Following a recent presentation I gave to BCU lecturers last week, the question of “What is Gov 2.0?” was raised, and by pulling aggregated information from various sources, I set about explaining. Then on Thursday, I gave a short presentation to the Solihull’s Councillors that are kicking around ideas based on developing their own social media strategies to help them engage further with their constituencies (well done to them all for embracing this idea- it’s good to see them all having a go, supported by local volunteers of course).

Drawing from Pete Ashton‘s blog post, explaining his interpretation of “What is Web 2.0?” – “… is about online services talking to each other using standardised data. The reason Flickr is a Web 2.0 service isn’t because it hosts people’s photos. It’s because you can take photos of your city, mix them with Wikipedia pages about your city, add in some Twitter messages from your city and plot them on a Google Map of your city. Automatically. That’s Web 2.0.”

Today, Dominic Campbell posted this link, to a video compiled by O’Reilly Media, and hopefully this offers a few more interpretations, to help you draw your own opinions:

The adoption of Gov 2.0 and Web 2.0 practices are going to continue to grow and develop here, and I dare say that some key points will be used as carefully selected election campaign principles over the coming 12 months by all parties.

There’s certainly a lot of movement in this area happening right now, and it will be interesting for me to see how this all turns out in the long run.

Here’s Tim Berners-Lee’s recent interview, purely for a little background info.

UPDATE (7th December 2009)- Peter Alexander has posted some developments today; “Here is the draft Government 2.0 Taskforce report Engage: Getting on with Government 2.0. The Taskforce is seeking your comments and input before finalising the report to go to Government.” http://gov2.net.au/blog/2009/12/07/draftreport/