[LINK] e-government and open government

[Alex (Maxious) Sadleir]

On Thu, Mar 3, 2011 at 2:16 PM, Bernard Robertson-Dunn
<brd at iimetro.com.au> wrote:

> I've been to
> http://www.finance.gov.au/e-government/strategy-and-governance/gov2/declaration-of-open-government.html
> which URL seems to equate e-government and open government, or at least
> makes open government a subset of e-government.
>
> I've also had a look at Kate Lundy's Citizen-Centric services page
> (thanks, again Marghanita), which also seems to equate e-government with
> open government.
>
> However, looking at the three pillars of open government, I'm not
> convinced it's what I'd call e-government. In fact participatory
> government, one of the pillars is a disaster waiting to happen (it's
> happened in California, and I'd rather it didn't happen here)
>
> So, I'm confused. Can someone explain to me the difference (if any)
> between e-government and open government, in the Australian political
> environment

e-government is the Gov1.0 that Gov2.0 supplements, just as boring
webpages became social experiences in Web2.0.
So the distinction is that while getting government services online is
good (saves time/money/trees filling in forms), we should now work on
getting them unified and smart. For example, the Standard Business
Reporting project so businesses present their data to one service and
that service takes responsibility for distributing it to all the
appropriate agencies. Or the "australia.gov.au Account" single sign on
facility to access private data held by multiple agencies with a
single logon/password.

The Gov2.0 taskforce report sadly seems to have missed explaining
e-government in detail except to say that is "the use and access in
government of information and communications technologies rather than
government take-up of web 2.0 tools and approaches" and "e-government
capability is a necessary but not sufficient condition for Government
2.0 approaches to thrive.".

This was a point more clearly made by some task force members when
I've heard them speak; that ideas like Kate Lundy's 3 pillars of Open
Government could probably be achieved using paper or engaging in
person but that the technology makes it all the more easy to do.

The URL is probably an artifact of the website layout of finance; all
the AGIMO/NOIE stuff went in e-government because when they arranged
the hierarchy that's what the content was about. ICT purchasing policy
is in that folder too and it's not really citizen-facing e-government
to get printers and word processors in front of public servants.