Government 2.0 has seven main characteristics:

• It is citizen-driven.
• It is employee-centric.
• It keeps evolving.
• It is transformational.
• It requires a blend of planning and nurturing.
• It needs Pattern-Based Strategy capabilities.
• It calls for a new management style.

Without access to the research note, its a little hard to know exactly what Gartner analyst Andrea DiMaio means by this list of characteristics - particularly her his point about 'Pattern-Based Strategy capabilities'.

However, its interesting to note that we have also proposed a pattern-based approach for one of the Government 2.0 Taskforce projects we (Headshift) are currently working on.

In the Toolkit Blueprint we talk about two types of patterns:

• Software deployment patterns - for the technology used for online engagement; and
• User experience patterns (although we've focused on some principles in the first instance, because we could write a book to cover all the possible UX patterns involved!) that are applied to that software to promote participation.

To us, a pattern-based approach makes a lot of sense as a way of dealing with the complexities of applying Web 2.0 tools to online engagement. I wonder if this is similar to what Gartner means too?