Web 3.0

By Daniel Wood

With the Malaysian government seriously pursuing its own personal holy grail of Government 2.0, and with MSC Malaysia continuing to be in the forefront after over a decade, it would seem too early in the Malaysian context to be “looking ahead” already to the next steps.

Government departments are beginning to streamline services and, more importantly, data collection, through direct interaction when creating policies and strategies, communication lines with the people are becoming clearer, with quick and updated information being more easily available, in tune with the new generations modern needs.

While the journey to the end is far from visible, government initiatives are much better at facilitation interaction through information sharing, user-centred design and collaboration using the Internet, focused on the World Wide Web. Further recognising also that Government 2.0 doesn’t simply assumes that public participation is the same as public input (but allowing the public to participate in all levels of government including planning), the Government is also looking for more ways to build frameworks than enable the people, their communities, and the business sector, to build and use their own services according to their own wants and needs.

Some great examples of government initiatives that have set the machine in the right direction include Tax E-Filing (which calculates automatically, allows people to get tax returns faster, and cuts down huge delays in manual entry) and the MyEG platform (which has received positive feedback for allowing people to renew car insurance and road tax online, receiving documentation by post within 2 working days).

The overall picture is not as bleak as many would claim it to be. If compared from the 1990s when Malaysia entered the Internet age to today in 2010, many things have already changed. For example, in the beginning, government services were mostly made up of home pages that focussed on companies, corporations and organisations, catering to perhaps 10 per cent of Malaysians. Most of the online content was also “read only”, informative but static. The government owned all content, and used portals and HTML to broadcast this content. It also arranged its information through directories.

Today, government services continue to be portals and homepages, but frequently include social media tools such as blogs and Facebook pages, which not only focusses on communities, but also allows them to interact and contribute to the content. Most urban Malaysians are online, and accessing government services such as MyEG and and E-Filing, clearly demonstrating an increased audience. Content now does not clearly belong to the government as it is user-generated. Information is also arranged by different methods, using tags and keywords to group content.

Returning to the question of looking forward, can Malaysia already plan for the future? Is it too premature to listen to the whisperings of Web 3.0 when the goals of Government 2.0 have not been completely attained?

While there is some confusion, and a lack of consensus on the exact terminology of Web 3.0, it can be said that it is a vision of a semantic web, or linked data, a web in which data can be linked intelligently to make more meaningful and insightful action.

In essence, it should transform today’s way of doing things into a web that is portable, focussed on the individual, consolidates dynamic content made up of widgets and drag and drops and heavily focuses on user engagement. Content will no longer be arranged by directory or tags, but by user behaviour.

A simple example would be the way life would work in a Government 2.0 environment. It’s the end of the new year and you realise you have to do several things. You go to the E-Filing tool to file your taxes and calculate your returns. Then you open up the MyEG website and renew your car insurance and road tax. Then perhaps you would go to an integrated police website and check for any summonses and traffic offences. These are useful tools, and work very well in the current environment. But this still needs the user to have considerable initiative, and a forgetful person may not remember all the end-of-year tasks.

Web 3.0 envisions a way for the web to recognise what tasks you would like to do, based on your behaviour, and then would suggest for you all the other available tasks that would need to be done. Using the example above, the web would prompt you after using E-Filing, to enter all your information, and then present you a list of tasks you need to complete, based on a central integrated database that links to all other government sectors.

Clearly, these are useful implementations, and may not be so complex to incorporate into existing designs, or to build on, using 2.0 as a foundation. So perhaps it is not unrealistic to talk about Government 3.0 when Government 2.0 is underway, at least before 4.0 starts getting talked about.