The Goverati
Dr. Mark Drapeau writing at Read/WriteWeb has a piece today on Government 2.0: the rise of the goverati. What is the goverati?
It is made up of people with first-hand knowledge of how the government operates, who understand how to use social software to accomplish a variety of government missions, and who want to use that knowledge for the benefit of all.
The goverati includes not only government employees, but also people from think tanks, trade publications, and non-profits. And it includes high-profile thinkers outside of the government who have an interest in a more open, transparent, and efficient government; people such as Joe Trippi, Craig Newmark, and Tim O’Reilly. Using formal and informal social networks, the goverati is networking, sharing information, and changing how parts of the government interact with each other and with citizens.
About a week ago, President Obama issued a memo on this very topic. The memo, which affects all Executive Branch employees, has three main pillars: government should be more transparent, participatory, and collaborative. Social software will be part of an overall strategy to make this happen, spearheaded by the CTO, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and the General Services Administration (GSA). The naming of a “New Media” czar, Macon Phillips, will no doubt push the process along and keep branches well informed.
There are many barriers to this kind of change, so many they would be overwhelming to list. But the changes that are happenening are being covered by the mainstream press, and they are being enacted mainly by — you guessed it — the goverati.
READ ON for his explanation of how the goverati is a body more powerful than the sum of its parts.
One Response to “The Goverati”
Joe — the _real_ operators are the Congressional staffers, the officials and operatives of the two major political parties, and lobbyists. Not these kids. These kids are simply the latest smug, self-absorbed kids who “adopted” tech to use as a style issue with their view, often elitist, of a better, liberal, Democratic-planned-and-managed world. As with their computer toys and software, so with how they view alternative energy, mass transit, etc., especially now with with the Goronic “global warming” fad constituting a political “bubble” bigger than past environmentalist causes when it comes to scope or extent of potential government interventionism. There actually is nothing new with these people, who believe they're a new phenomon just “discovered.” We had the Atari Democrats in the 1980 and the Nintendo Democrats in the 1990s, who already were playing silly games (mainly mind games) with Goronic techno-futurism. The conceit of the latest kids is wholly misplaced. They aren't even in command, as Obama's Cabinet and other executive choices show.