Gov 2.0 Boosters from Around Globe Point to Sprouts, Much Bigger Opportunities

Israel is using Facebook for public diplomacy, said Yaron Gamborg, deputy director of training in the country’s Foreign Affairs Ministry. Some of the highest use comes from Indonesia, a country that Israel lacks diplomatic relations with, he said. Israel also is working on institutional wikis for its government, Gamborg said. It has Ovdei Media, an online social network for public employees, he said.

Realizing Gov 2.0 in Australia depends for “equitable participation” on the completion of a planned national broadband network and of the federal government’s multibillion investment in computers for schools, and passage of a freedom of information bill that has been introduced, said Sen. Kate Lundy of the Labor Party, who represents the Capital Territory. She has helped organize and develop with no budget the technology for Public Sphere conferences combining in-person and online participation in policy discussions. They have combined live streaming, e-mail, letters and the use of Twitter, Flickr and blogs, Lundy said. The efforts have been channeled into wikis to create recommendations, she said. Government and private bodies are picking up on the techniques, Lundy said.

One of the high points of collaborative e-government north of the border is that Natural Resources Canada is using a wiki, which any employee can edit, to prepare briefing notes for the agency’s top officials, said David Eaves, an adviser to Vancouver’s mayor and a fellow at the Centre for the Study of Democracy. “It has really destroyed the old hierarchical model” in the department, he said. The Health Canada department is using Facebook for outreach, he said.

These developments reflect a national pattern, Eaves said: The federal government action is mainly in social media, rather than open public-data sets, and the opposite is true at city halls. Overall there’s “a lot more excitement” in municipal government, he said. He credited that to their need to substitute ingenuity for financial resources and their larger size relative to their constituencies, increasing the chances of finding a few risk-takers on staff.

Vancouver has been a leader, with its “open” motion strongly directing officials to open data and to use open standards and open-source technology whenever possible, Eaves said. Vancouver Garbage Reminder is available online to let residents know when their pickup days are coming, and using common standards, the city ported from New York an augmented-reality Web application to find transit stops and stations and plan trips in time for the Winter Olympics, he said. Every transit point is a Foursquare location, a development that could be used in allocating buses to meet demand, Eaves said.

Toronto and Edmonton also have strong government Web 2.0 programs, Eaves said. But little Nanaimo, British Columbia, has been the national leader due to the efforts of a pair of technology volunteers, he said. In less than two weeks, using off-the-shelf technology, they allowed online users of the local council agenda to click on an item of interest and go straight to the discussion of it in video of the meeting, Eaves said.

"Technology can be a key part of the healing process” after a war, said Joel Whitaker of the U.S. Institute of Peace, created and funded by Congress. Reaching the crucial goal of “stable governance” dovetails well with what social media offer, he said.

Afghanistan shows how this can work, Whitaker said. It relies on “simple and traditional cellphones” rather than PCs and Internet cafes, he said. Mobile technology has been used for election monitoring, to prevent corruption by notifying members of the Afghan National Police how much they've been paid and where to collect, and even, through what Whitaker called an m-Jirga program supported by eBay, to enable long-distance administration of traditional tribal jurisprudence.