Government 2.0 Examples: Good and Bad

Like all things there are good and bad examples of Gov 2.0.  One of the main drivers for Gov 2.0 should be a reduction in cost of communication with citizens and I came across two separate examples with different outcomes.

Spenta, a Spanish partner who specialises in SharePoint, CRM and .net development and do most of the work on the CSP Demo image and CodePlex for CSP, pointed me at this article about the Barcelona Mayors’ Blog, and the cost of it which is being called into question.

The complaint is that he has spent €315,000 annually on his blog which has 23,000 readers a month, and even after this expense he is not answering the questions being posted by these citizens.  The main cost seems to have arisen from the cost of 6 people used to write the blog for him, which seems a little over the top…

On a more positive note I was looking at the Neighbourhood America website (they are global, despite the name) who provide SaaS Gov2.0 solutions.  In one of their case studies they worked with the United States Health Care Working Group and the team responsible for reaching out to citizens.  This team have to find out what health care coverage and services they want, and how they are willing to pay for it.

Using social software they managed to reduce the cost per participant from $250 to $7.50 and quadruple the number or participants.  A far better set of figures than they managed to get in Barcelona.

It does not matter how good your tools are, you need to put them to effective use to get good results.