Gov 2.0: It's All About The Platform
Editor's note: The following guest post is by Tim O'Reilly, the founder and CEO of computer book publisher O'Reilly Media and a conference organizer. O'Reilly coined the term Web 2.0 five years ago. Now he is arguing it is time for Gov 2.0 …
Context & Ripple Effects
Tim O'Reilly coined Web 2.0 five years ago and has been defending the term ever since — including an October 2008 course-correction reasserting what Web 2.0 actually means against dilution. With this guest post he applies the same definitional discipline to government, arguing Gov 2.0 is not about better government websites but about government as a platform.
It matters because O'Reilly has done this playbook before: his framing of an era tends to set the vocabulary conferences, startups, and eventually agencies organize around, as a 2005 Wired profile of the trend spotter himself captured early on.
First-order effects
- Government agencies reading this get a concrete template shift: expose raw data and services through APIs rather than building every citizen-facing application in-house.
Second-order effects
- Developers and civic startups become the de facto interface layer between agencies and citizens, pressuring incumbent government IT contractors whose value was building finished front-ends.
- O'Reilly's conference machinery gives Gov 2.0 a branded venue the way it did for Web 2.0, concentrating attention and talent around the platform framing.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, public-sector procurement moves from buying applications toward maintaining data infrastructure — with accountability questions about who owns and governs the platform layer left deliberately open by the essay.
The trend: The same 'platform, not product' logic that organized the commercial web is being extended into how governments publish data and deliver services.