Government 2.0 Club
The government 2.0 club is an organisation whose sole purpose is to make a better, more democratic government. Quite aptly, using software terminology, the new version of democracy would be known as Government 2.0. The ball was set rolling with the government 2.0 camp. This was an event back in 2009 which saw the meeting of industry experts, academics and representatives of the government in order to discuss using Web 2.0 technology and social media to design what would effectively be a new government, gov 2.0.
This sounds more confusing than it is. Web 2.0 is basically things like Facebook where the user can add to or change the content of the site. A user can post a message or video and the site viewed by everyone is actually different once they click “share” and the information is uploaded. The site has been effectively changed by the individual user, for this reason it is known as Web 2.0 as opposed to the original web, where all the user can do is passively read the content.
The Government 2.0 Club
So the Gov 2.0 Club is an organisation that aims at creating a new government in a Facebook-esque sort of manner. For an example of this sort of thing take a look at data.gov. The idea of this government website is to allow public access to all the data the government collects that is not private or restricted for security reasons. The next society? This idea of using web 2.0 facebook-like sites to make the government more reachable and (seemingly) more transparent could indeed pave the way for a new kind of democracy that appeals to a wider audience. Historians may look back at such events as the Gov 2.0 Camp as being the splitting point where society began to actually change form, obviously looking back from the relative comfort of a Utopian Government 5.7 somewhere down the line. More detailed info can be found at http://www.government20club.org/