government, and government employees need to engage with citizens on the citizens’ turf (e.g. consumer social networks)

Government 2.0 Gets Lost in Declaration

Later in the declaration there are statements such as

We will ensure that open specifications are promoted in our national interoperability frameworks in order to lower barriers to the market. We will work to align our national interoperability frameworks with applicable European frameworks.

which apply to both traditional e-government initiatives and to government 2.0. Unfortunately there is no element to judge whether a new architectural approach will be pursued and whether the use of open specifications is promoted only to achieve interoperability among government organizations, or is meant to address also more innovative scenarios, where government services interoperate with non government ones.

From this point onward the declaration mostly restates concepts and mechanisms that are very similar to those of previous years. For instance:

The Open Source model could be promoted for use in eGovernment projects. It is important to create a level playing field where open competition can take place in order to ensure best value for money.

Without prejudice to the relevance of open source (especially as a mechanism to socialize and co-develop specific vertical solutions), the genericity of the reference above seems to recall behaviors from several years ago.

Also the reference to innovation, although mentioning service architectures and new computing paradigms (cloud?), carries the legacy of previous declarations and reveals one of the fundamental purposes of the declaration, which is to secure resources to continue supporting existing programs and initiatives.

Regard innovation as an integral part of our way of working. We will promote innovation in eGovernment services through research and development, pilot projects and other implementation schemes. We will explore and develop the possibilities offered by new open and flexible service architectures and new computing paradigms. Innovation is a central part of eGovernment and will contribute to the goal of making Europe a leading knowledge-based economy.

In fact the last section mentions studies, programs and initiatives that clearly map on on-going initiatives and interest groups and there is no reference to truly innovative schemes.

There is still hope, or not really?

One should consider that the declaration is a very high-level document and there is still plenty of room for changing the type of initiatives and mechanisms. Unfortunately the publication of the most recent e-government benchmark, which is the first outcome of the renewed contract between EU and Capgemini, shows a disappointing continuity with the old e-government approach.

If government 2.0 is about discontinuity, enabling bi-directional flows and engaging new stakeholders, the EU declaration has failed on every account.

I am in Sydney at the Gartner Symposium and I just met a client from a federal government organization, who seems to get web 2.0 right and expressed his doubts about the kind of response met by the Australian mashup contest. I have not reviewed it in any detail, but it seems to mimic, both in quantity and in quality, what we have seen in previous contests.

I am not really surprised. In fact, for how widespread web 2.0 use is, those who are able and have time available to write an app and submit it are still in a minority. “Citizen developers” will be a reality in a few years time, but are still an exception today. Yet, citizen do use social media to gather together and discuss issues that matter to them. These communities are the best place to socialize data and make people think about mashups. So the real question is how to get their ideas as opposed to the usual geeks’ and web 2.0 enthusiasts’ ones.

What are government 2.0 strategic planners doing to bridge that gap? In my humble opinion, not much. The only way to bridge the gap is to empower government employees to reach out to those communities and socialize data. But, again, how many government organizations have any such plan?

While there is a research note (access for clients only) explaining the definition in some detail, I want to provide the main highlights here.

The socialization of information has multiple facets (government to citizens, citizens to government and government to government) and the boundaries between these facets are increasingly blurred. The next step will be the socialization of services and processes by engaging individuals and communities to perform part of existing government processes or transform them by leveraging external data and applications.

Commoditization – which has already started with consolidation and shared services to reduce the diversity of infrastructure and horizontal application – will gradually move toward services and business processes.

Government 2.0 has seven main characteristics:

• It is citizen-driven.
• It is employee-centric.
• It keeps evolving.
• It is transformational.
• It requires a blend of planning and nurturing.
• It needs Pattern-Based Strategy capabilities.
• It calls for a new management style.

• Government provides data to citizens to provide openness and transparency
• Citizens engage with government to improve policy-making and service delivery

This approach implies that data flows from government to citizens and engagement flows from citizen to government. This is what I call the asymmetry of Government 2.0, since flows appear to be somewhat mono-directional, or very biased in a single direction. But these capture only one part of the story.

What about case managers who access to external communities rating government as well as non government care facilities to make a decision about where to place a case subject depending on a combination of financial constraints and customer ratings? What about a procurement officer looking at communities discussing prospective suppliers’ performances? Or HR professionals looking for information about candidates LinkedIn or Facebook? What about citizens tagging pictures put by museums and cultural heritage organizations on Flickr, so that they help the museum describe and organize their collections?

There are plenty of examples where data goes the other way around, from citizens to government, and government can use it in combination with data it owns (such as financial, HR, case-related ones, as well as taxonomies) in order to improve the way it deliver services or to initiate policy changes. A prediction we are about to publish says that by 2012 up to one in five government processes will be based on crowdsourced (i.e. external) data.

The assumption that citizens are mostly on the receiving end of open data and mashups needs to be changed. While the idea of citizens as application developers and data mashers is great, those who are most likely to benefit from all this are governments themselves, once they empower their employees to access, assess and use data outside their own perimeter.

Government 2.0 implies a bidirectional flow of information and services. It will require business intelligence suites that integrate data analytics with social networking analysis to help identify patterns revealing future behaviors; case management tools that give case managers the ability to alter case processing on the basis of data from external communities; online citizen services that can be integrated with third party portals; and indeed open data repositories that allow citizens to develop value added mashups and new applications.

One school of thought suggests that the use of social media should be carefully planned and controlled by government, and that having a sufficiently compelling purpose is strong enough a guarantee that communities will be sustainable and thrive.

Another school of thought says that – in the case of government – no planning is really possible or useful until when you have figured out what exists already. This means that, even if a government organization identifies a compelling purpose, it still needs to look for existing or emerging communities and assess whether to join them, complement them or do something different.

My colleague Anthony Bradley has recently posted about “Piloting Social Media Creates More Risks Than It Mitigates”, where he rightly points out that:

You may only get one shot at catalyzing community formulation. Don’t pilot, test, prototype, or experiment on the community. Don’t artificially restrict participation. The law of numbers is a critical factor in building a thriving and productive community. Why would you only go after a small subset of a target audience when mass adoption is a critical success factor? You will handicap success from the start.

I cannot but agree more with this. But my contention, and the reason why – unlike Anthony – I do like the term “pilot” is that for a government organization is very easy to believe its online presence is relevant just because it has a strong and recognized brand. But what is a compelling purpose for a government organization, may not be so for its target audience. So, before venturing into creating one’s own community, it is imperative to identify whether external communities already exist, possibly join them (as a group of individuals and not as a government organization) and “pilot” participation there.

Is this community valuable to our goals? Can we influence its behaviors? Is it able to generate knowledge that we could not aggregate on a government-branded community? Is there any indication that it can generate public value for our agency? These are some of the questions that employees who experiment with these communities should answer, before doing any planning for a government-driven community.

Over a year ago I published a research note (How Government Can Use Social Networks – access to clients only) that seems to be applicable to most of the cases I have seen, where people are struggling either with finding the compelling purpose to launch a community or with making sure it will be compelling to others and not just to them.

The note suggests a framework called SOCIAL to empower employees to

• Seek communities that are relevant for their job and purpose,
• For communities that seem interesting, Observe their behaviors;
• For communities that seem promising, Complement their content with public information where deemed fit;
• For communities that seem valuable, Involve in deeper discussions (with appropriate disclaimer).
• Up to this point, participation has been at the employee level. It is now time to Assess whether this community can have an enterprise value. If not, it will remain as an individual tool or be discontinued. If yes, then
• Leverage it as an enterprise one

This is the kind of process that government organizations should go through before considering the development of their own external social networks. Seeking, observing, complementing and involving is exactly what I mean by “piloting”. If the outcome of such a process is not satisfactory and the organization still believes it has a strongly compelling purpose, then it can well develop its own presence. However, if such a compelling purpose is difficult to find or to socialize, doing nothing and letting employees pilot new emerging communities is a perfectly legitimate option.

As I’ve said in a recent post, the path to success is from the bottom up, and from the outside in.

There does not seem to be a real sense of urgency. Engaging citizens remains a noble aspiration but few would consider doing it by reaching out to them on somebody else’s social network. With few exceptions, most seem to be banning access to social sites from the workplace, and there is very little done even in terms of social media strategies and policies, let alone any reflection on the pivotal role of employees.

Do not get me wrong here. European clients are as smart as North American ones, and they can be as articulate if not more. But they seem to be unwilling to challenge the status quo and to believe that anything can happen from the bottom-up and from the outside-in. Most feel comfortable in starting with tackling internal collaboration and – although they know very well that their employees are already using consumer social media – they’d rather ignore the impact that these media might have on internal collaboration goals. When it comes to external engagement, there is no room for individual employee’s initiatives, and any venture needs a political blessing. Unless the mayor, the minister, the governor say that government needs to use web 2.0 to engage people, they won’t.

Although I did not discuss this topic with any UK client yet, it is interesting to note how the fair amount of activity there is probably connected to the political push created by the Digital Britain plan and – earlier – by the Power of Information report. As usual, things take place in government when the hierarchy decides they do, but I’ve certainly noted in North America a greater propensity to explore new avenues, to trust knowledge workers, to step outside traditional boundaries.

So after two days in Cannes, my statement about North Americans being more likely than Europeans to get government 2.0 is even more valid. I hope my last day in Cannes tomorrow will give me hope, as I believe European citizens and government employees are using social media as much as their North American counterparts and denial will not help for long.

I have been reluctant to pick the number one factor, until when during a meeting last Friday, an executive from a federal Canadian agency used the term I had in mind but I had never put on paper. We were discussing how to make content more appealing to citizens using social media, and what the Smithsonian and others have been doing with Flickr, where they push content that can be tagged, classified, augmented by people on line. As I was going through this and other examples, I concluded with what I thought was the  common denominator in all success stories so far. Funnily enough, this government executive (a very smart lady, with a long experience in several large agencies, and an enviably open mind) and I used the same term at the same moment, so much so that it almost sounded like a duet: “You have to let go” we both said.

This is it. This is the key ingredient, the secret sauce for government 2.0 initiatives to succeed. Of course it is not the only one, and it won’t always guarantee success, but should be top of mind for all those who strategize about and lead government 2.0 projects.

“Let go” means that you cannot plan in advance, you cannot set a future state architecture, you cannot control your employees too tightly, you cannot make assumptions about where and how and when value will be generated.

Pretty scary, isn’t it?

In most cases I have delivered uncomfortable, controversial messages. The blurring boundaries between internal and external collaboration, the urgency of empowering employees besides (or rather than) citizens, the need for simple and enforceable social media policy that cover employee behaviors both on corporate network and elsewhere. For many, my examples of how consumer social media are creeping into internal processes were an eye-opener, and so were the calls for a bottom-up approach, where government agencies should let go control to facilitate engagement

What I noticed in every single meeting, also when people came from a completely different perspective, has been the willingness to challenge themselves, to consider alternative viewpoints, to use some of my intentionally provocative views to reflect about where they can improve. Once again, it has been a refreshing experience, with officials at all levels debating issues, bouncing back ideas, drafting roadmaps they had not considered possible before. It has been an exciting experience where I have got from our clients at least as much as I hope I have given them, if not more.

While a typical North American celebration such as Halloween approaches, I can’t but think about how different many Europeans are when challenged on the same topics. I do distinctly remember a guy who sat in a minister cabinet explaining to me why I was totally wrong about suggesting that government agencies open social media access to their employees: his view was one where employees are not an asset but a liability, where management tools are the same as those used in the fifties, where time seems to have frozen at the gates of his agency. He is not alone though. Several officials in European countries that I have been interacting with are relatively dismissive of any advice that runs contrary to their beliefs. I never assume I am right in what I say, but I love to provide alternative viewpoints for people to challenge their own ideas and possibly improve them. While most North American clients will engage and react, most European clients won’t.

Of course there are exceptions. People in Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands  or Ireland show similar characteristics as North Americans when it comes to debating issues. But in most other countries I have to be careful not to piss people off or to lower my expectations about the outcome of a debate.

Maybe the world is changing and I will find multiple counterexamples to this as soon as I start my next week at Cannes Symposium. I very much hope so, as I believe that in these turbulent times only those who are bold enough to accept that they may be wrong will thrive.

Most of my criticisms to some of the common wisdom is the excessive focus on the role of organizations (e.g.. government institutions, parliaments, political parties) and the very limited concern for the role of individuals within those organizations.

There is a lot of talking about individuals, but they are citizens, i.e. somebody to whom government is a service provider. In previous posts I have already articulated the complexity of the relationships between government and citizens, and highlighted why government cannot simply be equated to a platform.

Now, as the biannual European E-Government Conference is approaching (it will be held in Malmoe, Sweden, on 19-20 November), I have come across a draft Open Declaration on Public Services in the European Union, which – as far as I understand – will be presented at the conference, where we can expect a ministerial declaration expressing the willingness of EU member states to continue pursuing initiatives around e-government, government 2.0 and the likes (this has been the same every other year for a few years now).

The Open Declaration is being finalized with the help of several people, in pure crowdsourcing style (could it be otherwise?). It is certainly an interesting initiatives, but surprises me for stating the obvious and missing the key point.

Don’t get me wrong. What is obvious to those who do research on Government 2.0 may not be to the “person in the street” or the average, not too IT-literate politician. Therefore it is very good to restate that the three core principles for European public services are

1.       Transparency:  all public sector organizations should be “transparent by default” and should provide the public with clear, regularly-updated information on all aspects of their operations and decision-making processes. There should also be robust mechanisms for citizens to highlight areas where they would like to see further transparency. When providing information, public sector organizations should do so in open, standard and reusable formats, but with full regard to privacy issues.

2.       Participation: government should pro-actively seek citizen input in all its activities from user involvement in shaping services to public participation in policy-making. This input should be public for other citizens to view and government should publicly respond to it. The capacity to collaborate with citizens should become a core competence of government.

3.       Empowerment: public institutions should seek to act as platforms for public value creation. In particular, government data and government services should be made available in ways that others can easily build on. Public organizations should also enable all citizens to come together and solve their problems for themselves, by providing tools, skills and resources.

Now read the above a few times. Do you find anything missing? There is transparency (some commentators suggest to add “openness”, but that does not really change the basics). There is participation (citizens get at the center of government processes). And there is empowerment (with the platform concept taken from O’Reilly).

What this declaration misses – and in my view it is a big miss – is the role of those who work in government, i.e. its employees. Indeed they are citizens, so they will participate and be empowered but… wait a minute… they are bound to a code of conduct that could somewhat constraint their ability to participate Further, they are likely to know more about government objectives, procedures, processes, than the average citizen. So, wouldn’t it be appropriate to single them out and finally recognize that they are an asset government should leverage, through a wise use of “government 2.0”?

I am still amazed to see how little employee-centricity there is in today’s government 2.0 conferences, debates, positions and articles. It is as if employees were considered legacy, just part of an organization that will be transformed, and not the real fuel and soul of those organizations.

Until when their role will be given equal dignity as “citizens”, government 2.0 will remain an interesting subject for discussion, will marginally contribute to service improvement,  but won’t realize a fraction of its potential.

What does it take to take a step in this direction? Is the Malmoe ministerial declaration going to say anything about government employees?

Many think about how government as an organization (or actually a set of organizations and institutions) can leverage technology to improve effectiveness and efficiency and to better engage constituents. This leads to very interesting conversations about what to do with public information (now renamed “open data”), how to deal with personal data protection (otherwise known as “privacy”), how to bend existing rules to accommodate the blossoming of blogs, wikis, social media and other tools, and whether new laws and regulations are needed to police all this.

The problem is that government 2.0 is not about organizations and institutions. It is about the way in which constituents aggregate and socialize knowledge in ways that change their expectations and how they relate to government institutions.

Some of this knowledge will be facilitated or nurtured by open data initiatives (such as Data.gov and the likes), but this is just the tip of the iceberg. Ways in which open data will be used, mashed-up, rated and transformed by online communities as well as individuals  will already challenge existing policy boundaries. While legal entities (such as enterprises or professionals) are liable for misusing or misrepresenting information, will people be able to sue a community or an individual for an incorrect mash-up? Will law enforcement authorities be effective in pursuing a myriad of potential wrong-doers, who may have inadvertently violated rules in their personal rather than professional capacity?

If this looks already challenging, think about the vast amount of knowledge that gets accumulated by people themselves, ranging from Wikipedia to pictures on Flickr, from tutorial videos on YouTube to health-related groups and communities on Facebook or MySpace. As people start trusting more and more these sources as an alternative to – or to complement – official government sources, the role and clout of some government institutions will be inevitably challenged.

Recent history shows that institutions cannot easily deal with peer-to-peer networks. The best example is the never-ending fight between P2P music networks and music labels: how many thousands people keep downloading and sharing music for every single person who gets charged for pirating music? As music sharing sites get shut down, people move to different sites and platforms and pursuing each and every one of them is impossible or just not cost-effective.

Things are even more complicated when it comes to publishing and sharing information that people themselves have generated. The boundaries of ownership and privacy get blurred, let alone how to assess the quality of that information. Would any government institution ever be able to police all social networks dealing with health care, or social services, or how to find loopholes in the tax systems, and so forth?

While there is no easy answer, there is a starting point for an answer. If challenges come from groups of individuals who dynamically self-organize according to their purposes and values, the only way to face it is to engage individuals within and across institutions, and empower them to reach out, mingle, sense, help, and basically act as the institution’s sensors in this increasingly complex web of peer-to-peer relationships.

It boils down to what government employees can and cannot do, to whether and how they are equipped to face these challenges in their respective domains of activity. Be they teachers, nurses, tax agents or social workers, they are the best assets for institutions to understand how to morph in the future and still be able to exercise basic “governance” in a world where relationships are deeply transformed, forever.

It is, once again, about citizen-driven employee-centric government.