MyMashup or MashMeUp?
What exactly do we want from Government? Apart from something to blame when things go wrong of course, this question is too big to have an easy answer. But focusing on a department or agency, or one of their sub-units even helps frame the response. At this level, a misappropriated management-consultant-style 2×2 grid can be used to view the inside-out view of the type of engagement the government sub-unit does.
Government communications types
But this still begs the question: what do the people want? That depends on the situation, but one thing is for sure – it won’t necessarily be in the format predicted from the inside-out view. The indeterminate nature probably exists as a spectrum or normal distribution along some axis. Here’s where the idea of mashups is good. What if the starting point was the situation where all government data was surfaced as raw data, thus allowing the citizen, when interacting with one or many government departments, to get at what they want via their own personal mashup. This would include their own personal data, as is currently the situation when logging on to do the dreaded tax return or whatever, but by creating a personalised data mixing-desk, people can get what they want all in one place. Its just the same as the mashups being discussed for wholesale use, but applied to the individual.
Information Flows
- Many-to-one relationship, information flows both ways: Crowdsourcing… “crowdsourcing is getting less hip and more productive”
- Some-to-one relationship, information flows in both ways: Wiki-Government
- One-to-one, information flows in only: Form-filling, tax returns… not usually enjoyable things.
- One-to-one, information flows both ways: Some kind of P2P (albeit this is also many-to-many)?
- One-to-one, information flows out only: Post – if its important, the government sends it snailmail. Of course there are exceptions, particularly when its person (gov’t employee) to person (citizen). I have yet to receive demands for my tax return via email, though the presumption by government is increasingly towards online returns (especially if you leave it until January like me).
- One-to-many relationship, information flows out only: Broadcasting in all its guises.
… and many more configurations, I’m sure. The White House came in for some flak about not quite living up to the expectation of bidirectional information flows, and was described as using crowdsourcing as listening-only mechanism in this piece which mentions other variations.
