What Gov 1.0 Is

Andrew Krzmarzick described Gov 1.0 as an inaccessible storefront, a place that allowed you to see what the owner chose to display, but barred you from actually going in and interacting with the goods offered. I found this description extremely apt. The government works hard to present information in a manner and slant that influences citizen behaviour “positively”. This Gov 1.0 model does a decent job of providing information (albeit from the government’s point of view), but a terrible job at interaction.

And the Singapore government has pushed the same 1.0 mindset into the web 2.0 era, attempting to use the technology but never really changing the one-way communication paradigm (via @victortan). We’ve launched microsite after microsite, each one more ajaxified than the last. Interactivity, it seems, has been defined as moving visual elements upon mouseclick, rather than human-to-human communication.

The Government’s Perspective of Her Role Towards Citizens

The reason for the endless effort to provide citizens with “what they need” lies in the government’s parent-child perspective of her role towards her citizens. It’s not necessarily a bad perspective: the government feels a strong maternal urge to take care of her citizens, a strong need to safeguard the nation’s future.

The one problem is this: the child is growing up. Like any parent-child relationship, a rift grows when the expectations held by both parties differ. The “mothers knows best” and “the decision is for your own good” message doesn’t work on an older child. The efficiency of a dominant-government-subservient-citizenry was probably necessary for us to break out of poverty, but more is demanded of the government these days. The citizens have grown more mature, and with the change in media landscape, a lot more powerful.

So as citizens we’re protesting in all forms of new-fangled ways. We blogging, tweeting, submitting all manner of stupid to Stomp in a display of our new-found power, proclaiming that we are mature.

The Citizen’s Perspective of His Role Towards the Government

The thing about maturity is that change is required on both sides. Just as I need to accept the fact that my daughter isn’t a baby anymore, my daughter needs to do the same. She can no longer expect me to carry her in my arms all the time or feed her during meals. The Singaporean citizen’s perspective of what the government ought to be is mired in the concept that the goverment functions as a vending machine.

We pay our taxes, and therefore have the right to demand goods and services from the government such as education, healthcare, employment and infrastructure. This mindset has deeply permeated into many, many aspects of our lives: how we treat the street hawker we buy food from, the cleaner who sweeps the streets and even the beauty pageant winners we tear apart. There is this almost unbreakable sense of entitlement and self-centredness.

This sense of entitlement also paralyses us from action.

What Gov 2.0 Is

Gov 2.0, for the citizen, is a departure from “do it for me” to “do it ourselves”. It is not a giving up on the government, but a realisation that we possess more power now than ever in history. Where we once needed to ride many miles, blowing horns and banging cymbals in order to spur civic action, we can now reach thousands upon thousands through tweeting a powerful idea.

The Changing Role of Government

The traditional role of the government as sole provider of services and as a retailer of information needs to change. The government needs to transform into a facilitator, a platform for citizen action. One of the most important steps the government needs to look into is the providing of open, machine-readable data.

The government, however enthusiastic and well-funded, can never meet all of her citizen’s needs. Imagine the possibilities of MOE’s School Information Service mashed up with Gothere.sg maps and geotagged Flickr photos, made available on a location-aware app for the iPhone. You’d be able to instantly find and research schools within the vicinity of the condo you are currently viewing. Sure, we at the Ministry of Education could build that app, but it is limited to my imagination, knowledge, and my understanding of what citizens need, and a lot could be lost in the translation. If we opened the data sets, there would be so many more avenues for innovation.

A great example of what could be achieved with open data is Everyblock. The site pulls data from crime databases, business registration, news outlets, reports of facilities that need fixing and incorporates it into a hyperlocal context, in most cases your address. For the government to build something like that, it would require a massive multi-agency committee, which in all honesty, would spend more time managing egos than actually working on the solution.

Even in the absence of open data, there have been great attempts. Many of Singeo’s numerous maps were made without the provision of information by the government. Redsports does an amazing job covering sporting events at schools without having been given information on match fixtures. Imagine how much easier their lives would have been if the relevant parties had made the information easily available. Better yet, imagine how much more complete and robust their online offerings could have been for citizens.

Conclusion

The most startling thing I learned during my short time at Washington was this: despite our constant awe at the success stories emanating from the United States, our lack isn’t know-how. We have the technical skills. We have the media savvy. What we need is the guts to take the next step.

Citizens need the guts to grab the bull by its horns and to effect change. Even among the WebSG audience, there are many who are able to produce a website overnight. Communities can be created almost instantaneously around a common purpose. Problems can be addressed and solved, if we as citizens take the proactive step and try.

The government needs the guts to empower her citizens. She needs to understand that a mature citizenry is an important step in the development of society, and that she should no longer directly or indirectly sustain the parasitic infantilism that wedges an adversarial barrier between an increasingly vocal citizenry and the civil service. She needs to trust that citizens care enough about the country to nourish and improve it. And we all need to see that ultimately, a country is defined not by efficiency of governance, but the quality of her people.