Just as the Web has fundamentally altered retail, real estate, media, and even manufacturing, Gov 2.0 advocates seek to redefine the relationship between citizens and gov‐ ernment officials. It's not about replacing representative democracy with some kind of online poll, but instead engaging the citizen as a full participant rather than an observer of their government.

Take San Francisco, where the city has created an API (application programming interface) to distribute information from its 311 system about city services to developers in a way that they can integrate and distribute that information into new software and web applications (see http://apps.sfgov.org/Open311API/). Everyone will be able to get information about citizen requests and issue new requests (such as reporting potholes) directly to city departments via their own web software. The concept breaks down the line between citizens and government—letting someone other than a government official determine how to route citizen requests.

As if this radical transformation were not enough, the Gov 2.0 movement seeks to make a similar transformation within government itself: empowering employees inside governments to go beyond the traditional boundaries and limitations of bureaucracy to act across organizational lines and move from top-down to bottom-up structures of management and decision making.

In this book we have found leading visionaries, thinkers, and practitioners from inside and outside of government who share their views on what this new balance looks like, how to achieve it, and the reforms that are needed along the way.