New Paradigm collaborator and avid Intellipedian Chris Rasmussen has a good article in FedTech magazine imploring governments to adopt a 2.0 strategy. It won’t be headline news for advanced users, but Rasmussen lays out a number of pretty simple Wikinomics ground rules for government agencies that are just getting started with web 2.0:
First, you need the big three: a wiki, a blog and a social-bookmarking service. You might want to augment these with an instant messaging service and about a gigabyte of free storage space for every user to post content such as Adobe Portable Document Format files, audio and video that link to wiki pages and blogs and from socially bookmarked URLs.
Second, you need a plan to start exposing your databases and business functions through Web services to your enterprise –and even the world — to draw upon the widest range of talent possible. Your agency or office can no longer innovate with internal assets alone.
It will help to keep this quote from Henry Ford in the back of your mind while moving forward with all of this: ”If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they would’ve said a faster horse.” Take it to the next level.
Rasmussen raises another good point: government agencies should reinvent their service portals as hubs for user-generated content and citizen engagement. That’s something I have a lot more to say about, but I will save it for some other time when it’s not late on a Friday afternoon.
Incidentally, I also have an article in FedTech on government and the Net Generation. You can read that here.
