What will e-government in 2020 look like?

The following contributions address the question of the transformation of government. As Andy Williamson asks, "Is 'eDemocracy' a new opportunity or simply shifting what we already do online? If it is the latter then we have a problem."

There could be a "problem" because transformation is not only about using innovative technologies, but also about innovating institutional processes. Stephen Coleman describes this as the distinction between institutional preservation and democratic transformation, and Rose O'Neill delineates the transformation of substance or form – which results from the introduction of new technologies – from the radical transformation of the nature of engagement between government and people. In a slightly different take, Yih-Jeou Wang argues that the transformation of government is actually a new iteration of the ongoing process of modernisation, and that "e-government" will have become embedded in business-as-usual service delivery in 2020.

All agree, however, that e-government in the future will be more focused on the needs of citizens and businesses rather than public sector needs. People increasingly expect governments to use Internet-based tools to support democratic engagement. Interactive technologies present the potential to enable citizens to become active players in an ongoing process of deliberation, rather than spectators in a prescripted conversation. However, this is not about creating a libertarian utopia, as Chris Lipscombe explains, but about shifting the balance from consultation based on pre-determined outcomes, to participation based on choice. Stephen Coleman echoes this idea: citizens want to update, not abandon, existing institutions; they want to engage in a more genuine, dialogical relationship, and not to merely participate in consultations undertaken for the sake of form.

Furthermore, the global nature of the problems that e-government seeks to address range widely from Internet security to sustainability. Whether they are directly or indirectly related to e-government, various sectors including government, citizen groups, and businesses are often implicated and need to work together, not separately or alone, in order to generate a solution.

Several of these pieces also address the question of the role of government in the future. This might mean, among other things, availing government of the necessary technological tools, building capability, fostering creativity, and enabling citizens to manage their own information and reuse that which government holds. This would be characterised by a cooperative dynamic, rather than government necessarily acting as the sole provider, champion, or agenda-setting body. To move beyond information provision and government-driven engagement, citizens as well as governments must take ownership and lead the transformation. However, in order to reframe these roles so that radical innovation can be effected on both technological and institutional process levels, it is necessary first to reframe existing notions of trust in government–citizen and government–business relationships.

Enhancing stakeholder engagement

Building capability through pooling expertise

The contributors discuss the potential for co-creation and collaboration on everything from broad policy to small, local initiatives. This allows not only information and knowledge to be shared, but also the skills, competencies, and experiences of citizens to sit alongside the rigour of policymaking. Stephen Blyth, for instance, suggests that government should enable citizens with online tools and skills to support their own organising locally and independently on local projects involving social and environmental issues, which should be matched by developing expertise and flair on the part of agencies so that they can work skilfully with citizens. On the other hand, Andy Williamson points out that true democracy requires an active and informed civil society as an equal partner with government, both working together. While ICT has the potential to enable this sort of partnership, it will not do it alone.

Access to ICT as a basic necessity

Miriam Lips writes about the necessity of providing basic ICT infrastructure – such as broadband and ICT in schools – to enable access for all in every sense: technically, geographically, economically, educationally, and socioculturally. The importance of ensuring that the basic infrastructure is put in place to enable capability-building from a young age is reflected in David Tredger’s piece, which reflects the fact that high-speed ubiquitous network access, particularly to the Internet, will be taken for granted as a basic necessity by future generations.

Role of government

The new roles of government have been described variously as a "platform", "facilitator" or "partner". Even the role of politically neutral public officials, according to Rose O'Neill, will have to be reconsidered given the changing nature of government-citizen interaction brought about by new technologies.

If government is to act as the 'platform' that connects diverse services or citizen groups, then it has to develop sophisticated facilitation skills for the future, particularly for online engagement. Some of these skills may include "mobilising, listening to, learning from, mapping and responding to public talk" (Stephen Coleman), and they should also be capable of "recognising, encouraging and summarising the diverse and disparate voices of the increasingly confident and articulate public".

Conversation

Part of facilitation and partnership is about joining up and maintaining conversations at various levels. Stephen Coleman writes that conversations relevant to government are exchanged both informally and formally, but there is very little interaction or translation between the two.

The context of engagement determines the dynamics that occur in conversations, and in turn influences the role that government could potentially play in each. Are participants co-creating the conversation agenda, and at what stage of the process are they involved? Or are they, at the more conventional end of the spectrum, feeding their views through the consultation process? The nature of a two-way, ongoing conversation is desirable, whether the conversation itself is about developing a service, responding to a policy, or building community ICT capability.

Apart from local conversations, conversations with international counterparts are also growing in importance (see International context, below). To address complex problems of a global nature, it will be even more important to maintain conversations at both the strategic and implementation levels – between citizens and government (C–G), between businesses such as ICT vendors and government (B–G), and within government (G–G), to deal with specific issues such as cybercrime.

Innovation

Strategies for enhancing engagement will involve learning from new ICT initiatives and actively making use of emerging technologies. Public servants and political representatives will also change their traditional modes of working and engaging with their stakeholders through the use of these technologies. In order to shift the culture in this direction, the contributors suggest that strategies to foster innovation are needed.

User-driven innovation

The theme of user-driven innovation is discussed in several pieces. Miriam Lips talks about the need to facilitate demand-led (as opposed to supply-driven) social innovationⁱ to develop new forms of public engagement. The direct implication of this sort of user-driven innovation is that it will lead to a transformation of both process (e.g., participants determining and designing the processes) and purpose (e.g., participants co-creating the agenda aided by a facilitator).

Although the extent of user involvement would vary according to the nature of the activity, the contributors give compelling reasons why the direct involvement of individuals will become even more important in the future given the global nature of the problems we face (see International context, below).

Encouraging an innovation culture in the public sector

Contributors suggest several ways to foster a culture of innovation in the public sector. Government can introduce particular initiatives to encourage experimentation, such as providing strong political and financial support, or setting up new spaces – such as "incubators" to hothouse new ideas, or partly controlled or uncontrolled spaces to enable open debates of policy issues, particularly with the use of web technologies. If good ideas are to flourish in these spaces, they should be supported by appropriate tools and policies. Ultimately, the purpose of these initiatives is to allow original and novel ideas to emerge from across the public service, so they can be harnessed and channelled into the transformation of government.

Nurturing creativity also requires and begins with a change in fundamental attitudes. This may mean promoting "out of the box" thinking, followed by "applying" and "doing" once ideas are generated. As Miriam Lips suggests, this may lead to desirable innovative outcomes or, equally, to unfavourable results and mistakes. How such successes and failures are viewed depends on our attitude towards change, which should be "about opening our eyes and our minds to the changes that technology can enable" (Chris Lipscombe).

Trust and accountability

Trust as a necessary condition for transformation

If new spaces for open dialogues are created, citizens will be motivated to participate only if they appreciate the value of the new engagement processes. According to Andy Williamson, this first requires that citizens develop the confidence to create and manage these processes in ways that privilege their own views and empower them to act on the consequences of their own decisions.

"Successful participation requires a certain amount of letting go", Chris Lipscombe says, especially if conversations are to be had about potentially unpalatable issues. He argues that even though we wear different hats as roles, we often identify with and separate each hat from another even though we are simultaneously the bureaucrat, citizen, and taxpayer. If we trusted ourselves to make good decisions, the locus of power could then shift onto the citizen.

Individual accountability

Similar to Chris Lipscombe's notion of trust, Tara Hunt goes so far as to say that, "Trust is the single hardest barrier for all of us to get over and the more we externalise it, the less we can trust one other with it." Specifically, this is the kind of trust that will affect "the idea of offering shared control with accountability on both sides". Trusting ourselves implies taking individual responsibility for a particular outcome in the first instance, rather than placing it on other parties.

In a similar vein, citizens interacting with government, rather than seeing a monolithic face, might expect public officials to be individually accountable for their experience of government. In Stephen Coleman’s discussion of UK representatives he says that, "a key function of representatives is to humanise governance, representing it to people, and people to it, in humane and accessible terms."

International context

The complexity and global scale of problems in several domains directly or indirectly related to e-government require international collaboration, both vertically and horizontally across sectors.

Some of these areas are of strategic importance to the government, such as Internet security and cybercrime, which would impact on the management of New Zealand’s strategic ICT infrastructure and the maintenance of New Zealand's electronic sovereignty. The challenge in confronting these problems is that they lie at the nexus of factors controlled by various distributed centres. At the same time, government wants to obtain the best value out of its investment in government infrastructure, and ensure a stable economy amid unknown security threats in a world where the Internet has become ubiquitous. Furthermore, regulatory coherence is needed in certain areas of endeavour, such as copyright and standards development, which requires cooperation with groups in other jurisdictions.

Climate change and environmental problems, argues Stephen Blyth, require creative solutions that cannot be the sole responsibility of governments, but must be a collective effort where "policy and people power" meet so that individual values and commitment can be drawn on. To address the environmental crisis, government should tap into the creativity or ingenuity of citizens and public servants. At a more local level, as suggested in Josie Fenwicke's piece, reducing air travel by using teleconferencing tools to overcome the physical barriers of time and space could also help to lesson the human carbon footprint.

Information

Several contributors suggest that although current online tools such as teleconferencing and deliberative polling could be used, what is really needed is for data held by government to be released for analysis and reshaping by academics and other interested parties for their own purposes.

The use of information will increasingly be driven by users' needs, and Chris Lipscombe and Tara Hunt both describe what such user-driven information systems could look like. Chris Lipscombe's "online vault" lets citizens build portfolios of supplier agencies that they choose to interact with, and make decisions about how and who accesses their information based on outcomes they define. This is conceptually similar to Tara Hunt's Government 2.0 "open platform" of mashable, reusable information which can be accessed by anyone – citizens, agencies, businesses.

Footnote

[i. Social innovation refers to new strategies, concepts, ideas and organizations that meet social needs of all kinds . . . and that extend and strengthen civil society. The term has developed several overlapping meanings. It can be used to refer to social processes of innovation, or innovations with a social purpose. (Wikipedia, accessed 9 June 2008)]