In a recent interview with the Financial Times, Google CEO Eric Schmidt lambasted government leaders around the world for being slow to understand and embrace the potential of new communications technologies. While companies in the private sector, many non-profit organizations, and an increasingly large proportion of the global citizenry steam ahead, government institutions are being left behind.

As a prime example, the UK’s deputy prime minister John Prescott recently proclaimed, with some measure of smugness, that he doesn’t really know what a blog is and is only just getting accustomed to reading his snail mail. This view, unfortunately, remains too pervasive, whether one looks to the marble halls of London, Ottawa, Washington, Geneva (or countless other places) for leadership in bringing the public sector up to speed with the latest generation of Web-based technologies.

Schmidt is quite right to be critical, but what failed to come through in the interview was the complexity of moving government and governance into the digital era. These complexities became most apparent to me while I was involved in an exciting international research program that was sponsored by over 20 government agencies around the world, including top ministries from the Canada, the Netherlands, Malaysia, Singapore, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States between 2000 and 2001. We found that government leaders quite readily accepted the idea that the Internet could bring both substantial efficiencies to the business of delivering government services and help enrich the vitality of the democratic process.

While many valuable initiatives followed in the wake of the program, government leaders have struggled with cultural inertia, complex legacies, and political wrangling. Getting government services online is hardly an election issue and many of the agencies that deliver government services are led by a generation of political bureaucrats that think of the Internet in much the same way that John Prescott does.

Meanwhile, many efforts to move government services online amount to little more than paving the cow paths–the same old inefficient government structures and institutions have remained intact when a much more radical rethinking and restructuring is in order. Citizens, for example, may be able to go to one website to renew their driver’s license and pay their taxes, but the buraucratic machinery behind the scenes remains largely unchanged, which means that opportunities to reduce bureaucracy and increase efficiency have been missed.

To be fair, concerns around privacy, security, authentication, and accountability–concerns that have been largely brushed aside by the private sector–are crucially important in public services, so there are no doubt tough implementation issues that must be resolved before government moves online in any meaningful sense.

The promise that engaging the citizenry in setting policy could renew democracy is even further remote than the more business-like job of public administration. Citizens already feel, with considerable justification, that government leaders blatantly ignore their views. So many citizens rightly cast a skeptical eye on efforts to engage in them in online consultations that appear to be more about public relations than policy-making. At the same time, governments leaders who genuinely care about democracy often lament the fact that the majority of people seem to care more about the next episode of Desperate Housewives than they do about the local planning commission or even issues of national importance. This in turn means that many political debates are monopolized by activists who tend to lean to either the left or right-wing extremes.

Deeper citizen engagement is further frustrated by elitist policy-makers that would rather rely on expert opinion than allow so-called laymen to weigh-in on issues for which they have little expertise or training. Whether the average citizen is adequately equipped to judge the consequences of various economic policy options in an increasingly complex and interdependent world (for example) is debatable indeed. But in such circumstances the onus should be on government officials (and other third parties) to inform the public, because when citizens are well-informed they will collectively make decisions that better reflect the values, views, interests, and aspirations of the majority than an elite group of experts could possibly hope to.

Lets face it; democracy is hard. The act of making policy is inevitably easier when conducted away from the critical eye of interest groups, the media, and ordinary citizens. Truly representative and fully-engaged democratic decision-making has so far proven next to impossible in all but the smallest and most committed organizations. As more and more critical issues escape the confines of local and national jurisdictions, however, the democratic deficit will only widen. That is why it is imperative that we envision and enact new ways to harness communication technologies to narrow that gap before the very legitimacy and effectiveness of government collapses.

I firmly believe that digital technologies–especially the latest generation of user-friendly tools like blogs, wikis, and podcasts–are moving all institutions in society (whether in government, the economy, or the community) in the direction of greater democratization. Governments must follow or risk losing power, authority, and relevance in a world where citizens are increasingly empowered to act collectively. As Don Tapscott and I argued in Wikinomics, if people can self-organize to build a world-class operating system, an encyclopedia, a mutual fund, and so much else, there is no reason why they cannot collaborate across borders to devise new forms of bottom-up governance.

I hope readers of this blog will weigh-in on the debate. I will continue to post on this issue over the coming weeks and months. In the meantime, check out some of the papers I wrote for the aforementioned program on digital government and democracy. The case studies are a bit dated, but I’m convinced that the ideas are more relevant now than ever.

The Governance Web

Digital-Era Policy-Making

Government Encounters the Hypernet