Keynote Speech by Mr. John S C Wong, Assistant Government Chief Information Officer, at the "Asia Pacific Web Technology Conference"
2 June 2008

Dr. Hareton Leung, Dr. Samson Tam, Ir. S.W. Cheung, Honourable Guests, Speakers, Ladies and Gentlemen,

Good morning. It is my honour to be invited to speak with you today on Gov 2.0. The conference programme and the workshop scheduled in this week provide a valuable opportunity for such a large group of learned parties to gather together to share expert knowledge and experience on Internet technologies surrounding Web 2.0. Nowadays, we have mobile Web 2.0, Security 2.0, CIO 2.0, Enterprise 2.0 and e-Government 2.0. There might be 2.0 versions of windows and doors very soon. Today, I would like to talk about the impact of Web 2.0 on our new wave of e-government development.

What is Gov 2.0?

Like other 2.0 phenomena, there is not a clear definition of Gov 2.0. However, it is related to the interpretations of Web 2.0 and the adoption in government activities and services.

As many of you know, so far there is no single definition for Web 2.0 also. Since 2004, Web 2.0 has confused not only the general IT users, but also experts in the field. Some people consider '2.0' is better than '1.0' and regard this as a transition to the next generation Web or even the second generation Web. In fact, Web 2.0 does not represent a new version of the World Wide Web at all, but merely continues to use so-called "Web 1.0" technologies and concepts. Techniques such as AJAX do not replace underlying protocols like HTTP, but add an additional layer of abstraction on top of them. Many of the ideas of Web 2.0 had already been featured in implementations on networked systems well before the term "Web 2.0" emerged. For example, Amazon.com has allowed customers to write reviews and consumer guides since its launch in 1995, in the form of self-publishing. Amazon also opened its standard programmatic interface to outside developers since 2002.

Another school of thought regards Web 2.0 as an idea in people's heads rather than a reality, a philosophy of mutually maximizing collective intelligence and added value for each participant by formalized and dynamic information sharing and creation.

Tim O'Reilly regards Web 2.0 as business embracing the web as a platform and using its strengths (global audiences, for example) with the traditionally passive buyers of editorial and advertising now taking active, participatory roles in value creation. The prospective Internet-based economy is seen to be characterised by collaborative production and decentralized decision-making. The business strategies will be a model of masses of consumers, employees, suppliers, business partners, and even competitors co-creating values in the absence of direct managerial control. This can result in a rise in the economic value of the web to businesses, as users can perform more activities online. New media companies can find ways of how to make profit with the help of Web 2.0 by designing and assembling products with their customers, and in some cases customers doing the majority of the value creation.

People often associate Web 2.0 with popular sites or services like YouTube, Facebook, Flickers or Podcasting which provide an open platform for their users to contribute contents, allow them to share with others, and facilitate them to chat, discuss, leave comments, voice out viewpoints, and even debate. A Web 2.0 site differs from a traditional information portal by facilitating 2-way communications, user generated contents, participation, sharing, and collaboration. Users can own the data on a Web 2.0 site and exercise control over that data. These sites may have an "Architecture of participation" that encourages users to add value to the application as they use it. This is very different from traditional websites that limit visitors to viewing and whose content only the site's owner can modify. Technologies such as weblogs (blogs), wikis, podcasts, RSS feeds (and other forms of many-to-many publishing), social software, and web application programming interfaces (APIs) now provide enhancements over read-only websites.

Web 2.0 is characterised by its openness, freedom and collective intelligence by way of user participation. The spirit of Web 2.0 can be applied to Gov 2.0, i.e. to enhance creativity, information sharing and citizen participation in order to identify and analyze emerging opportunities to harness new models of collaboration to transform the public sector.

In moving towards Gov 2.0, governments seek to gain additional value from citizen interaction and business transactions because they are expected to increasingly use social networking and other Web 2.0 innovations for fostering greater participation and interactions with the citizens, as well as encouraging more effective intra-government communication. A lot of Web 2.0 applications allow governments to change the nature of what they can do in terms of interaction, but apart from the technical side of things there will be a greater focus on improving the business of government.

Adoption of Web 2.0 in the Government

The development of Gov 2.0 is usually prompted as much by governments needing to replace legacy applications as any attempt at nurturing greater interaction with their citizens. User generated content and social networking behaviour encourage the free flow of digital material. With the convergence of ubiquitous network and wide adoption of mobile services, the community is now no longer satisfied with collecting government news from dedicated web site.

The Hong Kong SAR Government in building our next wave of e-government services emphasise on interacting with citizens through a simple and clean interface to encourage participation of most if not all generations of the public as well as transparent processes and context sensitive to enhance usability. We aim to make available the information from where it is needed and enhance our public service to a citizen-centric approach.

Since 1996, the Government has commenced to publish public information and related news and business information over the Internet on departmental web sites. We then aligned to publish the information in English and Traditional Chinese as well as Simplified Chinese. We have also launched the Electronic Service Delivery (ESDLife) scheme in 2000 to deliver public services through the Internet. Over the years, the Government portals have been continuously upgraded to keep in pace with the Internet technologies and community needs to improve the delivery of electronic services to citizens.

Last year, we launched the GovHK portal to provide one-stop citizen-centric e-services for citizens and visitors. The infrastructure of GovHK is based on the service-oriented architecture and Web services technology to provide a simple, efficient and innovative one-stop service platform that has enabled us to deliver e-government services with the use of a standard-based common interface and allowed our developer to shorten development time with the use of common modules that are shareable among different applications.

The Government is aware of the development of Web 2.0 in the Internet community and has incorporated Web 2.0 features like RSS, blogs, Podcasts, etc. appropriately. For examples, RTHK started to provide Podcasts for citizens to download since 2006. At the GovHK portal, we have some 33 RSS news feed channels that citizens can subscribe to obtain the latest information available from the government and related organisations. The information includes government daily news, press releases, blog entries of our CE and FS, Hong Kong statistics, weather information, environmental information, news on postal service, and news on business and trade. We have packaged the weather information, air pollution index, etc. using XML format so that they are accessible not only from the web sites of the HK Observatory or the Environment Protection Department but also most government portals including the Wi-Fi access points.

Besides information dissemination, the Government makes use of various tools for public engagement such as weblogs to collect public opinions and feedback from citizens in our policy development process. We have established the "Blue Sky Actions" blog site since 2006 to promulgate the campaign and share knowledge and views with the citizens. We have also established an online discussion board in support of the West Kowloon Cultural District public engagement exercise to collect views and suggestions from citizens. Social networking tools like You-Tube have a lot of potential in improving government services. For example, citizens can submit the location information such as street name or lamppost number etc. together with a digital photograph of a public facility requiring repair. This can help locate the item correctly, reduce the need to schedule an initial inspection, enable an early assessment of the work, and shorten the time to complete the maintenance.

Weblogs can speed up consultation and enable the government and citizens to analyze and debate issues in reasonable detail. In last December, our Secretary for Commerce & Economy Development hosted a thematic blog site to promulgate the 2008 Digital 21 Strategy and invited the community to send in comments through the blog. We have received many valuable comments from the industry and the public.

Issues of Gov 2.0

Our Gov 2.0 experience has been very encouraging and has built up our confidence to continue to incorporate more Web 2.0 features in our next generation of e-government services. On the other hand, there are issues that must be addressed in our future development of Gov 2.0.

In order to design sites that meet each end-user need, the Government has to focus on creating a simple, reliable and publicly accessible infrastructure that exposes the underlying data. In other words, the government should become a data platform, exposing the vast amounts of data to the public. The private sector will likely seize the opportunity to provide data mash up products and services for people. However, there will likely be public concerns over the Government's information management and dissemination especially where certain services are only delivered to selected groups within the population. There is also concern on the integrity of data and probable misuse since some services rely on information that needs to remain private, e.g. social welfare, taxation and health care.

Technology channels are diversifying, and the users are fragmenting across them, increasing the cost to make information widely available. Having standards & guidelines for the format and programmatic access to government data is critical. Technology standards are evolving at a very fast rate. Traditionally, scoping, budgeting and delivering a new IT project in a government environment, with its accountability checks/balances typically takes many months or years by which time the realised benefits may be less than originally expected. Government has to change the approach and shorten the lead time of its systems and services development process in order to match with the Gov 2.0 interactive, social networking and collaborative working characteristics. The Government is working on it, but it takes time.

Another issue is that most citizens are not technology savvy enough to create their own mash-ups or even figure out how to search for information they need. New behaviours are required from citizens as both producers and consumers of digital content, and this also takes time to change.

While Gov 2.0 is welcomed by the community, it is not always suitable to expedite its development and transformation in the Government as quickly as possible. A very concerning issue is the potential of increased security risks that must be treated seriously. Web applications create new network penetration risks and issues like data privacy, intellectual property rights and information security are real issues to be addressed in a Web 2.0 networked and connected community. These issues are not limited to the service provider but also the service consumers. To add more complexity, we need to cautious about the identity of the counterpart you are conversing in a social network. It is crucial that we can implement a flexible and reliable security control system including authentication that can effectively and efficiently manage the sharing, collaboration and social networking environment. Information security is a big issue to consider when adopting whatever new technology. Gov 2.0 is no exception.

One of the salient architecture of Web 2.0 applications is that the contents are usually uploaded from every Web user. For conventional web sites, contents are maintained by dedicated webmasters. This will make the dissemination of bits and bytes, irrespective whether harmful or not, accelerate at a galloping rate. As Gov 2.0 will use a lot of Web 2.0 technologies, the system and network capacity to handle the collaborative creation of contents and information flow traffic is a big concern.

Looking Forward

To move towards Gov 2.0, there are important issues to address, problems to solve and new milestones to achieve. These include testing the regimes for protecting the integrity and trust of the digital platforms in respect of privacy, identity management, intellectual property protection, control of immoral and indecent contents, etc. Moreover, the Government should focus on policy and education to guide citizens in the proper ways of using Gov 2.0 services for sharing, collaboration, joining-up and knowledge exploitation. Furthermore, we need to appeal to the younger workforce who are growing up with social networking.

Finally, I would like to highlight that the dimensions of e-government services should not be limited by technology. We should access and cater for the needs of people and seize the opportunities for improving existing business processes in delivering citizen centric e-services to the public. Web 2.0 has come at a right time.

From the IT perspective, we encourage government agencies to further invest and adopt emerging technology to enhancing their e-services. On the other side, we are mindful of the need to constantly review and revise the existing business processes in order to fit in the new working models in pace with the political, social, technological and economic environments. Most important of all, Gov 2.0 relies on everyone to participate in the innovation and collaboration process in implementing our next wave of e-government services.

The Internet is an open and publicly accessible environment. We need to take appropriate measures to protect our information assets including personal photos, videos, credential data, intellectual work, and personal belongings in the cyber world.

Tim Berners-Lee described the term "Web 2.0" as a "piece of jargon." "Nobody really knows what it means". I want to thank the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and other supporting organisations for organizing this event for us to understand Web 2.0 and share our experience with it. I wish you enjoy the conference that follows.

Thank you.

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