The Promise and Myth of Barack Obama’s Government 2.0

See Gaurav Mishra's most excellent post, The Promise and Myth of Barack Obama’s Government 2.0. In addition to a great set of links and smart analysis, he provides a good structure to think about and talk about "government 2.0."

"It is obvious that different people associate different things with government 2.0. In essence, they are talking about five different level of government 2.0, which can be plotted on a scale of 1 to 5 where 5 is the most radical version of government 2.0 –

Level 1. Allowing government employees and elected officials at all levels to access and use social media tools like blogs, wikis and social networks to connect with their constituents.

Level 2. The strategic use of social media tools like blogs, wikis and social networks by government agencies to achieve their objectives and solicit citizen feedback to improve their processes.

Level 3. A participatory platform that engages citizens in policy debates and voluntary service at all levels of the government.

Level 4. Open availability of all non-sensitive and non-personal government data so that citizens can use it and third parties can build web 2.0 mashups on top of it.

Level 5. Crowd-sourcing the government, party by institutionalizing a process that directly uses the aforementioned participatory platform as an important input into government functions, including policy formation. --Read the entire post.

He goes on to give links to examples. Really, read it.