E-government, politics and Web 2.0

The advent of Web 2.0 has created abundant opportunities for reinventing businesses and governments. Web 2.0, coined by Tim O´Reilly in 2004, is the idea of mutually maximizing collective intelligence and added value for each participant by dynamic information sharing and creation. Accompanied by the Web 2.0 technologies and services have spread around the world at an amazing pace and are used by millions of people every day. Many public service organizations are also adopting Web 2.0 applications as a means of improving their ability to collaborate and serve citizens more effectively. Web 2.0 tools allow governments to develop two-way communication with their citizens. As such, these tools hold the potential for enhancing citizen participation in online government offerings. Blogs, wikis, chat rooms, podcasts, Really Simple Syndication (RSS) and other applications are all part of this process and are tentatively being adopted to accelerate e-Government. These trends also pose big concerns around privacy, security, authenticity, and access that need to be addressed. Government faces cultural challenges as well, including agency hierarchy and accountability issues that need attention. Though it may not be obvious, essentially the road marks in web 2.0 are political: grassroots participation, forging new connections, and empowering from the ground up. The ideal democratic process is participatory and web 2.0 is about democratizing digital technology. From the other end of the spectrum, it may therefore be relevant to ask, if there has been a shift in political use of the internet and digital new media, how do broader the communication of politics and policy making towards web 2.0 impact? Does web 2.0 hinder or help democratic citizenship? This paper attempts to figure out e-government and politics engagement in the context of Web 2.0.