A couple months ago I posted a short essay about government in the web 2.0 age and it generated some interesting conversations. The basic argument was that government leaders around the world have been too slow to understand and embrace the potential of new communications technologies. Indeed, while companies in the private sector, many non-profit organizations, and an increasingly large proportion of the global citizenry readily adopt the latest technologies, government institutions are being left behind.

As many people rightly pointed out, simple comparisons between the private and public sectors are unfair. Among other things, government leaders struggle with deep cultural inertia, complex institutional legacies, political wrangling, and consensus decision-making, while most citizens and private sector organizations do not. There’s also the issue of organizational leadership: many of the agencies that deliver government services are led by a generation of political bureaucrats that don’t understand the Internet. As a consequence, one could argue that very few substantive changes will be put in place until a younger generation of leaders is in charge.

That being said, there are enormous opportunities to harness the power of Web services to develop new public offerings that would require very few fundamental changes at all. Government agencies, for example, are one of the largest sources of public data, and yet most of it goes completely unutilized. Don and I argued in Wikinomics that this data could provide a platform for countless new services that would empower citizens to interact with their elected representatives and enable community groups to contribute to public welfare.

Take Scorecard.org as an example. The Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) launched the application in 1998 (that’s right, a full 7 years before the term Web 2.0 was even invented ) to aggregate hundreds of sources of public data to create a powerful nation-wide tool for assessing environmental risks. Visitors to the site can type in their zip code and get instant access to a wealth of information about pollution sources in their region.

Then there’s Neighborhood Knowledge California (NKCA), an ingenious tool that harnesses public data to help citizens and policy-makers spot and improve troubled neighborhoods. NKCA plots real-time information (including tax problems, housing code violations, tenant complaints and fire violations) on city maps so that public officials, citizens, and businesses can view comprehensive information on one property, or see at a glance which communities might be headed for trouble. It was created by researchers at UCLA who joined up with community groups in Los Angeles to empower low-income neighborhoods like Vernon Central to reclaim and rebuild their neighborhoods.

These and other strategies should become part of a more concerted effort by governments to explore and leverage new forms of value from public information. For communities left out of the high-tech boom in particular, open platforms and well-designed Web services can provide real hope when they are applied to concrete social problems. In fact, the powerful combination of interactive mapping applications and citizen participation could easily be replicated to track information on issues such as employment, public health, and migration patterns.