We live in exciting times. Very exciting times. In the western world, we live in an age of material abundance, having the luxury of the ability to focus on longer-term issues than daily survival. The rules of a lot of games are changing. 
 
For a long time, material scarcity was one of the key pillars of our economy. People were trying to make a buck, in order to fulfill their material needs. In the western world, this is no longer necessary true. Now that we can afford most of the things we really need, the focus is changing into gaining access, as Jeremy Rifkin described in his excellent book, The age of Access. Access is what the network economy is all about. The scalability of access in the digital world is a very important step in the development of new organizational structures, based on entirely different means than the old hierarchical structure. 2009 is also known as Darwin's year. His book, On the Origin of Species was about the development of his insights on evolution, mentioning the survival of the fittest. The specie that was most successful in adopting changing environments and changes was the best able to survive. In the last decade, but certainly in the upcoming ten years, the model of how to organize or monetize things is rapidly changing, even more radical and fast than most people perceive. The ones that are best able to deal with sudden change will survive. Most of them won't be in the traditional governmental  environments. 
 
Traditionally, governmental institutions were formed by the elite of society, to solve and organize issues larger than personal interest. And to be honest, it proved to be a very good thing to get where we are now. In our part of the world, we live in a very stable, developed environment. A few years ago, Ori Brafman wrote an excellent book named, 'The Starfish and the Spider' describing the differences between traditional hierarchies and network-like organizational models. As he proved in his book, network models are better fit in dealing with rapid change than the organization models of the last 150 
years. It's funny but not so very surprising that until recently, networks were mostly studied by sociologists and biologists. If we look into the world of ants for example, we see elegant chaos, but working together in a very robust and effective way. As human beings, we can learn from that. It is interesting that a lot of insights from sociologists like Milgram and Granovetter, who coined the excellent 'Strength of Weak Ties' in which he explains the importance of being connected with people from different worlds, and recently Mr. Burt who studied 'Structural holes in networks'. 
 
What has all of this to do with eGovernment? Well, we live in a digital world now, that is developing in a faster pace than ever, in a lot of unimaginable ways. Communication costs are lower than ever, combined with fast, freely available IT solutions and communication powers, harnessing collective intelligence easier than ever. The traditional tools that governmental organizations had were legislation and money. In the Digital age, money turns out to be not so very effective when it comes to organizing human talent and skills. The problem with money is that if you spend it, you don't have it anymore. Social capital is the sum of your networks, your reputation, your credibility and your talent to bring people together. If you spend social capital, it will grow, as Tara Hunt explained in her recent book, 'The Whuffie' factor'. If you look closely to what's happening on the web, people turn out to be more social than we thought. The real deal is in organizing all the time, help and talent of everyone that wants to contribute. Most of the time, it's exactly the opposite of what government organizations are trying to do. If you want to set things in motion on this planet, you need people, information and ideas. The costs of organizing this are lower than ever. What would happen when a ministry that has to solve something onbehalf of the people, would use social capital instead of monetary capital? 
 
Of course we still need money for things like roads and buildings, but a lot of the annual budget of any governmental institution is not used on material stuff like road-signs, concrete or expensive medical gear, but on things that are easy to get or organize on the web. We need to rethink government, collaboration and the smart use of social networks and our citizens. The only real thing is that you have to treat them as a part of your governmental organization. So far, the big large organizational bureaucratic structures that have been formed in the last 50 years somehow forgot to understand what the purpose of their existence was. Serving the greater good of the country, the society and mankind as a whole. Solving things together, which is possible now, because of the web. My advice? Organize all the people that want to contribute and see them as a part of your organization.