Google have had a spate of bad publicity, the once uber urban and open minded company has been labelled as some sort of corporate hound. It is claimed that all things Google are geared towards marketing and advertising – a far cry from its original ethos a competitive and accessible range of products. The launch of Google for the Public Sector under the Gov 2.0 initiative could be the altruistic move that the company needs to secure the trust of the public.
Gov 2.0 is a term that has been coined to represent the unification of the interactive abilities of Web 2.0 with government interests in an attempt to make supposedly public information public. According to Carl Malamud, who spoke at the Gov 2.0 Summit in Washington, public now means ‘on the internet’. This makes perfect sense as an increasing number of people use YouTube, Google, Twitter and the like to find out the answers to their questions.
In the UK politicians such as David Cameron have begun to make their political lives public on such platforms and applications, and in the US Congress, the Senate and government officials have embraced the same publicity. It could therefore be said that the new platform is a form of marketing for politics. In recent years getting the attention of the younger generations and encouraging them to vote has been a notoriously difficult task. It could be that Google for the Public Sector is a way for a new generation to access the information they require to make an informed decision about political futures.
Google for the Public sector uses open source software to make information available. In the past, public documents online have been fixed so that search engines cannot crawl the information, this could be through IP blocking or through inserting a nofollow or noindex rule into the HTML page for example. The other problem with the current system used by Government departments is that the CMS systems are massively out of date, and as with any website needing an SEO overhaul, the system needs updating to be compatible with user friendly interfaces.
Web 2.0 is all about making the internet link to itself, something that government sites are not currently built to do. By using offline systems such as Chrome OS, which is based on open source software, Google are encouraging these systems to be compatible with online applications that they develop, and ultimately make the industry more competitive as well as compatible. Using offline software to boost online capabilities is just the kind of boost that will secure the future of Google applications in the public sector.
Malamud has been working on a number of projects that make government documents more accessible, such as digitising around 600 government films for Internet Archive and YouTube. He has also made a 5 million page crawl of the Government Printing Office possible and has actively prevented the copyright claim on both state laws and legislative statutes.
Google for the Public Sector aims to be a resource that governments can use to increase the transparency in politics, and its success lies in SEO. Making archived public information search engine friendly means that anyone will be able to access the information that has been hidden in the depths of government archives, even though it is ‘public’. In return, it will be a chance for a new generation to engage in political issues with a medium that is increasingly becoming second nature.
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Web 2.0 is all about making the internet link to itself, something that government sites are not currently built to do. By using offline systems such as Chrome OS, which is based on open source software, Google are encouraging these systems to be compatible with online applications that they develop, and ultimately make the industry more competitive as well as compatible. Using offline software to boost online capabilities is just the kind of boost that will secure the future of Google applications in the public sector.