By Alice Downey | Health Editor

Experts at the CeBit conference said governments need to use online media to tackle population growth. Image: (twitter logo) mfilej/(twitter image) buzz.bishop

The world’s ballooning population will make participatory government initiatives absolutely necessary in the future.

Experts attending the e-Government Forum at CeBit yesterday hope that working with technology can transform the way governments operate.

Initiatives like fixmystreet.com can help citizens play a more active role in their governance.

Experts also hope that social media platforms like twitter and facebook can be utilised to help public servants interact directly with citizens to create change.

Graham Colclough, an executive at Capgemini spoke at the CeBit e-Government Forum yesterday.

He said that transformation is needed urgently.

“I don’t know any person who understands how to write policy that’s going to deal with a trebling population.

“It introduces enormous challenges which transcend any locality or nation and action deals with some very very major global issues,” he said.

According to Colcough, if you apply the issues of population growth to global finances, the cost of sectors like public health will be completely unsustainable in the future.

“There will be twice as many 60+ year olds and 45 times as many 85+ year olds in the world by 2050.”

Colclough said that this will create a massive burden for the public health systems of the world.

The current way that governments work is too slow and caught up in bureaucracy, he said.

“It’s time to act… but we must do it collectively. We can’t expect the government to do it for us so we need to participate in that process.”

Colclough said that although public service departments do set meaningful goals, the convoluted process of policy making is too inefficient to achieve those goals.

The current model of administration-centric governance is not sustainable and consumer-centric governance is the way of the future.