No doubt that governments will be building private clouds but then in terms of service constituency, not to mention that there's taxpayer funding, we can refer to them as 'public' clouds, as well.  But then its just a start and mere cloud adoption will not be enough.

Today's service-oriented model requires keeping up with disruptive changes that are happening all around us. Nowhere can it seem more challenging than for governments which are primarily recognized as white elephants unable to move with the times, burdened by bureaucracy and its complex relationships.

But that is precisely what technology tools has been adressing the past few years albeit in a different setting with corporations and business entities.  The time for debate is past and governments will really have to look into how they approach IT projects and systems to create a more efficient system. 

This time the 'government is the platform'.

Gov 2.0 Summit brings together innovators from government and the private sector to highlight technology and ideas that can be applied to the nation’s great challenges. In areas as diverse as education, health care, energy, jobs, and financial reform, there are unique opportunities to rethink how government agencies perform their mission and serve our citizens. Social media, cloud computing, web, and mobile technologies—all provide new capabilities that government agencies are beginning to harness to achieve demonstrably better results at lower cost.

And what of clouds?  One only has to listen to the discussions and take note of the words mentioned: transparency, access, engagement, participation, and collaboration and think how this can all be achieved near real-time if not for cloud computing resources.  Factoring costs as well, governments need not look any further to realize that cloud computing solutions makes sense over the costly infrastructure upgrades that will replace or extend lives of increasingly obsolete models they still employ.

Still, beyond mere adoption of clouds, it will take a different mindset to make all this work.  Cloud computing alone cannot make the ideals of gov 2.0 a success.  One has to understand that a true gov 2.0 means the use of  IT to socialize and commoditize government services, processes and data - where the fulcrum is not the government nor adoption of IT, but rests within an engaged citizenry.