Is this Gordon Brown’s Open Gov memo moment?

This morning at the RSA Gordon Brown announced his “Smarter Government” initiative – a package of proposals and ideas to launch what he described as the “3rd generation of government services”.

Gordon Brown described this 3rd generation of government as being distinctive by the fact that it will be based around “more personal and interactive services” which will be “shaped by citizens through a dialogue” and where “users have the right to feedback and shape the way that service is delivered”.

For us – and for government in general – this is an extremely exciting development, as it a strong announcement from the top of government that the UK government is dedicated to embracing participative governance.

Most importantly, this embrace of participative governance doesn’t look like a case of adding some gloss – but is actually a substantive embedding of citizen participation throughout government service delivery – where citizen participation should sit.

And the drivers behind this participative governance initiative are clear and make perfect sense from a government business perspective, as Gordon Brown described in his speech “the days of the citizen in charge of the service has started” and therefore a  “radical shifter of power to the users” happening.

Most excitingly for us, this announcement clearly fits into what we’ve been doing with the Obama Administration over in the US – running participative policy dialogues for a wide number of government agencies over there – using our Dialogue platform.  I also happened to write an article last month for PR Week on the issue of the shift in power from organisations to citizens – which you can read here.

So – was this Gordon Brown’s Open Gov memo moment???  Well, I think it might well have been, and I hope the similar wave of momentum and excitement and action will follow . . .

+ finally, I was truly intrigued and interested about the number of times the Gordon Brown used the word “dialogue” in his speech – something which seems like a real shift from his previous language talking of things like “let’s consult the public”.  Really good stuff – and definitely a conceptual shift for the better . ..