The Elephant and the Mouse:
will web 2.0 change public
services?
Local Government e-leaders Forum
David Osimo
Tech4i2 ltd.

So far ICT has not fundamentally
changed government
• 1990s: ICT expected
to make government
more transparent,
efficient and user
oriented
• 2005+: disillusion as
ICT failed to drive real
change in government
David Osimo - Open Days 2008 - 2

The e-ruptive growth of web2.0
70 M blogs, YouTube traffic: 100M views/day
doubling every 6 months
Peer-to-peer largest
Wikipedia: 2M articles
source of IP traffic
Source: Technorati, Alexa, Wikipedia, Cachelogic 3

What I will try to answer today
• ADOPTION: is web2.0 applied in e-government?
• USAGE: do these applications encounter high take-
up?
• IMPACT: do they make a difference?
• BIG PICTURE: a new vision for e-government?
• SO WHAT? some concrete suggestions
4

Viral adoption in public services, but not by
government
Source: own elaboration of IPTS PS20 project

Relevant for key government
activities
Back office Front office
Regulation Service delivery
Cross-agency collaboration eParticipation
Knowledge management Law enforcement
Interoperability Public sector information
Human resources mgmt Public communication
Public procurement Transparency and accountability
source: Osimo 2008 “Web 2.0 in Government: Why and How? www.jrc.es 6

Regulation : Peer-to-patent
7

•
Peer-to-patent: an inside look
Eighty-nine (89) percent of participating patent examiners thought the presentation of prior art th
received from the Peer-to-Patent community was clear and well formatted. Ninety-two (92) perc
ported that they would welcome examining another application with public participation.
Governance
• Seventy-three (73) percent of participating examiners want to see Peer-to-Patent implemented a
• Self-regulated: need
office practice.
critical mass to control
“bad apples”
• • Twenty-one (21) percent of participating examiners stated that prior art submitted by the Peer-to
2000 users
• community was “inaccessible” by the USPTO.
9/23 applications used
by USPTO
• • The USPTO received one third-party prior art submission for every 500 applications published in 20
73% of USPTO
Patent reviewerswant the an average of almost 5 prior art references for each application in
examiners have provided
project to become
mainstream
• pilot being extended
and adopted in Japan
“We’re very pleased with this initial outcome. Patents of questionable merit are of little value to
anyone. We much prefer that the best prior art be identified so that the resulting patent is truly
bulletproof. This is precisely why we eagerly agreed to sponsor this project and other patent
quality initiatives. We are proud of this result, which validates the concept of Peer-to-Patent,
and can only improve the quality of patents produced by the patent system.”
8
— Manny Schecter, Associate General Counsel for Intellectual Property, IBM

Intellipedia, the Wikipedia of 007
• Based on Wikipedia software: information sharing and collaboration on joint
reports.
Governance
• Used by 16 US security agencies – on a super-secure intranet (not public)
• Flat, informal cooperation.
• Risks: too much information sharing. BUT it’s “worth it”: \"the key is risk
management, not risk avoidance.“
Usage: fast take-up, two thirds of analysts use it to co-produce reports
Impact
• Reducing silos effects (joined-up government)
• Better decisions by reducing information bottlenecks
• Main tool used in drafting key intelligence reports (Nigeria, Iraqi insurgents
using chlorine in explosives).
•
9

Service delivery: Patient Opinion
10

Patient Opinion: an inside look
Usage: 3000 comments in first 9 months, 38 health providers subscribed
Benefits of ratings/reviews
• Enabling informed choices (for citizens)
• Understanding users needs (for hospitals)
• Monitoring quality compliance for service improvement (for health
funders)
• “Does feedback actually work”?
11
Source: PatientOpinion blog

Citizens monitoring government:
farmsubsidy.org

Spinea, Italy: citizens monitoring as
management tool

Why?
Because it does not impose change (e-gov 1.0) but
acts on leverages, drivers and incentives:
• building on unique and specific knowledge of users: the
“cognitive surplus”
• the power of visualization
• reducing information and power asymmetries
• peer recognition rather than hierarchy
• reducing the cost of collective action
• changing the expectations of citizens
14

“A problem shared
is a problem halved
...and a pressure group created”
Dr. Paul Hodgkin
director PatientOpinion.org

“it’s about pressure points, chinks
in the armour where
improvements might be possible,
whether with the consent of
government or not”
Tom Steinberg
director mySociety

It’s not about “total citizens”
1.Producing content
2.Providing ratings, reviews
3.Using user-generated content
4.Providing attention, taste data
3% 10% 40% 100% of Internet users (50% of EU population)
Source: IPTS estimation based on Eurostat, IPSOS-MORI, Forrester
17

A new vision?
Gartner:
“The Real Future of E-
Government: From Joined-
Up to Mashed-Up”
From providing services
online, to exposing web
services for re-
intermediation
David Osimo - Open Days 2008 - 18

A new flagship goal IMPACT:
of eGovernment? Better
government
high
eGov2.0
Reusable data
INPUT: IT low high
investment
eGov1.0
Online services
low 19

SO WHAT: some suggestions and
lessons learnt
• Open your data, make them available for re-use
• Start from back office: knowledge intensive,
collaborative culture teams
• Evaluate existing usage by your employees
• Partner with civil society and existing initiatives
• Provide governance, but soft: policies and guidance
• Listen and follow-up on users’ feedback
• But no ready recipes: experiment!
20

Common mistakes
• “Build it and they will come”: beta testing, trial and
error necessary
• Launching “your own” large scale web 2.0 flagship
project
• Opening up without soft governance of key
challenges:
- privacy
- individual vs institutional role
- destructive participation
• Adopting only the technology with traditional top-
down attitude
21

Web 2.0 is about values,
not technology
User as producer, Collective intelligence,
Values
Long tail, Perpetual beta, Extreme ease of use
Blog, Wiki, Podcast, RSS, Tagging, Social
Applications
networks, Search engine, MPOGames
Ajax, XML, Open API, Microformats, Flash/
Technologies
Flex, Peer-to-Peer
Source: Author’s elaboration based on Forrester
22

Thank you
Further information:
Osimo, 2008. Web2.0 in government: why and how? www.jrc.es
Osimo, 2008. Benchmarking e-government in the web 2.0 era: what to
measure, and how. European Journal of ePractice, August 2008.
http://egov20.wordpress.com
david.osimo@tech4i2.com
23

Back-up slides
24

Are these services used?
• in the back-office, yes
• in the front-office, not too much: few
thousand users as an average
• still: this is much more than before!
• some (petty) specific causes have viral take-
up (mobile phones fees, road tax charge
schemes)
• very low costs of experimentation
25

Why? /2
• Citizens (and employees) already use web 2.0:
no action ≠ no risks
• Likely to stay as it is linked to underlying
societal trends
- Today’s teenagers = future users and employees
- Empowered customers
- Creative knowledge workers
- From hierarchy to network-based organizations
- Non linear-innovation models
- Consumerization of ICT
26

Is there a visible impact?
Yes, more than the usage:
• in the back office: evidence used by US Patent
Office, used to detect Iraqi insurgents
• in the front office, making government really
accountable and helping other citizens
• but there is risk of negative impact as well
27

Web 2.0 is a set of values more
than a set of technologies
User as producer, collective intelligence,
Values openness “by default”, perpetual beta, ease of
use
Blogs, Podcast, Wiki, Social Networking, Peer-
Technology to-peer, MPOGames, Mash-up
Ajax, Microformats, RSS/XML
28

Reminder: citizens and
employees do it anyway
29