In a few days' time, I'll head off to Europe again, to present at this year's Conference on e-Democracy (EDEM 2010). I really enjoyed the 2009 edition (see the coverage in this blog), and it's hard to believe a whole year has passed already - probably because it hasn't: EDEM 2009 was held in September...
Still, that's not stopped us from developing some new ideas on how to further the 'government 2.0' push which aims to utilise Web 2.0 technologies, social media models, and produsage processes in order to create better engagement and participation between governments and citizens. This year, I'm building on my observations with Jason Wilson about top-down and bottom-up forms of engagement, presented at EDEM 2009, to suggest (in a paper co-authored with Adam Swift) that neither the common government-to-citizen (g2c) nor citizen-to-citizen (c2c) initiatives in the government 2.0 space quite manage to find the right balance, and that we may need to explore the possibility for new, hybrid models in between these poles: we outline what we've called a g4c2c model in which government provides explicit support for, and gets involved in, citizen-to-citizen activities.
I've posted our slides and full paper on this site already (updated: posted the wrong link originally...) - comments very welcome. We were also happy to note that there's a very good fit between our g4c2c model and Stephen Coleman's and Jay Blumler's call for a 'Civic Commons 2.0', in their latest book (perhaps not surprising since in turn they're drawing specifically on my work on produsage in outlining that new civic commons...).
After the conference, incidentally, I'll be mostly offline during the rest of May, as we travel through Germany. Might continue to post updates on Twitter and Facebook , but not about anything related to my research...
