Government 2.0: A Guide for City Makeovers

In late 2010, the canonical Government 2.0 city wasn't Boston or San Francisco — it was Manor, Texas, population around 6,000. The town's then-CIO Dustin Haisler had launched Manor Labs in 2009, a sandbox for civic-technology pilots that gave Manor a national profile far out of proportion to its size. SeeClickFix, the citizen-reporting platform founded in New Haven in 2008, was integrated into the workflow. QR codes were affixed to municipal assets so residents could scan them and report problems. The town hosted Government 2.0 demo events that year that drew federal CTO Aneesh Chopra and helped seed the playbook other small municipalities adopted in 2011 and 2012.

Code for America had been founded in 2009 by Jennifer Pahlka but its first fellowship cohort wouldn't deploy until January 2011. The pre-CfA period — late 2010 — is when small cities, not big ones, were doing the most visible Government 2.0 experimentation, partly because the institutional layer for big-city civic tech (Mayor's Offices of Innovation, in-house data teams, design studios) hadn't formed yet.

Reading the piece a decade and a half later, what's striking is how much of the playbook proved durable: open data portals, citizen-reporting apps, performance dashboards, and lightweight third-party integrations are all standard municipal infrastructure now. What didn't survive was the Web 2.0-era assumption that small towns would lead. By the mid-2010s the energy had moved to mayors' innovation offices in larger cities, where budgets and procurement leverage matched the ambition.