Government 2.0 is more about culture change than technological change
The main themes I heard in the Government 2.0 session were:
* you have to change the culture of the organisation, change the expectations and processes for engagement, before you can take advantage of technology change
* government can gain a lot simply by freeing its data (creating APIs, to put it technically) for citizens to analyse and present as they see fit - the idea that there is more capacity for creation and innovation outside the walls of your organisation
Ellen Miller of the Sunlight Foundation used a phrase beloved in the open source and Wisdom of Crowds communities: "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow", in the sense of (in my understanding) "given enough citizens examining the government, all legislation and politics is transparent".
Don Lenihen of Crossing Boundaries stated that the challenge was "more about engagement than technology". He said that rather than citizens fighting one another for the attention of the government, we should get citizens talking to one another, with the government as facilitator. He was concerned with the idea that Web 2.0 and technology are "inherently democratic", he said it takes a conscious effort to use the technology in positive, productive ways.
Quitterie Delmas talked about the use of blogs in the recent French presidential election, and showed a tool for visualisating the political affiliations and activities in the French blogosphere, blogopole.fr
Wolfgang Blau stated that we need a new narrative: from the pyramid to the circle, from hierarchy to collaboration. He saide he felt we are returning to a culture and notion of government from before the age of broadcasting - local, non-commercial, and amateur (in a positive sense).
In the Q&A it was recognised that for most politicians the risk of moving to a collaborative system is high.
At the conclusion, it was suggested that a wiki could be created to gather examples of exemplary and innovative government use of the Internet.