 Thank you so much for taking the time for this interview. And we'd like first to know, what's your definition of government 2.0? And is it all about ICT adoption or transparency or something different? I have to say, our definition of government 2.0 is relatively unusual. It doesn't contain any of those terms like participation, democracy, transparency. It looks at two trends. Socialization, which is doing things together, among citizens, among employees, across government and the public. And the second one is commoditization, which is using commodity technology, which could be the internet, could be consumer social network, could be consumer devices to support the government to citizen delivery. So the definition is the government 2.0 is the commoditization and socialization of pretty much anything, so services, data, and processes. So that at the end of this process, which we have no idea how long it's going to take around the world, government becomes part of its environment rather than a separate thing. So when we usually hear about government 2.0, we hear about e-participation and citizen inclusion and empowerment. So how related are these two entities? Those are important concepts. There are like steps, if you like, in these government 2.0 evolutions. So as soon as you socialize, you clearly make people participate. You have to become more transparent in order for them to understand what you do and give you advice and be engaged in things like service delivery or policy making. But don't get mistaken. These are just steps. The end game of government 2.0 really is that all different boundaries, including organizational boundaries and the boundary between government and the public, is going to be completely blurred. And that's the part that I think makes government 2.0 more difficult to accept from an institutional perspective. So you spoke about how government 2.0 can embrace social media. And when you spoke about it, you mentioned three different phases, denial and replacement and embracing. So how different and distinct are these three phases and how do they relate to government and social media? Well, in some cases, they are phasing. In some cases, they are just attitudes. So we finally, if we look at our clients around the world, some of them are still in denial for whatever reason. Some of them are trying to do the same things, creating their own platforms and their own channels. So they try to own this community phenomena. And the third category, which is growing, people accept this is, I mean, the train has left the station basically. And the only thing you can do is to embrace. You can also look at these three phases as an evolution. But sometimes those who are in denial are so because they have some security or mission criticality issues that is very difficult to resolve as soon as you accept, well, a way to socialize this. So how do you socialize intelligence data? How do you socialize cities and data with other people? So I think there are both phases, but also different ways in which people in government relate to this phenomena. So when speaking about government 2.0, you mentioned that very little part of the conversation is speaking about the employee 2.0 and how government police should act. So why do you think there is very little part of conversation about that? And why is the conversation more leaned through towards the new media? I think in every kind of strategy or endeavor, governments always try to look at those issues from an institutional perspective. So what would government do about electronic services? What should government do about health care? You see, institution versus an issue. Now when you look at web 2.0 and social networks, the fundamental characteristics is that this is people to people. So if you look at Facebook, people follow other people. They follow other people on Twitter. So if you then look at government, you say, well, would citizens follow or would they like to be friends with government? No, because government is an institution and the same applies, by the way, to corporations. So the reason why the employee dimension is important is that employees are the most important asset in government as they are the people. So if I'm a citizen, I may wish to be connected with persons in government, with employees. So as soon as you recognize this, you figure out, well, what I really need to do is to understand what employees are supposed to do. Now the reason why this is not being discussed so much is that this becomes more personal. And the point is, governments operate as an institution. They really allow individuals to have initiative, to test the boundaries of existing regulations and so forth. But that's exactly what needs to be done if you want to engage with social networks and get the most out of this government 2.0 trend. So you also discussed the use of Wikis when governments embrace social media, web 2.0. So tell us about some of the examples of how Wikis can be used in that context. As Wikis are just one of the many tools and just traditionally for whatever reason, they have been more successful than other tools when you try to apply them inside government. And there are plenty of examples. For instance, ministries coming from the mergers of different agencies, building a wiki as allowed employees who didn't know each other to start socializing. Another important example when, for instance, the Department of Defense in the United States looks for new capabilities, wiki is a great tool to allow employees to collaborate, to solve these new challenging problems. Another great example is to use the wiki in procurement when you have, rather than having a consultant writing the request for proposal on your behalf, you actually have all the possible vendors, the public at large if you like, writing the request for proposal for you on a wiki, which is more transparent, more quicker I would say, and allow vendors to understand what you need much earlier in the process. So there are plenty of areas in which Wikis have been extremely successful, but they're just a tool. I think what people really need to understand, tools are the least of their worry. There are plenty of tools. The point is how do we use the tools to innovate and let people, in this case, employees, get the most out of it. Okay, so we're interested also to know about the UNE government survey 2010. Tell us about the main findings of the report and whether you know any findings that can benefit Qatar and the Gulf region in that area. I have to say, we in Qatar have a very controversial view of rankings and surveys and we have consistently written since 2005-2004, they are not particularly helpful. The problem with any survey, including the UN, is that every country has a particular context. Okay, so I've been in Bahrain, I've been in, the Emirates have been here. I can sense the differences, how you're dealing with certain priorities, how do you do you do planning and so forth. So having everybody even in the same region on the same criteria in my view doesn't make too much sense. This means that what is interesting in the UN ranking, they look at three different things. Kind of human capital development like IT literacy, level of education. They look at infrastructure things like internet penetration, mobile phone penetration and then they have a pretty articulate way of looking at online services. Now I'm not terribly positive on the latter part because it's a little bit arbitrary but when you look at those more objective numbers like infrastructure maturity, level of education, those are clearly indicators that Qatar and other countries should look at in terms of looking at what their peers are doing. So if there is a lower penetration, if there's lower level of education and so forth, those are the most important things to be tackled as opposed to focusing on how many services do we have online because the ability to use those services will depend on how many people do we have online. Does it make sense to have the service online? So I think elements of the survey make a lot of sense. Taking the service as a ranking like it was a formal one race in my view doesn't make much sense. So in the last segment of our interview, we're really interested to know about the dark side of government 2.0 which intrigued many of the attendees today. So first tell us about how this dark side pertains to productivity and many people are thinking that productivity may be lessened or reduced when governments embrace social media or web 2.0. So what do you think of that? Yes, let me say in any government organization, actually in any organization, there have always been multiple ways in which people can waste their time. The coffee machine, reading the newspaper, the internet before 2.0 provides multiple ways of wasting time. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, all the social networks are an additional potential source of destruction. And like before, it's an entirely management problem. The manager has to understand what outcome is this employee assumed to produce and is the use of this tool helping rather than preventing that outcome from being achieved. So attitudes like a band the use of these social networks because this person will be on productive is not going to work. Also because many people today have smartphones. So you block Facebook on the network, he or she will use it on the smartphone. So I think the right attitude is from the productivity perspective is to encourage employees like this. Do you want to use Facebook? Well, show me how Facebook can help do you do your job better. So it's put the challenge to those who say, well, I think I want to use Facebook is part of my mindset. Well, you are an employee, use it. Show me how you can be more productive as opposed to assuming you want to be productive. So the challenge again goes to the employee rather than to the organization. So how does that pertain to accountability when we speak about the dark side of government? I think accountability is a tricky thing because the way to use these tools effectively is to use on a personal basis. So as soon as you start blurring your personal identity on Facebook, for instance your professional identity, you may say things that may be misconstrued as a statement of the government. So it's very important in order to discharge accountability to actually be accountable that every time I as an employee say something wherever it is on social networks, people can understand, is this person saying this on a personal basis or is this an official statement? So that has to be clearly stated in my Facebook profile or the LinkedIn profile and so forth. This won't solve all the problems or at least helps understand the boundary between my freedom of speech if you like and the fact that I'm accountable for what I say being a government employee. So you also mentioned you referred to a cultural clash, kind of cultural clash that may arise. So also we'd like to know about that. I mean this has to do with the never-ending discussion between digital natives and digital immigrants. Digital native is somebody who's pretty young who has always been surrounded by technology so they breathe and eat all this stuff. Probably people like myself, we actually learn this stuff but it's not in our DNA. So what happens is if you go through these employee incentives and you say well I'm going to reward you if you connect with people through these new social networks. People like myself don't really possess the ability to do much, may feel at a disadvantage. So when it comes to evaluating who has been the best employee, what possibilities do I have not being a digital native to rank very well into the new connection world? So the point is be very careful from the management perspective in balancing, I want to encourage you but I want to really discourage you people who just don't get it because there is nothing you can do to make them get it. So finding a balance is an important thing from a management perspective. So also what about social monitoring? You mentioned that this is a very important step for governments to take so. Yeah, social monitoring, I want to be very clear on this because monitoring suggests government watches what people does, it's not what I mean. What I mean is if you have multiple employees who are engaging themselves with citizens on those social networks, it's very difficult, close to impossible for managers to monitor them. So social monitoring is about people watching out for each other. So all those who are engaged in blogs or wikis or social networks of all sort should spend some time in looking for their colleagues. What is my colleague doing? And if you sense that something wrong is happening, just tell them. So that monitoring is brought down from the management level to the people level and that is very effective. Very good example is Wikipedia, any Wiki. Somebody makes a statement, maybe inflammatory or wrong, somebody else corrects it. It's the same principle. People help other people do the right thing. So my final question is about open source since you're an expert in open source. What do you think of the governmental shift into open source from proprietary systems? You know it's interesting because I've been dealing with this for many years and the first wave has been we don't want to use proprietary and we want to use open. In reality is that anybody in government who buys open buys open from a vendor. So at the end of the day, what this is becoming is just a wider choice of vendors. So it's not just Microsoft, there will be somebody else if you like. And greater openness in terms of the products that are being used. But when it comes to the original, the original drive was oh I can do it myself, I can get rid of vendors, that's not going to happen. In fact, those who are benefiting most out of open source are the vendors themselves. Vendors have slashed their development and support costs by using open source including Microsoft. Now there is one other area of open source which is interesting which is when governments develop their own specific applications for which they don't find products in the market. If they develop that in certain ways using open source they may engage other government agencies and they create communities amongst themselves. And they can collaboratively support the development and maintenance of these very vertical and narrow applications. That's a different dimension of open source. We call it community source because those are smaller community than just all the public. But that's an area where I think there is lots of mileage for open source as such. When you go to infrastructure software, operating system, productivity packages, it's just a market. So it has opened the market but nobody's maintaining their own open source email system. They will just go to another vendor who happens to have an open source solution but it's just a contract between you and that vendor. So you don't think that open source may help governments have vendor independence since? Well, it's sort of independence because if different people support, I don't know, open office would be an example, your documents are written in such a standard that if you change version you can still use those documents. But that's it, you're still buying from a vendor. You're not actually insourcing the ability to maintain and develop the product. So in my view, open standards, which is what the document is about, are far more important than open source. Whereas in the past, let's say five, six years ago there was this idea that open source would be almost free of charge. There is no such thing as a free meal. So you have to pay, you may pay less and you can actually change restaurant time in the same food. That's exactly what open source is about. Thank you so much for this insightful interview and we wish to see you again in Doha. Thanks a lot, thank you.