Recently, I heard the awesome Gustavo Esteva speak about his experiences with multiple uprisings in Mexico. What struck me was how empowered he described Mexicans as being. At one point, he compared the citizen engagement to the story of the Wizard of Oz:
[paraphrased] Government is much like the Wizard of Oz. Just like the scene where Dorothy, the Tin Man, the Lion and the Scarecrow approach the Wizard, and find out he is just a human like themselves, then ask if they can have a heart, a brain, courage and to go home, the people of Oaxaca find out that the ability to have what they want was within them all along. They don’t need the Wizard to give them these things.
This is a very similar message to what I’ve been producing for the various presentations to government services organizations. We all have it in ourselves to make our world a better place to be in…only, we need the Wizard to step from behind his curtain and work with us on it.
While I’m blogging up a storm, I thought I’d post my most recent Government 2.0 presentation with a similar message (which is why Gustavo’s presentation really resonated with me):
Of course, I think of the partnership as more of a superhero/sidekick partnership where we have special powers that we can use to defeat the ‘enemy’, which is complacency. Either way, nothing beats an empowered public.
:: bonus: this most excellent presentation by valeriev that uses the Wizard of Oz analogy beautifully.
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When I saw on one of the slides the transition delivery of data to person to person file sharing, the following question struck me: why are wikis centralised? That is, why do we have to put stuff in this centralised place instead of just links to it in our own place. But then, that would just be the old web. Or would it? Surely folksonomies are just the underlying architecture for a distributed wiki? Why am I writing this here? Marc Andreessen (I hope I spelt that right) has dropped comments from his blog in favour of just allowing trackbacks, with the rationale that trackbacks force people to take responsibility for their responses (and the responses tend to be less trivial?). A side-effect of such a policy if everyone adopted it would be that it might become easier to clear the substance of your web presence - as instead of having comments strewn all over the place there would only be links (sometimes with excerpts) that would be outside of your control. Is that good?
(Also ridden a bus not rode a bus on slide 119
At the end of the community section I thought: see difference - find the common - share the unique
Today is a good day for getting sidetracked…
Congrats, you’re starting to get to the heart of government 2.0!
It’s not about the technology (web) enabling efficiency and effectiveness, its about changing the type/level of engagement, between people, community and government.
Amazing, when you think it’s a technology that’s only been popular for the last 10-15 years; What other technology has that much potential for impact on the way in which government operates?