From one of my favorite writers, favorite sites: Nancy Scola at TechPresident.com. Below, she’s referencing a chat that took place at the Gov 2.0 conference I was covering for Discover Magazine. I’ll have more on that later. Gov 2.0 represents some radical thinking and I, for one, am excited about the possibilities. However, as Scola addresses below, there’s at least one “fault line” in need of further examination.
There’s was a telling, if all too brief, exchange between Texas Republican Representative John Culberson and the west coast publisher and conference convener Tim O’Reilly at this morning’s Gov 2.0 Summit that exposed a fault line that runs through the whole of this “government 2.0” discussion. One wishes that Culberson and O’Reilly had kept up their back-and-forth rather than moving on to less contentious subjects, but it boils down to this: Is this new movement, such as it is, fundamentally an aggressive bid to reform a political system that has devolved into a mess of corruption and exclusion? Or is it instead an apolitical course correction aimed at simply making government more efficient? The answer, if there is one, will like shape what the future of government 2.0 looks like, and whether we’ll ever be able to ultimately judge whether it’s been a success. Read full article.