Gartner’s recent scolding wasn’t enough. Public sector organizations that are dragging their feet on Web 2.0 applications and practices have caught another slap upside the head, courtesy of a British study which suggests that it’s really all about power.

 

Just weeks after the heavyweights at Gartner drew “a gloomy picture of current adoption and plans for Web 2.0 in government” around the world, the Society of IT Management has concluded that the British public sector in particular is excessively cautious on the social networking front. And author Chris Head thinks he knows why:

 

“Web 2.0 challenges the very roots of the public sector ethos,” he says. “As if the retreat from paternalism and recognition of the citizen as a customer were not enough, Web 2.0 provides the facilities to put citizens in control. This turns public sector thinking upside-down. It means marketing services, not rationing them. It means being proactive, and not responding defensively to criticism.”

 

That’s basically a brief on behalf of the digital democracy side of e-government, focusing the potential of technology not simply as a neat way to deliver government services but as a way to reinvigorate everything from public consultations to, no doubt, elections.

Tags: Gartner, Social Networking, Web 2.0