My company sponsored a recent InfoWeek survey (results) and conference on Best Practices for Government 2.0. Jay and I had not only the good fortune to attend, but the good sense to remain silent while cheeky_geeky and Dan Mintz presented some interesting material to the crowd of mostly government workers. Tracy Haugen kicked off the session and amidst the twittering, it sort of dawned on me that I had no real concept of the relationship between Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, and Government 2.0. I mean…I think I understand what each of them mean, but the incessant jargon-dropping in the conversation had me unsure whether steps were being made forward or backward. Thus I thought I would try and draw a couple pictures to maybe better understand.

Best I can tell, the difference or relationship or commonalities or whatever between Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 kind of look like this:

From Blog Pics

From the point of view of an enterprise, the E2 stuff typically engages people inside some sort of organizational boundary.  Like our internal Confluence implementation. The Web 2.0 stuff, while using the same technologies typically engages people outside an organizational boundary. The Web 2.0 stuff can (and probably should) engage people inside an organization, but it is not necessarily as deep or pervasive as the E2 stuff. An example of this might be something like my company’s corporate blog. We author, but the majority of the readers and commenters are supposedly outside the firewall. Also, there can be some crossover between the two. Twitter might be an example of that, but the jury is still out for me. Yeah I know…this is a gross oversimplification and “stuff” isn’t the most technical of terms, but (hopefully) you get the point. 

But in listening to round table discussion on Government 2.0, it sounded like this was the concept.

From Blog Pics

There was seemingly a mixing of “stuff” engaging both sides of an organizational boundary at once. Maybe this is less confusing to some, but to me I think it tended to get people bogged down in technologies and approaches, rather than community engagement. For example, a particular audience member was turned off by the entire 2.0 concept, merely because she thought every taxpayer in the world would see her mistake if she ever incorrectly edited a wiki. While this is a valid concern, it sort of depends on where that wiki is, what it is used for, and who it is engaging. To have a potential convert write off an entire concept because of this minor misunderstanding is unfortunate, and might possibly be avoided by drawing some corrollary Web/Enterprise 2.0 lines for the public sector.

Who knows though….Maybe I am trying to put too much structure around something that is inherently unstructured and emergent. What do you think?

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