Maybe you need to spend a bit more time with local government! Seriously, I’m seeing interest and desire for understanding in many councils up and down the country, from big counties to small rural districts. There are growing numbers of examples of really interesting use of digital channels in local government, with the cuts being used to create a sense of urgency to promote this activity.

Likewise, the need for councils to work together better is seeing another spurt in interest in collaborative online tech. Learning Pool are working on two projects in this space at the moment, and there’s more in the offing.

My worry is that the current hard-on lots of people seem to have over transparency data is distracting people from the real benefits that effective use of social, collaborative technology can have.

Di Maio’s right that individual use of tools by the worms in the wormery (to coin a phrase) is the really interesting space few government organisations are going into seriously. Partly that’s because of corporate IT blocking stuff or making it hard, partly because of the Daily Mail and partly because of a lack of leadership generally that really encourages it. And if anyone were to start doing it seriously, my bet is that ministers would be distinctly unimpressed at what looks, in this immature media and management environment, like timewasting.

So we have the corporate channels, which are fine, as far as they go (but frankly, they’re a big time sink in many cases). And we have the socially-enabled one-off projects to crowdsource ideas or consult on policy, and they’re fine too as long as there’s appetite internally to do something with the results. But we’ve hit that brick wall, particularly in central government, where use of the tools and mindset can’t become a mainstream pursuit and really deliver on the potential of networked, porous collaboration because it’s annoying to do and more likely to get you fired than promoted. And I can’t see that changing anytime soon.

Which is a bit of a bummer.