I found that Venessa Miemis’s posting on Open Foresight helpful in thinking about how to address the issue of Australia’s Government 2.0 Future as there are some close parallels. Venessa described the ‘open foresight’ concept as being a process for analysing “complex issues in an open and collaborative way, and to raise the bar on public discourse and forward-focused critical thinking”. Surely that same process goes to the heart of the policy development potential of Government 2.0. And both ‘government 2.0′ and ‘open foresight’ share the same challenge in addressing the transformation being driven by communications technologies, and the emergent behaviours those tools enable.
In the context of ‘government 2.o’ I have paraphrased of the interesting questions that are raised:
- How are our notions of open government evolving?
- What role do social technologies play in the evolution of public opinion?
- What happens when Gov2.0 networks and collaboration teams form?
- What do these emerging Gov2.0 governance models look like?
- How do public servants build knowledge together and become more effective learners?
You may notice that I’ve not mentioned government agencies in these questions. That’s deliberate because I feel that the future of Gov2.0 is more about networks and issues, and less about government agencies. Citizens care about issues, not government agencies. Issues transcend organisational silos. Networks cross institutional, jurisdictional and geographic boundaries.
I’ll be given some more thought to the questions I’ve raised above, in particular on the potential for networked policy and networked regulation.
