The network as platform for...reciprocity

Recently,  while looking through the website of mySociety I found a link to a really nice piece on the openDemocracy site by James Crabtree.  Entitled Civic hacking: a new agenda for e-democracy  it looks at some of the challenges representative democracy currently faces and concludes that mainstream e-government approaches (i.e. government 1.0?) are not very promising in yterms of genuine democratic transformation, renewal or whatever you want to call the agenda needed to build public confidence, traust and engagement in government.

Instead, it looks at the importance of reciprocity as a social phenomenon, and suggests that the greatest value of information netwworks for government is their power to simply connect people, saying:

"So, a sensible strategy would start on this principle. But the people it should be connecting are not citizens and parliamentarians, or voters and civil servants. It should be connecting ordinary people with other ordinary people. And there should be applications that help these people to help each other. A programme supporting civic hacking can do this.

This should become the ethic of e-democracy: mutual-aid and self-help among citizens, helping to overcome civic problems. It would encourage a market in application development. It would encourage self-reliance, or community-reliance, rather than reliance on the state. mutual-aid and self-help among citizens"

Sounds good to me!