Web 2.0 et gouvernement, révolution ou sur-place?

Encore dans l’édition du 12 septembre du New York Times, Anand Giridharadas relève l’appropriation des technologies du Web 2.0 par le gouvernement des USA :

President Obama declared during the campaign that “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” That messianic phrase held the promise of a new style of politics in this time of tweets and pokes. But it was vague, a paradigm slipped casually into our drinks. To date, the taste has proven bittersweet.

Federal agencies have been directed to release online information that was once sealed; reporters from Web-only publications have been called on at news conferences; the new portal Data.gov is allowing citizens to create their own applications to analyze government data. But the most revealing efforts have been in “crowdsourcing”: in soliciting citizens’ policy ideas on the Internet and allowing them to vote on one another’s proposals.

During the transition, the administration created an online “Citizen’s Briefing Book” for people to submit ideas to the president. “The best-rated ones will rise to the top, and after the Inauguration, we’ll print them out and gather them into a binder like the ones the president receives every day from experts and advisors,” Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser to Mr. Obama, wrote to supporters.

They received 44,000 proposals and 1.4 million votes for those proposals. The results were quietly published, but they were embarrassing — not so much to the administration as to us, the ones we’ve been waiting for.

À la fois critique et intéressée, cet article propose une vision sobre quant à la réalité du Web 2.0 par rapport aux impératifs que doivent gérer un gouvernement.

Ce contenu a été mis à jour le 2009-09-17 à 15 h 14 min.