Jane Fountain, Professor of Political Science and Public Policy and Director of the National Center for Digital Government at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, gave a keynote address at Portugal Tecnológico 2010 on September 22, 2010 at the Parque das Nacoes in Lisbon, Portugal.
Fountain’s address, “The transformational effect of web technologies on government” examined the increasing usage of Web 2.0 tools in government, commonly referred to as “Gov 2.0.” According to Fountain, “Gov 2.0 signals government’s emphasis on the latest digital technologies for providing services and information, for policymaking, and for advancing the technology agenda of innovative national governments.”
These government agendas vary widely across countries. In the US, the Obama administration has viewed transparency through the Web as paramount to Gov 2.0 and launched an “open government” initiative. The release of data.gov, for instance, was an attempt to make government data freely available to anyone with an Internet connection. In the European Union, the Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market (OHIM) has been a leader in ensuring interoperability, redesigning business processes for technological efficiency, and creating knowledge networks that work across governments and agencies to promote economic vitality and social well being.
Fountain, with Raquel Galindo-Dorado and Jeffrey Rothschild, has produced a case study based on OHIM’s transformation. The Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market: Creating a 21st Century Public Agency is freely available in both English and Spanish through the National Center for Digital Government. The OHIM case study presents some of the most innovative and advanced sources of new and promising practices for using digital technologies to improve government processes. The agency is an example of a government office that understood the importance of technological advancements in conjunction with institutional transformation.
More information about the Portugal Tecnológico conference is available at their website: English version | Portuguese version. Videos of all the conference’s the keynote addresses are available online. Professor Fountain’s address begins around 1:28.