A Growing Gap Between Gov 2.0's Haves and Have-Nots?
BY Nancy Scola | Thursday, July 30 2009
Last week in Washington DC occurred the Open Government and Innovations Conference (OGI), put on by the Department of Defense and the latest in a steady stream of conferences dedicated to the intersection of government, politics, and tech. At least I don't think there have been any new Gov 2.0 conference between last Wednesday and today. It's frankly hard to keep track these days, what with Politics Online, our own Personal Democracy Forum, the upcoming Gov 2.0 Summit, so on and so forth. In what was once a wasteland, there is today rich bounty.
And as the gov 2.0 movement grows, it only makes sense that it splinter into different segments. Well, not exactly splinter, but pool in places. An in-house web manager at a behemoth government agency is going to have a different set of needs and wants than an entrepreneurial "new media" consultant. Both their interests are different from those of a grassroots activist looking for new organizing tactics. We see something similar happening in the food movement. As foodie-ism goes mainstream, we're crossing over from a general agreement that "Good food's important!" to "Okay, you folks think about food safety and we'll think about food justice and you think about changing food culture." That's a sign of maturation. It also means that the days of one-size-fits-all open government are over and done.
Here's an example. One staffer from a small federal office posted her reflections on OGI over on GovLoop, the open social network. She had mixed feelings about the conference, she wrote. "All web 2.0 conferences are all starting to look exactly the same. Many speakers come from agencies that are boldly using social media in a new and exciting ways, and many more 'believers,' who are not allowed to use those same technologies, come to hear about it." In other words, there are haves and have-nots when it comes to open government. "NASA and DoD get to successfully use social media, and the rest of us, for the most part, don't." And for the have-nots, she writes, what they need is less cheerleading and more tactical training. "We need specifics: case studies, business case strategies that succeeded to support any/all of these tools, etc." It's worth joining GovLoop to read the whole thing.