Web 2.0 In Government! Wait...we use that?

As a professor for the PAD3003 class -Public Administration in Society course here for Florida State. The first thing I ask my students is:

"How do you interact with public administrators?"

Usually it turns into jokes on the horrors of the local DMV, or how certain Florida House Reps and Senators don't respond to emails, but a couple are a little more aware of their surroundings and say they are currently talking with one right now (as teachers are in fact administrators working for the state! At least at FSU and other publicly funded schools...). 

At that point, i'd ask them is it only in person? To which, being undergrads I get blank stares (as they are all probably on Facebook). Administration, at least to the form we think it is, is usually in person. When we go to our clerk's office, when we complain over 411 (on the phone, not the web, which is web 2.0), that our power is still out after Hurricane Hermine (12 days!), and so on. BUT, interactivity with administration and government is handled digitally...in fact a lot of it is over the world wide web. 

Normal reaction

Now...Huh? But all I do is go on twitter/facebook/amazon/reddit/etc... What do you mean I interact with administration over the web!?

Yes, you may not see it often, or even think about it when you do. But you as a citizen sometimes involuntarily become a contributor and receiver of e-government services within your city/state/country. 

From the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission, and their focus on prospective technological studies, funding has been used to examine just the increasing usage of web 2.0 for governmental service and how do they function. In this research they address that "web 2.0 is relevant in the public and private sectors and have already been applied in multiple governmental areas" (Osimo, 2008). From here just a couple of the usages are as follows from the study:

And that's just a few

Now whoa whoa whoa... Back office and Front office domains? Yeah, now you might be thinking okay I can possibly see some things like that working for me, but just how much? Well when it comes to front office domains, you can actively see quite a lot! Virtual town halls, such as what you may have seen on CNN using "skype or facebook" to talk to senators and house representatives, sometimes that has gained in popularity from both sides of the aisle over the past decade (Libit, 2009) have gained massive appeal on what you would normally think interaction is! But even on a local level, how do most of us pay our utility bills? That e-tally program? Well, that is just as much a governmental web 2.0 program as a town hall. That little app or program on your website collects information for us in the "Back office domains" to know when issues are happening, from that knowledge management of programs and an active front office domain (reporting power outages on it, creating a crowd-sourced map of outages). It is also used to pay our bills for utility and give us information on when events in Tallahassee are happening (seriously if you use the app, it is quite interesting!).

Web 2.0 is a whole new avenue (in electronic age at least) for governments to truly create and gain content from those interacting with them, modernizing their respective government. I hope to go into it a lot more with technological examples. But first I will talk about why governments should go to web 2.0 if they haven't already.

Sources:

Libit, D. (2009, August 6). Virtual town halls gaining popularity. Retrieved from Politico : http://www.politico.com/story/2009/08/virtual-town-halls-gaining-popularity-025844

Osimo, D. (2008). Web 2.0 in Government: Why and How. Luxembourg: European Communities.