Don Tapscott -- Main Street Tomorrow

GT: In your book "The Digital Economy," you outlined seven broad trends in the reengineering of government -- such things as integrated public safety networks and integrated digital access to government information. Since you wrote of these a couple of years ago, it is now clear that many governments are indeed moving in the directions you described. Today, do you see new challenges and opportunities for government? Are there new trends that have not yet been widely recognized?

Tapscott: I think the challenges facing government fall into two categories. One has to do with how we can use the digital media to transform the business of government. As you've mentioned, I've discussed a number of themes: administrative renewal; integrated digital benefits transfer; the idea of having integrated digital access to governent information; government-fostered information initiatives, which can be very powerful; the whole idea of changing the way we do tax filing, reporting and payment and moving that to a digital platform; the notion of integrated national law enforcement and public safety networks; and a number of government communication initiatives.

I outlined all these in The Digital Economy. And, as you mentioned, there has been progress on all of those -- surprising in some areas, really, because it is an understatement to say changing government is a challenge. But we have the irresistible force to reduce government spending meeting up with the immovable object of public expectations regarding what government should be and should do -- which is that government should be better and government service should be better, not worse. So tinkering with the problem is not going to fix it. We need to make these fundamental changes.

A second set of challenges which I just touched upon in the book has to do with something much broader, and that is changing the nature of governance itself. We have a new communications medium which is emerging, of which the Internet is just the tip of the iceberg. And when you have a new communications medium, old laws and institutions and structures, as well as old modes of governance, tend to become inappropriate or break down. Prior to the printing press, knowledge was confined and held by a few. But with the rise of the printed word, knowledge became more broadly distributed and the old feudal infrastructure broke down. People knew about things. So it made sense, for example, to separate church and state. And we saw many far-reaching changes in the society, one of them being the rise of new models of governance -- parliamentary democracy being the key one.

So I don't think that we have yet fully thought through what it means to have governance in an age of networked intelligence, where you and I can communicate directly with each other across a mile-wide highway at the speed of light. This is a much broader challenge, and it is one in which I personally have become involved. At the Alliance of Converging Technologies we are just now launching a new, multimillion dollar research project on this issue and the future of democracy. This will be funded by private companies and also governments. We tend to have blinders on when we look at issues of governance, and it is hard to think outside of the paradigm.

GT: There is growing concern in America about the decline and decay of civil society and the fact that the majority of people don't really participate -- even to the extent of bothering to vote once every four years. The Internet has been heralded by some as a way to involve citizens again in the political process and the business of government. Do you view this as over-optimistic? What should governments be doing to involve citizens more using the new media?

Tapscott: I don't view it as over-optimistic. I view it