Gov 2.0 and Web 2.0 Expo

One of the best keynote sessions at today’s Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco was the interview of Ellen Miller of the Sunlight Foundation by Tim O’Reilly .

Sunlight Foundation is focusing on making government more transparent through Web 2.0 tools.  The fact is that in the US (never mind the UK) too many government departments spend too much money on web site development that delivers too little in terms of understandable information. 

This means that valuable information that should be in the public debate is hidden.  It’s a kind of web obfuscation caused by bloat and poor user interface design. 

Ellen mentioned that the Sunlight Foundation often produces ‘alternative’ web sites that present government data in much better, more visually understandable ways.  The result is that the alternative sites – often built for peanuts compared to federal budgets – become much more popular that the ‘official sites’.

The Foundation also challenges the vastly inflated costs associated with official sites such as Recovery.gov - that has a massive budget of multiple tens of millions of dollars.  Why such budgets in a Web 2.0 world?

The Sunlight Foundation is a non-profit organisation that is shaking the processes by which governments provide citizens with information.  We need its equivalent in the UK. 

(Picture of Tim O’Reilly by FRONT)