9.2 Research and evaluation in Government

A Wiki can be used as a place on the Internet where a government department can invite interested parties to contribute to a discussion paper on any issue of concern, e.g. The establishment of an Environmental Management Plan for a local riparian area or Development of child protection guidelines. The ‘open editing’ format allows anyone interested in the topic to make contributions to the document and edit/delete any previous comments. A wiki provides the opportunity for interested people from all areas of public life to seriously present their arguments on public policy. It can be accepted or rejected by others. All contributions are stored as data and can be referred to even if they have been edited by another person. A wiki provides policy makers with a draft and all proposals that have been contributed to assist them in preparing a policy that has been actively debated in a public domain.

Twitter in government is common place many politicians are using it to provide constituents with snippets of information or links to sites where they can find details on issues. Government departments could offer a service of answering quick question at set times. E.g. Centrelink could offer Monday 2nd November 1pm – 3pm tweet your questions about ‘rent assistance’.

Me as a supporter of Government 2.0
I do support Gov 2.0. At first I could only think of chaos when imagining the mining companies versus the greens and all the rest of us who have opinions completing a Wiki draft on ‘clean energy’. I had a vision of it being like ebay, where the last one to hit the enter button at close off is the winner. Then I thought about all the data the policy makers would have collected from contributors all over the country/world that they could use to write the policy document and then I felt calmer. I also read a great comment made by Matt Barton who really bought the whole use of wikis into perspective, he states, ‘they …enable collaboration and teach us all something very important about what a true democracy is all about’. His comments can be read at the following link.
http://wikieducator.org/Wikieducator_tutorial/What_is_a_wiki/Advantages_and_disadvantages

Twitter is happening. As the IT illiterates, who don’t want to get involved with Web 2.0 (or aren’t encouraged to by management) retire from government and the public service and those with the skills or willingness to participate and learn step up to the plate one of the biggest hurdles for governments in embracing Web 2.0 will be solved.