Continuing our theme of transforming public services through online participation this year, we are proud to be co-sponsoring an event called Public Services 2.0 in Brussels on March 16. Held at the European Commission DG Information Society and Media, it will bring together practitioners to talk about what has already been done, rather than what could or should happen in theory. The agenda includes people from the Commission, Google, IBM, the W3C, UK-based and EU-wide participation projects and also our very own Minister for Transformational Government, Tom Watson MP. I shall be chairing an afternoon session about the role of policy in supporting innovation.

I am in two minds about whether we have seen meaningful progress in this direction in the UK recently, or whether we are still a very long way off from transforming government in any real sense. We have some really good people here who are patiently trying to create change, but I suspect they have not yet managed to impact on the way government manages big policy, budgets and projects, nor is there sufficient political will invested in the pursuit of change. It will be very instructive to see how, for example, the Obama administration sustains the online energy of the campaign and uses it to create change in government. Election campaigns, especially one as historically important as we have seen in the United States, represent a special case of engagement and political participation. In the case of the UK, I fear the next election campaign could mask, and perhaps even divert, the real work of changing government regardless of the party in power.

Thomas Gensemer, who ran Barack Obama's successful online presidential campaign, was in London this week saying that he would like to work with Labour to do the same here. Put simply, he can't. Of course, he can try, and there is no doubt he has the most phenomenal case study in the form of My.BarackObama.com, which is superb; but Labour's impending election campaign will have very little in common with the recent remarkable US election. If Blue State Digital want to help, and I really hope so, then I would rather their evident talents were used to shape government and public services in the UK, rather than the unedifying campaign we are likely to see here.

Sadly, New Labour have so far totally failed to understand social engagement via the Web in any form, as Jack Thurston argues rather well. The return of Mandelson and Campbell to push for a fourth term, and the fact that they (and John Prescott!) are "blogging" for their campaign, is not a step forward but a step back. The message-bullies of the 1990's exist in an entirely different universe from conversation, participation and 'the power of we'. The party continues to cling to this outdated form of political communication despite mounting evidence that we regard politics as broken, as George Monbiot argues in the Guardian. What brought Labour to power, and arguably also lay behind their failure to deliver on the promise of 1997, is the very opposite of our current zeitgeist. Excalibur vs conversation. Control vs trust. Every time we hear a ridiculous "rebuttal" of reality, whether it is a Minister accusing the former head of MI5 of "play[ing] into the hands of our enemies" for warning against throwing away our civil liberties, or claiming that the public "can't wait" for ID cards, the party proves itself to be a strictly Twentieth Century phenomenon.

What Thomas Gensemer surely knows by now is that we do not have a Barack Obama. The best we have is Vince Cable. Obama's personality, values and passion for change were the key factor in his online success, not the technology. After all, Howard Dean almost achieved a similar online movement four years previously, but failed to reach out beyond his core vote.

In the UK, among technologists who support social change, the focus tends not to be about getting this or that party into power, but rather to slowly build a connected infrastructure and culture that seeks to improve the process of government and public engagement, rather than use it to pursue a partisan agenda. But right now, this is being held back by a lack of political will for change (as opposed to election "victory"), and in the case of the current government, a combination of fear and antipathy towards engaging with citizens in a meaningful way.

The recent Digital Britain report was a good example of how little the government understands the new world. Charles Leadbetter criticises its limited vision: "Reading Digital Britain one cannot help but feel the government finds the opportunities for people to self-organise through the web all too unsettling for its more technocratic, controlling tendencies," and showed a neat turn of phrase to describe the change broadband will bring (and by implication why the government is on the wrong side of the debates about copyright and open data):

A few very big boulders [big media companies] will be still showing. But many have been drowned by a rising tide of pebbles. Every minute millions of people come to drop a pebble on the beach: a blog post, a YouTube video, a picture on Flickr, an update on Twitter. A bewildering array of pebbles in different sizes, shapes and colours are being laid down the whole time, in no particular order, as people feel like it.

In contrast, The Power of Information Task Force Report, supported by Minister for Transformational Government, Tom Watson MP, is a much more promising strand of work, and the team behind it have made every effort to engage people with its development. They have made some useful recommendations about opening up data, supporting innovation and stimulating more online public engagement; but perhaps it did not go far enough, and could be ignored as we move towards an election.

There are lots of positive signs out there. MySociety continue to break down doors and create examples of what can be done on the edges of government, and now they would like to step up a gear and really show what they can achieve with a small amount of real funding. In national government, the Foreign Office quietly continues to explore its online relationship with the world in a fairly impressive way, and people like Steph Gray at the DIUS also seem to be doing some good work. In local government, we are lucky to have people like Sophia Parker, who has been doing some great work with Kent County Council and others around innovation and user-centred service design; Dominic Campbell, who is helping drive change at Barnet; and lots of unsung heroes who are bringing small but important changes to how public bodies engage with the public.

Like the people involved in the POI report, all these individuals and groups appear to know what they are doing, but none carry the political weight of a Mandelson or a Campbell. The simplest, most effective means of achieving real change would surely be to give these people real power (and budgets) to make things happen. A good first step is the recently announced role of Digital Engagement Director, and to their credit, the Cabinet Office seem to be making a real effort to ensure a healthy field of applicants.

But as we move towards a tightly contested election, will the government revert to type and see social media as just another channel for their message(s), or will they wake up to the fact that they are sitting on a pool of talent and ideas that can help them address the very tough challenges that government and public services face in a recession that has coincided with a low-point in public trust in the mechanisms of politics?

There is a lot of work to do. Our Brussels event is just one of many attempts to survey what is actually working in terms of new online public services. I really hope the impending UK election campaign does not hold back the progress being made in this respect; on the contrary, perhaps commitment to transforming government for the Twenty-First Century will become a factor of differentiation between the policies of the main parties.