Government as a platform

Thanks to we20 for link to Tim O'Reilly on Gov 2.0 September 4, 2009

Wondering if there's likely to be anything like BarcampUKGovweb10 (the third one?), and if so this ref a good thing to read beforehand?

Any views on prospects of similar vision being realised in the UK? Do we have to accept that essentially this sort of stuff is on hold until after an election, or are there more positive viewpoints?

A couple of brief quotes from the post:

"Too often, we think of government as a kind of vending machine. We put in our taxes, and get out services: roads, bridges, hospitals, fire brigades, police protection… And when the vending machine doesn’t give us what we want, we protest. Our idea of citizen engagement has somehow been reduced to shaking the vending machine. But what meetup teaches us is that engagement may mean lending our hands, not just our voices."

..."I called this DIY on a civic scale. Scott Heiferman corrected me: “It’s DIO: Not ‘Do it Yourself’ but ‘Do it Ourselves.’” Imagine if the state government were to reimagine itself not as a vending machine but an organizing engine for civic action. Might DIO help us tackle other problems that bedevil us? Can we imagine a new compact between government and the public, in which government puts in place mechanisms for services that are delivered not by government, but by private citizens? In other words, can government become a platform?"

Just a personal view, but in response to arguably our greatest challenge - climate change, we haven't really got a lot of hope until or unless gov reimagines itself in something like this way.

(First published on the Sustainable Community Action wiki)