The Elephant and the Mouse:
will web 2.0 change public
services?
IPA, 24 October 2008
David Osimo
Tech4i2 ltd.

Contents
• What is web 2.0 in government?
• Why it matters?
• What are the risks?
• How to act?
2

What is web 2.0 in
government?

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
4

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 5

Viral adoption also in public services,
and not only by government
Source: own elaboration of IPTS PS20 project: see www.epractice.eu/communities/ps20

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: “Web 2.0 in Government: Why and How? www.jrc.es 7

Regulation : Peer-to-patent
8

Peer-to-patent: an inside look
Governance
• Partnership of US Patent Office with business and academia (NY
Law school)
• Self-appointed experts, but participants ensure relevance and quality
by tagging, ranking prior art, ranking other reviewers
• Desire of recognition as participation driver
• Weak authentication: blog style
Usage: Started June 07. 2000 users, 32 submission in first month.
Benefits
• Faster processes, backlog reduction
• Better informed decisions
Other applications:
• Functions where governments have “to make complex decisions 9

Cross agency collaboration case:
• Based on Wikipedia software: collaborative drafting of 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
Benefits
• Avoiding silos effects (post 9-11)
• Better decisions by reducing information bottlenecks
Other applications:
• Social services for homeless (Canada, Alaska)
• Inter-agency consultation
• Environmental protection and disaster management (US-EPA, earthquake in
Japan)
10

Knowledge management case:
Allen and Overy
Answering key questions…
…by using “Enterprise 2.0” tools:
• Which articles do managers think are • Blogs and wikis for discussion and
important this morning? collaboration
• Which newsfeeds do my favorite • Collaborative filtering of information,
colleagues use? recommendation systems, bookmarks
sharing (tags, RSS feeds)
• What discussion topics are hot in a
project team (things you can’t
• On top of this: algorithms applied to
users’ attention data and behaviour
anticipate)?
• Who is expert/working on this
specific topic/tag?
Not yet spread in companies – but used by individual workers
11

Allen and Overy: an inside look
Governance
• Pilot launched on small collaborative groups – then upscaled
• Fast, iterative delivery (not big IT project approach)
• Strong authentication (integrated with company SSO)
• Kept the wiki spirit, low control (non sensitive content)
Usage: became internal standard for collaboration and sharing
Benefits
• Increased awareness of what others are doing – less duplication of effort
• Reduction in internal e-mail sent
• Better learning and knowledge creation
Other applications
• All knowledge-intensive areas of government
12

Citizens monitoring government:
farmsubsidy.org

Comment on this

Spinea, Italy: citizens monitoring as
management tool

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
16

It’s an incremental, yet
disruptive innovation
• Technologic: minor improvements, especially in user-
friendliness
• Social: diffusion of set of values which were already
there (hacker’s culture)
• Economic: new business models based on advertising
and open source -> lower cost barriers!
• Web 1.0: 200.000 personal webpages (Geocities),
web 2.0: 70 million blogs
• It’s a difference of SCALE
17

\"the brilliance of social-software applications
like Flickr, Delicious, and Technorati is that
they recognize that computers are really good
at doing certain things, like working with
gigantic quantities of data, and really bad at,
for example, understanding the different
meanings of certain words, like 'depression.'
They devote computing resources in ways
that basically enhance communication,
collaboration, and thinking rather than trying
to substitute for them”.

It’s not about “total citizens”
1.Producing content
peer-to-patent
2.Providing ratings, reviews
patientopinion.org
3.Using user-generated content
4.Providing attention, taste data
delaware.gov
3% 10% 40% 100% of Internet users (50% of EU population)
Source: IPTS estimation based on Eurostat, IPSOS-MORI, Forrester
19

A new innovation model
in public services

Implications for public services
• A new WAY to innovate public services
– Exploiting the unique knowledge and skills of
networked individual users:learners, teachers,
parents, employees…
– Continuous and incremental,
– Open and non hierarchical, difficult to control
– Lowering costs of failure and of trial and error
– Building on voluntary engagement and free tools
Not only by government: civil society, citizens, civil
servants
21

Implications for public services /2
• A new effective DRIVER to address the challenges of
innovating public services
– citizens’ ratings and reviews: reducing information asymmetries,
exposing inefficiencies through citizen-to-citizen exchanges of
information
– easier creation of pressure groups to make new needs emerge
Based on:
– a wider availability of free IT tools for citizens, civil servants, civil
society (blogs, collaboration tools, geographical applications…)
– a culture of public speaking, and increased expectations of openness
and transparency
22

Why web 2.0 matters

• Peer-to-patent: an inside look
Eighty-nine (89) percent of participating patent examiners thought the presentation of prior art that the
received from the Peer-to-Patent community was clear and well formatted. Ninety-two (92) percent re
Usage and impact
ported that they would welcome examining another application with public participation.
•
• Self-regulated: need examiners want to see Peer-to-Patent implemented as reg
Seventy-three (73) percent ofcontrol
critical mass to participating
office “bad apples”
practice.
• 2000(21) percent of participating examiners stated that prior art submitted by the Peer-to-Pate
users
•
• 9/23 applications used
Twenty-one
community was “inaccessible” by the USPTO.
by USPTO
• • 73% of USPTO the
The USPTO received one third-party prior art submission for every 500 applications published in 2007. Pe
examiners endorse
Patent reviewers have provided an average of almost 5 prior art references for each application in the p
project
• 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.”
— Manny Schecter, Associate General Counsel for Intellectual Property, IBM 24

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”?
25
Source: PatientOpinion blog

Reminder: citizens and
employees do it anyway
26

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
27

Impact on effectiveness, not
efficiency
• Some time savings: reduced e-mail congestion
• Better peripheral awareness, better relevance
• Bryolfsson: “access to information strongly
predicts the number of projects completed
by each individual and the amount of revenue
that person generates”
28

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
29

“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

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

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
32

A new e-government vision?
Providing services online
through portals
Exposing web services for
re-intermediation
Robinson et al.: “Government Data and
the Invisible Hand “
Gartner:
“The Real Future of E-Government: From
Joined-Up to Mashed-Up”
33

A new flagship goal IMPACT:
of eGovernment? Better
government
high
eGov2.0
Reusable data
INPUT: IT low high
investment
eGov1.0
Online services
low 34

The risks
What can go wrong? no impact and negative impact
scenarios

No impact scenario

It’s just another hype
• Web 2.0 business model is
not solid, too reliant on
advertising
• Online advertising is highly
sensitive to GDP growth:
bubble 2.0 in waiting
• Startups failing to deliver
profits: Skype, Vonage
Source: IPTS elaboration of U.S Census, IAB

Few users are proactive –
and we are reaching the peak
• Only 3% of citizens blogs, and growth
of blogs and wikis is slowing down
Source:
Robert A.
Rohde,
wikipedia
administrator
• In public services, citizens are even
less interested in participating/
discussing

It’s doesn’t matter
What matters is competence and high-quality services, rather than “conversations”
• In business, commercial success does not need openness (e.g. Zune
developers blog while I-Pod developers are secretive)
• In politics, success in the blogosphere does not translate in success in elections
(e.g. Howard Dean, Barak Obama),
• In public services provision, spontaneous cooperation (as “barcamp”) only
rarely delivers after the initial enthusiasm (e.g. Italian Tourism Portal).
• Bloggers approach is not always constructive: “the philosophers have only
interpreted the world. The point is to complain about it”

Negative impact

Creating inefficiencies
• Civil servants time diverted
to non-core activities
• Web2.0 applications are
cheap, but are human-
resource-intensive: against
the government trend to “do
less, buy more”
• Excessive social control
leading to increased risk
aversion and immobilisation
in the public sector

Undermining institutional credibility
• Opening confrontations, rather
than dialogue and increasing
distrust between government
and citizens
• Government held accountable
for bad/offensive user-generated
content on the website
• Blogging is not for government
(UK minister discussing the
pension reform)

Damaging societal value
• Risk of populistic outcome,
focus on short-term issues
(beppegrillo, road tax
charge)
• Citizens organize anti social
behaviour, and government
react through increased
control
• Excessive social control, no
privacy
• Balkanisation of society
• Increased exclusion:
services 2.0 only for the elite

So what?
Some suggestions and lessons learnt

Suggestions from web 2.0
experts
• Open your data, make them available for re-use
• Start from back office: knowledge intensive,
collaborative culture teams
• Evaluate existing usage by your employees
• Subsidiarity: 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: don’t embrace, experiment!
(it’s cheap!)
45

Common mistakes
• “Build it and they will come”: beta testing, trial and
error necessary
• Launching “your own” large scale web 2.0 mega-
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
46

Thank you
david.osimo@tech4i2.com
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. www.epracticejournal.eu , August 2008.
Aral, Brynjolfsson,Van Alstyne, 2007, “Productivity Effects of Information
Diffusion in Networks”, digital.mit.edu
http://egov20.wordpress.com
47