When will we see true my.gov?

I've been watching, and participating, in some of the discussions around whether government agencies and entire governments should centralise or decentralise their web presence.

For some reason a number, such as the UK government, South Australia and the ACT, have decided that centralising all their websites into a single portal is the right approach, although I've seen little in way of clear benefits to citizens or government.

At the same time some agencies still follow a route of rolling out a new website for every initiative, program and event, leaving some agencies with hundreds of websites to manage.

Totalling the number of websites can be deceptive. With a single content management system at the back-end, single set of servers and bandwidth and nothing more than different design templates it is possible to release many websites with little additional cost impact. In this situation, whether the content is in one site or many, it requires almost the same effort to create and maintain.

I believe that the argument over one or many websites really misses the entire point of the exercise - to serve the public.

If we stop thinking about centralise/decentralise and begin thinking audience, how would we build and maintain the web presence, not web site(s), for a government or agency?

I've been thinking about this recently with a view to the capabilities that web 2.0 brings.

Rather than building websites around agencies, portfolios, topics or governments, why not simply provide a my.gov.au framework which can be customised to every individual citizen's needs and demographics?

Agencies could publish information in 'fragments' or 'parts' with appropriate metadata. This would allow my.gov.au to selective and display the content, services, social channels and news from government appropriate to an individual.

With this approach the entire equation is flipped. No longer are agencies or governments solely deciding what they want citizens to see. Instead citizens are presented with what they need, based on their age, gender, location, work status, interests, past behaviour and other characteristics.

Individual agencies would not need to each collect information about individuals to provide a custom online experience. They simply become content providers, with the central my.gov.au portal storing any personal information and pulling the right content (as tagged by agencies) without sharing the information with other agencies.

This approach could expand beyond a single government, integrating local planning alerts, state government services and other relevant content in a single seamless interface.

This would remove the need for citizens to go to multiple 'single sites' for different government levels. As the user is in control of my.gov.au there's no need for agencies at different levels to have their systems working together for content or sign-on - the my.gov.au framework would simply pull content and services into the common personalised interface for each person.

The system could also expand beyond government - integrating your banking and medical records and more into the same view. This would become a real killer application. See your bank and salary information as you figure out how much you need to pay government over the year ahead. Of course, none of the services viewed through the personalised page would 'talk' to each other, only to my.gov.au, preserving privacy and security.

The my.gov.au service wouldn't even have to be built and managed by governments - competing services could be developed commercially and compete - through enhancements and features - for the 'business' of citizens, all drawing on the same set of government content and data feeds.

So perhaps it is time for government to stop talking about 'one website to rule them all' and instead consider what we could achieve if we let our content out of its departmental and government 'wrappers'.

We could enable a true personalised my.gov.au service for every citizen, customised to their specific needs and wants, growing with them through various life events over a number of years.

And we could still aggregate the same content into our corporate sites, or a single portal if we chose, at no extra cost!