Oct 1, 2009

Eric Kansa Discusses the Potential of Web 2.0 Technologies for the Government

From Nextgov

The Gospel of Gov 2.0

By Jill A. Aitoro

Even Sean Dennehy, whose title is evangelist for the intelligence community's widely lauded collaboration Web site Intellipedia, was initially skeptical.

"Cal Andrus spoke to a technology advisory group that I was a part of about wikis and blogs, and we all said, 'This guy is crazy,' " Dennehy recalls. Andrus, who worked in the application services office at the CIA, had won the intelligence community's Galileo Award in 2004 for his white paper on using the Internet to boost information sharing....

Skepticism about Web 2.0 technologies varies, depending on people's roles. For those in leadership positions, collaborative services that allow staff or citizens to comment on agency policies, operations or performance in an open forum means a loss of control.

"There's this interesting tension between the value of having contributed information versus a clear loss of control over the process," says Eric Kansa, executive director of the information and service design program at the University of California, Berkeley [School of Information]. But if people can see the unfolding of problem- solving then agencies become much less of what Kansa calls "black boxes making arbitrary decisions."

"The challenge is moving from 'batten down the hatches, and put on a happy face,' to 'let's share our issues, warts and all, and work through them together,' " he says. "In a risk-averse world like the federal government, that might be a harder pill to swallow."

Middle managers fear collaborative software tools ultimately will flatten the organizational structure - which they often do, Kansa says, by expanding the lines of communication - and render their positions obsolete. Managers also might view such an initiative as an added burden; one more directive "from on high" that they'll have to oversee, he says. As a result, they often put the kibosh on innovative ideas before they're even fully devised.

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Last updated:

October 4, 2016