Brantford 2.0

The future leaders of our community have grown up in a world in which there has always been an Internet. So, too have future voters. Tech-savvy and sophisticated, this new generation is completely comfortable with online participation and collaboration and cannot conceive of a hierarchical and closed government that denies them a voice, an opinion, a say.

This generation will not patiently wait for one opportunity every four years to express their concerns, hopes, and ideas by checking a box in a voting booth with a No. 2 pencil. They expect to be consulted, to be involved in real-time, to be heard and surprisingly, to contribute.
Most importantly they expect to be able to do it all online.

Governments should not fear this paradigm shift but instead embrace it. The best place to make a difference is where government most often interacts with citizens, and 80% of the time this occurs at the municipal level.

In a world where we can trade derivatives on an iPhone, telecommute to work and even eFile our taxes, what can we accomplish online as a citizen of a city? Not much yet, but we’re beginning to imagine the possibilities and they are indeed boundless.

Like most cities in the world today, our municipal government’s “operating system,” let’s call it Brantford 1.0, was developed and installed during the Industrial Revolution and it’s due for an upgrade.

So what is a Brantford 2.0, anyway? Well first off, let’s deal with what it isn’t. It’s really not about technology! It’s not about having a Twitter account or a Facebook page and most of all, it’s not about politics. Call it what you will– e-government, Government 2.0, whatever — the idea is simply to leverage technology and citizen engagement to continuously innovate our local government to a new and better version.

A 2.0 world is coming and the evolution of government can no longer be the exclusive domain of the politician. It’s not simply an IT project, either, nor is it fair to task the tech folks with modernizing the very source code of democracy.

Rather than striking a task force or hiring a consultant to complete a paper-based master plan, why not crowd-source the solution using online tools and ask the actual users what they want, need and can imagine? Why not even ask them to help build it?

Citizen engagement is imperative for a successful upgrade, anyway.

If we citizens are willing and able to contribute to the future of our community, then why not empower us to do so? The debate regarding the Southside, attendance at various city-sponsored town halls and open houses, the conversations on Facebook and Twitter and most revealingly the number of candidates already declared for the fall election all indicate our citizens want to engage, be heard and make a difference. To borrow liberally from late U.S. President Ronald Reagan, “We’re from the electorate and we’re here to help!”

So how do we begin the upgrade to Brantford 2.0? Why not start by leveraging what we already have rather than completely rewriting? Take, for example, our current citizen committees: community- minded volunteers bring their expertise, experience and passion to the table to tackle municipal challenges and provide advice to council on such diverse topics as economic development and the control of vicious dogs.

Why not then establish a Brantford 2.0 or, at the very least, an e-government citizen advisory committee? It would be a good place to start and if nothing else I hope the idea can spark a valuable conversation and perhaps even give a few of the candidates something to Twitter about!

Kevin Magee is a 2.0 Citizen, capitalist, community builder and member of The Expositor’s Community Editorial Board.

Republished from the Brantford Expositor: http://www.brantfordexpositor.ca/ArticleDisplay.aspx?e=2642452

Reimagining government as a platform

During the early days of the evolving technology industry, the Internet was often called the “Information Highway,” AOL was its principal onramp and Netscape was almost synonymous with what we now call the web.

How did these pioneering giants of tech rise so far so fast and then ultimately become irrelevant while other companies such as Google and EBay built billion-dollar businesses that have completely transformed much of our society?

The answer lies in vision: Google’s is to organize the world’s information while EBay’s is to provide a global trading platform that will allow anyone to trade anything.
These companies have built iterative, interactive platforms, not simply products and services, and have thrived because of what I as a user, entrepreneur or citizen can accomplish by both using and leveraging them. In contrast, governments tend to interact with their citizens much like vending machines do. We drop our taxes in, choose from a pre-defined selection of stale services and then hope that what we wanted will actually be delivered. When it isn’t, we can protest. We can shake it, kick it, call it names, but ultimately if you wanted a Mars bar and ended up with Doritos, it’s pointless to try to reason or argue with a machine.

Government is, however, successful when it builds quality infrastructure for the use of its citizens, institutions to govern use and a justice system to maintain order and then stands back. Sound crazy?

Well there is precedent for this sort of thing: think roads. Governments build and maintain them, create laws to govern their use and then police them to ensure that order is preserved. What governments certainly do not do is attempt to make cars. It’s left to the individual and the private sector to create and add value leveraging a network of roads as a platform.

The success of Web 2.0 is similar. It’s not actually about Twitter or IPhone’s. It is a “webenaissance” that has emerged out of the dot-com dark ages wherein the Internet has been rediscovered for its core purpose, that of networking, connecting and sharing. Once that happened, everything began to change and corporate, static, outdated vending machine-style web pages were replaced with all sorts of creative and interactive services like Amazon, Linkedin, Salesforce.comand Facebook, which are interestingly also platforms themselves.

In both examples, it is what can be accomplished by users or citizens and the private sector leveraging the platform that amplifies both economic and social value. Unfortunately, most governments today are intent on reinventing themselves as eVending machines and would probably have more success trying to build cars.

So, what would a Government 2.0 service look like? For one thing it should not be simply a “webified” version of an existing service rebranded with an “e”. An inapt or dated service ported to the Internet becomes not only an inapt or dated eService but also a missed opportunity. A true platform would allow citizens to create innovative and valuable services whose outcomes are not completely predetermined; services that evolve and are iterative creating a government that is an enabler for its citizens.

It is beginning to happen in cities like Vancouver and Toronto and in countries like the U.K. Collectivism and capitalism, left and right inexplicitly coming together to enable government as a platform. With elections at all levels on the horizon in Canada, we as citizens now have an opportunity to encourage this momentum and participate directly in the creation of the next version of government. Let’s ensure we do not allow existing goat trails to be paved over and called eRoads. If we do, then perhaps government too risks becoming irrelevant in the future.

Kevin Magee is a 2.0 Citizen, capitalist, community builder and member of The Expositor’s Community Editorial Board.

Republished from the Brantford Expositor:  http://brantfordexpositor.com/ArticleDisplay.aspx?e=2609595