Over at the Reg there’s a pretty recent article that reveals some of the stumbling blocks involved with using Web 2.0 in government.
One brief example (of many)
“The problem is that everything must be kept on paper,” McLaughlin says. “So, government web masters have to sit and print snapshots of their websites on paper. If you do a blog post, you have to print it. This is a real pain, particularly if the site does comments. You have to print out all the comments too.”
“So then the question is ‘What about status updates on Facebook? Do you have to print that too?’ The answer is ‘Yes.'”
I saw that article too. I’ve seen McLaughlin and met him briefly and seems wicked smart. The only downside of the article is that it almost made it feel like Gov 2.0 was a lost cause. A lot of the problems are being worked on and are not reasons to give up. Plus, from all my research, government is truly not behind its peers – large Fortune 500 companies. True they may not be as on top as a few like Google and Best Buy but they are definitely hanging in there with the likes of Accenture, Blockbuster, J&J, etc.