Framing Web 2.0 in the Process of Public Sector Innovation: Going Down the Participation Ladder

Recently, the rise of social computing has attracted significant interest from both the practitioners’ and scholars’ communities, in view of its potential applications to the public sector of the future. In this paper we frame web 2.0 as one of the steps in the process of public sector innovation, as an attempt to understand if and how it may contribute to the construction of a more open, transparent and collaborative government. The article focuses on three main implementation aspects of what may be defined as an evolved eGovernance approach, namely: the ICT tools deployed for eGovernment/eParticipation, the public actions put in place to ensure the widest uptake and social inclusion, and the institutional changes required (both at organizational and political level). The analysis conducted shows how Web 2.0 provides a number of useful levers that should be adopted to tackle some of the problems encountered in the first wave of Government digitalization, such as: the lack of orientation towards creation of value for the final user, the focus on automation rather than on innovation, and the consequent low levels of take up/participation.