In Development

It’s a strange thing when Wellington shuts down for two weeks over Xmas. You can’t get your usual coffee, drink in your usual bars or get ahold of your landlord when you really need to because they’ve just told you they’re selling your house. But thanks to the Internet, you can do some of your daily business anyway. You can search for a new home on an assortment of websites, then figure out where they are using online maps, and folksonomy tags to see what’s in the area. Bank branches are shut, but you can do banking online, or use phone banking. The post offices may be shut, but you can use their website to figure out how much it’s going to cost you to send out all your trademe sales of unwanted Xmas gifts. The city council website can tell you when they’ll come pick up all the bottles and rubbish from your New Year’s Eve party, and you can figure out what your public transport options are with the help of the Metlink site. How did anything get done over summer before the Internet? As a “digital native”, I can’t imagine what it was like. Anyone want to draw a picture of the past for me? The rise of a generation used to being able to get whatever they want 24 hours a day provides a big challenge to the government. How can we best serve the public in the way that they would like to be served?If I was to draw a picture of what my ideal government/public interaction would look like, all the aspects of government that I’m involved in, from voting to car registrations to paying tax would take the form of Facebook applications, and I could subscribe to them as applicable. They’d provide me with timely updates whenever I needed to take action, and I could do everything with a few clicks of a button. Of course, I have no doubt that this idea would be the worst nightmare of people who are more concerned with privacy and authentication than I am, and it is a very extreme idea. But who would have thought fifteen or even ten years ago that so much of what we take for granted now could be possible?