Carlota Perez, in her seminal 2002 book on technology revolutions and financial capital, talks about general purpose technologies (like steam, electricity, mass media and now ICT) that give rise to techno-societal revolutions occurring about every half century.

However, the early stage of this  50-60 year period consists of several decades when we tend to invest heavily in the wrong things, like real estate or in finance itself. This is because we don’t understand the new technology nor what it can do as we are confined by our existing institutions and mindsets. This inevitably results in an economic bubble which gets broken by a crash. Sound familiar!? We now need to go through a period of turbulent adaptation and assimilation of institutions, markets and mindsets, hopefully leading to a ‘golden age’ of widespread use and exploitation. 

 

In Perez’s view we are right now in a critical historic moment, and I’m sure Obama (to name drop just one other) would agree! However there also seem to be other critical paradigm shifts occurring right now.

The discussion last week in Prague at the 7^th EEEGOV Days emphasised how many in the ICT industry, as well as in the eGovernment network, see the technology also on the edge of massive changes. After a decade in the Web 1.0 world, we’re moving rapidly to the Web 2.0 world of bottom-up, democratised, mashable services, which can be fully personalised, culture-driven and empowering, within an open innovation and governance paradigm. And we already have much of the technology for Web 3.0 which will enable mass (or as Andy Mulholland intriguingly terms it) ‘mesh’ collaboration through the strength of weak ties, cloud services and cloud computing, GRID, open ID, open semantic web, full policy modelling, etc.

 

Further, according to Don Tapscott (in his latest book “Grown Up Digital”) the age of the digital native is upon us. Thus, the generation which has grown up using the Internet will soon be responsible citizens with jobs and families, and they will demand intelligent, personalised and self-directed government services.

Does the coming together of these three elements (i.e. a new economic paradigm, truly transformative new ICT, and the net generation) constitute a perfect storm and thus new era for (e)governance? It would be  nice to think so, but, as Perez also reminded us, it will depend on common sense and the right policies. And I haven’t even mentioned climate change or swine-flu yet! The latest Eurostat data on citizens' use of eGovernment services show a drop between 2007 and 2008 from 30% to 28% (EU 27 average). Does this show that Web 1.0 eGovernment has already reached it’s ceiling.