Week 9 Micropolitics, Opensource and Gov 2.0

What can we do with all these people? From a conventional government perspective we can organise them into a catalogue of details, from health records to tax payments and geospatial movements. They can be commodified into those with jobs and those without or skilled professionals and unskilled labourers. From a Gov2.0 perspective we might consider that these biological commodities have something to contribute back into the system, but the point at which we might consider Gov2.0 as faltering or even dead in the water is the foundational system of a top down approach consisting of traditional governments viewing themselves as the paramount power within the ecology.

I propose then that the title of this relatively new movement 'Gov 2.0'  should not stand for the reinvigoration of government but of governance. To address what governance is we need to examine all the groups, concepts, social ideals and movements that shape organised society. It is not enough to point to a particular group and say "this is what you contribute" or "contribute this", but instead we should examine the matrices involved in their relationships with one another, so that we might understand the sorts of outputs their collective resource could potentially generate.

We can easily apply Elinor Ostrom's research into 'collective pool resource' (CPR) here to understand a multi-directional approach to governance and where gov2.0 might be taking us (Ostrom, 2010). Consider an ecology of education consisting of teachers, students, parents, government departments and politicians an already vast ecology of knowledge sharing. Now introduce field researchers and business professionals to the mix and watch the curriculum grow, but for this growth there needs to be a platform developed for open communication with a structure geared towards an openly arrived at end goal. To illustrate how governments can stuff this up we might look at the then Education Minister Julia Gillard's development of league tables for schools. Rather than developing a platform for the input of ideas about solutions, the league tables highlight the problem instead of engaging the ideas of parents and teachers as to what might be the solution. This example demonstrates the danger of a government trying to '2.0' itself purely through the availability of technology rather than opening up the field to input from those whose work has the greatest impact.

Maybe open source education is the answer or maybe it is equally dangerous. This is worthy of passionate discussion.

Ostrom, Elinor (2010) ‘A Multi-Scale Approach to Coping with Climate Change and Other Collective Action Problems’, Solutions: for a sustainable and desirable future 1(2), <http:// www.thesolutionsjournal.com/node/565>, accessed May 3 2011