Governing - Government 2.0's Inauguration - By William D. Eggers and Tiffany Dovey
From:
Steven Clift
Date:
Nov 19 18:31 UTC
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From:
http://www.governing.com/mgmt_insight.aspx?id=6062
Government 2.0's Inauguration
November 19, 2008 By William D. Eggers and Tiffany Dovey
What the Obama campaign taught us about collaboration.
William D. Eggers
When Cuauhtémoc "Temo" Figueroa, national field director for the Obama
campaign, arrived in San Antonio ahead of Super Tuesday to get local volunteer
operations off the ground, he came across what looked like an already
well-oiled campaign operation. In something of a role reversal, Figueroa found
himself taking orders from a self-organized group of 600 volunteers who, just a
year earlier, had started out as a handful of Obama supporters gathered around
a table at their local bookstore.
Tiffany Dovey
The rest is history.
Elections will never be the same again. The Obama campaign demonstrated that
traditional top-down, tarmac-to-tarmac presidential campaigns cannot compete
against self-organizing armies of millions motivated by an inspiring candidate
and empowered by a Web-savvy campaign team.
It is not only political campaigns, however, that will be transformed by the
2008 election. Obama's deft use of collaborative technologies to create a new
campaign model has big implications for governance. While some governments have
already started experimenting with Web 2.0 tools, they are nowhere near the
level of sophistication shown by the Obama campaign.
With the Obama team already promising to bring his bottom-up, participatory
model to the federal government, government agencies will be under intense
pressure to catch up with their new president-elect. And that goes for not just
federal agencies. Legions of Obama voters will expect to interact with their
state and local governments in the same way they did with the campaign.
...
More:
http://www.governing.com/mgmt_insight.aspx?id=6062