On Friday last week  I was at the National Defense University’s Government 2.0 symposium talking about the opportunities web 2.0 creates to transform the way governments deliver services, organize their workforces and create policy. The event was a celebration of the Information Resource Management College’s 20th anniversary and IRM director Bob Childs tells me that it was the largest event in the institution’s history.  My biggest surprise was not that so many people showed up, but that Alvin and Heidi Toffler were escorted into the room just as we were about to take center stage — talk about being in the presence of giants!

The event was keynoted by Dave Weinberger (author of Everything is Miscellaneous and Small Pieces Loosely Joined and co-author of the infamous Cluetrain Manifesto). Having followed his work for some time, it was great to finally see him live.

I served on a panel, along with David Wennergren (DoD deputy Chief Information Officer) Bruce Klein (Cisco, US public sector) and Mike Bradshaw (Google, federal sector).  Several bloggers have already produced excellent reports on the symposium (see here and here) so I won’t reinvent the wheel, but I will emphasive one point.

Government 2.0 is about much more than blogs, wikis and social networking. It’s about how the government sources expertise and how it orchestrates capability. It’s about marshalling the collective intelligence of society to address big issues like climate change and fiscal reform. It’s also about delivering services like education, health care and social security benefits more effectively by treating citizens as co-innovators rather than passive, inert consumers.

Social media has a role to play. But the hard problems relate to the people and institutions. A complex machinery of government has grown organically over the past century with multiple levels of government, hundreds of agencies, and overlapping lines of accountability. The complexity makes it difficult to implement reforms and change in the public sector is almost always slow and incremental.

Don’t get me wrong. There are a number of exciting web 2.0 projects in government (we’ve blogged about most of not all of them — check our Gov 2.0 tag).  But the tendency is to sometimes assume that if an agency has a wiki, then it’s well on the road to Government 2.0. I guess the message I wanted to leave people with is that we have a long hard road left to travel.