A study of government 2.0 implementation in Indonesia

Web 2.0 has brought innovations in digital government, namely, government 2.0. Social media, as one part of Web 2.0, could potentially support fuller participation and public interaction. Social media enjoys a very high level of acceptance by individual users and government agencies around the world. Web 2.0 and social media usage in the public sector still needs to be tested from the perspective of not only the government but also the community as the recipient of services. Therefore, this study aims to answer the following research questions: How effective has government 2.0 implementation been in Indonesia? Is there a correlation between e-government management and government 2.0 implementation? We adopted the sophistication index (SI) by Bonson et al. (2012) [1] to answer the first research questions. The SI examined the presence of Web 2.0 features and social media applications on these government institutions’ websites. As to answer the second research question, we conducted parametric statistical tests to assess how e-government implementation, based on the Indonesian E-Government Rating (PEGI) score, has influenced the effectiveness of government 2.0 use by government institutions in Indonesia. We observed the websites and social media accounts of 116 Indonesian government institutions. According to the evaluation of Web 2.0 and social media use, the average SI score is 42%. These results indicate that, in general, government institutions in Indonesia have used Web 2.0 and social media features, although the adoption rate has not been equal. The correlations between the PEGI scores and SI values also suggest a positive relationship between the effectiveness of e-government implementation and the effectiveness of government institutions. Therefore, government institutions that have been effective in implementing e-government have also been effective in implementing government 2.0.