Many peo­ple involved in the move­ment that is Gov­ern­ment 2.0 want it to hap­pen. Now. Not least of all, I’ve been guilty of har­bour­ing such desires. But per­haps it’s not nec­es­sary, as Andrea Di Maio noted recently.

Like all things good, open gov­ern­ment will even­tu­ally come to those of us who wait. Of course, that’s not to say we shouldn’t be doing some­thing active in the mean­time. Pas­siv­ity has no value in this case. We can be all of anx­ious for change within gov­ern­ment, encour­ag­ing and doing some­thing of our own to trig­ger that change.

I’m pro­gres­sively more of the view that in the case of open gov­ern­ment, Gov­ern­ment 2.0, or what­ever else we choose to call it, one of two things will hap­pen — either gov­ern­ments will take some level (there’s obvi­ously a con­tin­uum here) of action, or they’ll do nothing.

In the for­mer case, that action will lie some­where between releas­ing a lit­tle data, or start­ing an open con­sul­ta­tion or any num­ber of other things that are “toe in the water” efforts, and some­thing toward the oppo­site end of the scale where they both release an action plan as the Vic­to­rian (Aus­tralia) Gov­ern­ment has and enforce it through a com­bi­na­tion of coer­cive and encour­ag­ing actions.

Most gov­ern­ments in the West, on a whole-​​of-​​government level, seem to be doing some­thing. It’s at the agency and indi­vid­ual level that ret­i­cence becomes more vis­i­ble. This will change, over time, as do all things asso­ci­ated with com­plex cul­tural shifts. Make no mis­take, Gov­ern­ment 2.0 is a pro­found cul­tural shift for both organ­i­sa­tions and the indi­vid­u­als within them.

In the case of doing noth­ing, even­tu­ally the com­mu­nity will route around the dam­age and do some­thing for them­selves, mak­ing the bits of gov­ern­ment that could have had a hand in the solu­tion more or less redun­dant. With smarts, some­times those bits of gov­ern­ment then come on board.

So, no, Gov­ern­ment 2.0 isn’t nec­es­sar­ily urgent in and of itself, because it’s already hap­pen­ing. How­ever we all have a hand in mak­ing it hap­pen, whether we’re inside a gov­ern­ment agency, a cit­i­zen anx­ious for gov­ern­ment to inter­act more openly with us, a devel­oper keen to make some­thing amaz­ing with open PSI.

Where we can and where it’s appro­pri­ate, cer­tainly, we should encour­age urgency. But it needn’t be in every case.