Beyond these advantages, frameworks are already the direction of travel for social and governmental organisation.

Johannes Bohnen and Jan-Friedrich Kallmorgen of the Berlin-based public affairs consulting firm Bohnen Kallmorgen & Partner have already identified how Web 2.0 features are changing politics.

"In the future people will not see their influence limited to elections every four to five years; rather, citizens will exercise permanent influence through constant suggestions, ideas, and contributions, all organised over the internet.

"Using these technologies, new actors will break into the system that has always been reserved for insiders. Transparency and innovation will spread."

Their analysis still sees a role for traditional parties, but they add: "Politicians will have to be directly engaged in addressing the concerns of their constituents; those who do not will lose support, not only among voters but also among established media outlets."

So while they are not being as radical as these essays would suggest is required, they still see the development of a new type of political engagement, particularly when it comes to policies.

"Web 2.0 can also help established democracies generate policy solutions from the collective intelligence of informed citizens. Previously deterred by the classical political party structure, educated politically-concerned citizens will now have much better access to and a stronger involvement in the political process. The creative potential of the 'wisdom of the masses' has long been recognised by companies such as Dell, IBM, and Starbucks. The success of community features and opportunities to offer suggestions on company websites was striking: Starbucks received over ten thousand responses, among them elaborate suggestions for technical innovation. The gains for the companies were enormous, as they received valuable input that helped them strengthen their brand and stay competitive, for free. The customers functioned like a large group of external creative consultants who donated their labour-intensive recommendations.

"This could also work for domestic politics. However, the successful implementation of such a bottom-up initiative requires more than a webmaster and a pretty homepage. It will require a talent for political communication and agenda setting, a professionally organised network and database, first-class marketing, an intuitive sense of the target group, and last but not least a solid financial backing. When these preconditions are filled, technologies such as theme-specific web communities, Wikis, and videoconferencing can be used to collect the ideas and arguments of an intelligent and well-informed citizenry. The information must then be evaluated and summarised into precise, readable policy recommendations, ideally enriched with some expert knowledge. Eventually, this strategy could also be used to collect ideas from people on the ground in crisis regions.

"Web 2.0 will eventually mean a civil society actively engaged in domestic affairs and policy solutions that are more creative and more popular."

So the internet creates the scope for more engagement, and not necessarily through traditional structures.

And internet consultant and commentator Matt Wardman noted in a review of the MyConservatives.com website, the trend is towards "liquid politics, permeable party boundaries".

But in much of this, as Dan McQuillan has written, the purpose of Government 2.0 is still seen as being to "make current modes work more smoothly, rather than to question the distribution of power at a basic level".

He suggests a shift in power to a peer-to-peer model.

"I'd contend that the bolder win is for people to aggregate and socialise solutions i.e. actual functioning answers to social needs, whether stand-alone, grant funded or direct hacks of gov operations."

This could take the form of bottom-up development of policy frameworks.

In December 2009, British prime minister Gordon Brown also delivered a speech on how technology can drive public service reform and deliver 'smarter government'.

He argued that power will shift to "the users of public services, all users, not just those who are wealthy and powerful, not just those who have the resources to make the best of what government offers them" [i].

In part this is a statement of existing thinking about how e-government can improve services and efficiency.

"We live in an age of expanding opportunity in which rapid technological advances are changing our world at a speed and scale not witnessed since the industrial revolution. And this offers us a unique opportunity to give the public what they now demand: public services responsive to their needs and driven by them.

"At the same time it provides us with the means to deliver these public services in a way that maintains and enhances their quality but brings down their cost."

But Brown also took the traditional model a step further to argue that citizens will become more involved in shaping service delivery and that governments must be ready for this.

"Crucially, we will put in place the mechanisms that will enable every user of public services to shape the provision of them. The days when the state would tell you what you were getting and you were supposed to be grateful are gone. That was first generation public services.

"And the period of laying the foundations on which modern public services could be built has been completed. That was second generation.

"In this third generation of public services, public services will be shaped and driven by users. Information is the key. An informed citizen is a powerful citizen.

"We will ensure that people can get access to the information they need to engage in dialogue with public service professionals; and in doing so reduce bureaucratic burdens. This will drive improvements in public services, making them more personal and cost-effective, whilst at the same time strengthening democratic deliberation and giving frontline workers and voluntary organisations the freedom to innovate and respond to new demands in new ways."

He is certainly right that information is key to making good choices; a point which perhaps highlights the need to link formal inspection and audit reports and other datasets with the comments of the public on microgovernment frameworks.

"This increased transparency and accountability will enable citizens to compare local services, lobby for improvements, choose providers and demand changes in service delivery – with the web as a powerful new tool for sharing customer experience – in the same way that social networking sites provoke debate and discussion and mobilise opinion. Judgement on public services will no longer be the preserve of anonymous government inspectors."

Brown also pointed to the NHS choices website as an example of the way in which existing services allow patients to make decisions "based on reviews and other ratings".

And he said that citizens "will no longer be passive recipients of services but, through dialogue and engagement, active participants – shaping, controlling and determining what is best for them".

So this is the direction of travel, albeit that the ideas in these essays lie further down the road.

It is interesting to note that none of these ideas about the potential of technology to reform government are particularly new, having been around for years.

In an essay on 'open source politics', Micah L. Sifry wrote in The Nation back in November 2004 that "the truth is that voters don't have to rely on elected or self-appointed leaders to chart the way forward anymore".

"The era of top-down politics – where campaigns, institutions and journalism were cloistered communities powered by hard-to-amass capital – is over. Something wilder, more engaging and infinitely more satisfying to individual participants is arising alongside the old order."

He argued then that new political technology "works because it gives individuals a way to pool their time, attention and resources around causes they may hold in common". And none of this requires a professional politician to lead the way.

"The term 'open source' specifically refers to allowing any software developer to see the underlying source code of a program, so that anyone can analyse it and improve it; better code trumps bad code, and programmers who have proven their smarts have greater credibility and status.

"Applied to political organising, open source would mean opening up participation in planning and implementation to the community, letting competing actors evaluate the value of your plans and actions, being able to shift resources away from bad plans and bad planners and toward better ones, and expecting more of participants in return. It would mean moving away from egocentric organisations and toward network-centric organising."

While many political campaigns now attempt to make use these principles, the aim of frameworks is to take them one step further into the realm of governance.

Footnotes:

[i] Brown, G. (2009), speech on Smarter Government. Available at http://www.number10.gov.uk/Page21633 [January 6, 2009].