Anna Randle writes today in eGov Monitor about Social Software and the Enabling Council. Picking up on the recent New Local Government Network report, Invisible Villages - techno-localism and the enabling council, which she co-wrote with James Crabtree and Will Davies, Anna argues that social software is ideally suited to the changing needs of local authorities:

...we are increasingly seeing social software being used for the development of voluntary, bottom-up social networks around the common interest of the locality. In short, the internet is becoming more local. At the same time, the demands upon councils are changing. The New Localism agenda reflects a growing consensus that the needs of modern communities cannot be delivered through centralist, 'one size fits all' approaches"

There are no examples we're aware of as yet of local authorities picking up on this approach, though we do know of a couple that may well experiment in this area soon. Stilll, the report is good market making for those, like us, who have been arguing for some time against the poverty of bloatware in local government.