Democratisation of government: success and failure

I've been mulling over ideas as they have come to my attention over the past year roughly related to the question 'how can the public and third sectors and those they serve benefit from new web things, especially social networking developments?' Examples include blogs, wikis, search engines, podcasting, tagging and so on.

Thanks to a Demos post for this link to a recent (probably pretty miserable) Defra experience with a wiki to develop and environmental contract. David Milliband is also the first minister (Environment) to start a blog by the way.

I think it's a shame that this experiment failed. There are no doubt many ideas about why it did so, but I think the most important is that this kind of collaborative work is based on trust. This is an indication of the trust problem that government has, rather than proof that this approach will never work. The huge success of wikipedia and the tsunami blogs show the potential of this kind of tool. The third sector has significantly less of a trust problem than the public sector.

My view is that local government, and local partnerhsips can show the way for this kind of democratisation of government. Whether national governments will ever participate in the kind of trust that these forms of collaboration and communication need is another matter.