The great Marijn Janssen kindly invited me last year to write the preface of the book he edited, which has now been published.

You can download a pdf of my foreword here, but the gist is:

These factors led to an organic, rather than rationally planned, adoption of government 2.0 across governments. This was probably inevitable in view of the very nature of “2.0” technologies and should not be considered as negative in itself. However, this unstructured, bottom-up adoption led to a reality of many fragmented and improvised 2.0 initiatives. Decision-makers were put in a position where 2.0 initiative were suddenly a “must”, without being equipped with the intellectual tools to design, run and evaluate them. This is probably the reason why it is fair to say that while adoption of government 2.0 is almost universal, its impact is far from being demonstrated. There were a lot of “wheels” being reinvented, and disparate projects were launched in very different fields (from service delivery to political campaigning) without integration.