Government 2.0

Government 2.0 was the period's defining buzz-phrase, popularised by Tim O'Reilly's 2010 essay 'Government as a Platform' (in the O'Reilly book Open Government) and rapidly absorbed into every Gov 2.0 conference, federal reform document, and Code for America fellowship pitch. The framing — model government on iOS or Twitter, provide open APIs and stable rails, treat citizens as users — gave the movement a coherent rhetorical centre, but it also mapped poorly onto the institutional plumbing (courts, schools, social services, regulatory enforcement) that constitutes most of what government does.

The section's pieces tracked the movement at three levels. At the federal layer: Aneesh Chopra as U.S. CTO, Vivek Kundra at OMB shipping data.gov, the Sunlight-and-OGP infrastructure forming around them. At the city layer: Manor, Texas — population 6,000 — running the most-visible Government 2.0 sandbox in the country in 2010, before Code for America's fellowship cohort even deployed. At the international layer: the UK's pre-GDS run-up (the Martha Lane Fox Directgov review, the MySociety constellation), the Quebec consultation process under Henri-François Gautrin, the Canadian CPSRenewal community around Nick Charney, the Australian Government 2.0 Taskforce.

By 2012 the magazine's coverage had begun pushing back on the platform metaphor itself, arguing that service delivery, citizen co-production, and institutional culture change couldn't be reduced to API availability. That argument anticipated the post-2013 maturation of the field — the GDS / U.S. Digital Service / 18F school of service-design framings, and the public-interest-tech literature emphasising in-house institutional capacity over external developer ecosystems.