In 2009, we have a unique opportunity to accelerate the transformation of government and public services using online tools, and social computing specifically. As RSA chief Matthew Taylor has argued, next year we are likely to face a major reduction in funding for public services as the recession worsens. The implication of this is that we have to grasp the opportunity afforded by the current relatively generous funding settlement to create more efficient services that can take us through the drought that follows.

This is a hugely exciting challenge. Whereas many people have argued that local and national government needs to radically improve its use of modern, connected IT, including social software, because we believe it is key to better inclusion, engagement and participation, there is now a pressing economic reason for accelerating this process.

We simply cannot afford business as usual, even if we wanted it.

Recently, we collaborated with Dominic Campbell's Futuregov consultancy on a breakfast briefing about the challenges facing Local Government and the role of new technology in meeting them. Dominic introduced the event with a presentation about interesting current projects and thinking in online Local government (video here) and the ebullient James Governor from Redmonk spoke passionately about the power of Twitter to engage people and find out what they are saying about your services. Emer Coleman (Director of Strategy, London Borough of Barnet) also gave a great overview of her thinking at Barnet right now.

My session was a simple introduction to what I think are three key themes for 2009.

First, a major theme of our work in the commercial sector, which we expect to be on the radar of local and national government (and indeed the public sector in general) is the notion of humanising the workplace using social tools. Like some companies, public sector bodies have swung the pendulum too far in the direction of process-as-management and away from encouraging people to do what they think is right.

Everybody can think of examples where everybody is following the (often very bureaucratic and inflexible) process, but the outcome is wrong. We see this in the systematised nature of primary healthcare, where patients are often bounced from referral to referral without much continuity of care or indeed human attention, unless they are very luck to have a good GP and probably not live in an inner city area. We can also see this in some of the worst failures to uphold the responsibility of care within social services. People can fill in forms, make referrals and so on without ever using their eyes and brains to address the obvious issues in front of them. "The computer says no," as parodied by the comedy show Little Britain.

Part of the problem here is that some of our internal IT systems have evolved into centralised, process-driven monsters that inhibit rather than augment normal, human communication and interaction. Social tools offer a significantly cheaper and more lightweight approach to communication and collaboration. But more importantly, they also place the human at the centre of the piece. This has great potential to improve cross-departmental awareness, for example where multiple agencies or disciplines come together, and also to give public sector worker who are passionate about delivery an opportunity to shine. Or as we see it:

Social tools + weak ties = an organisational immune system

Hopefully, some of the people toiling away at this weekend's government barcamp can produce some examples or insights into how we can bring these ideas into government.

The second big theme we see influencing public sector social computing this year is the need to engage stakeholders in difficult but necessary conversations about what government does, how it works with people to achieve positive outcomes, and where we find the money in challenging economic circumstances.

The problem with conventional approaches to external communications is that they too often rely on broadcasting a shiny message and then falling back on defensive (or downright dishonest) PR when this fails to live up to expectations. This reinforces an adversarial approach to engagement, where people (e.g. citizens or consumers) have unrealistic expectations of fulfilment by 'the government' or 'the company' and resort to throwing brickbats when their expectations are not met. Increasingly, we need genuine partnership between government and citizens to ensure we put in place the right services at the right price, and both sides need to take responsibility for making this happen.

Part of the problem here is that organisations have a brittle facade rather than the porous membrane that Hugh McLeod drew in his famous cartoon. Empowering real people inside our organisations to have real conversations with those who they deal with is what the porous membrane idea is all about. It is not easy, and we have built up a cornucopia of 'risks' and legal barriers that make this difficult, but if we are passionate about improving public services, then we have a duty to work around these to make it happen. Of course government and the public sector have to take tough resource decisions and they can't please everybody, but establishing a liminal space in which people on inside can work with people on the outside to find the best fit or the most workable compromise between demand and supply.

This, of course, is where the classic modes of social media (discussion, deliberation, debate, co-production, collaboration) come in. Possibly also tools like Twitter, though in my view it is nowhere near mainstream enough to be a primary channel at this point. Social tools are also useful for listening to existing conversations and surfacing peoples' existing expressions of need, or their opinions. This is not something government has been good at in the past.

It is not rocket surgery, and there are many barriers standing in the way; but small steps are not hard to take, and we are seeing an example of how the power of 'we' can transform debate in the USA with Obama's administration, which has been keen to promote the message that real change needs citizens to take the lead in helping solve them, rather than just rely on government to do so on their behalf. Let's find better ways to do that.

My third theme returned to Matthew Taylor's point about the need to create next generation public services before the money runs out. There are a number of enablers that could help make this happen, and which are not too hard to implement. The first is the need for open data to be a default setting for government projects. This must be done intelligently, of course, using anonymous data in cases where privacy could be threatened, or setting conditions for usage. Openness should not become a dogma. But there is ample evidence of the benefits of opening up data, from the improved medical outcomes of publishing cardio-vascular surgery outcomes to the second order innovative simulus expounded by Don Tapscott in Wikinomics. The Show us a Better Way project was a good pathfinder in this respect, although there were real limits to what it could achieve without far greater support across government. Similarly, as Demos argued a couple of years ago in the Collaborative State, collaboration with citizens should be a basic design element for government rather than a nice to have, along the lines of current forms of 'consultation'.

Another issue that frustrates many people who are passionate about transforming public services is the continuing reliance on big projects that are outsourced to generic public sector project management companies. Huge amounts of money are spent on projects that do not have a good success rate, and in many cases these projects are run by day-rate consultants who, whilst being professional in most respects, do not always share the passion of people inside public services for delivering social value. Since the 1980's, Government has adopted some of the worst characteristics of the private sector in an attempt to become efficient (outsourcing where there is no economy of scale or specialisation being one), without some of the best aspects of private business, such as entrepreneurial vision, innovation and risk-taking.

In the current climate, where Keynes is not a dirty word, public expenditure has an important role to play in building a recovery. It is not just expenditure in return for a product or a service, it is also economic pump-priming. Do we want to continue paying generic corporations public money for under-delivery or might we take a more investment-minded approach to this funding and use it instead to create jobs and stimulate innovation in both pubic and private sectors. Instead of tens of millions (or in one case billions) being spent all in one go to build big IT systems that might not work at all, we should be releasing lots of smaller pots of funding to small businesses or social enterprises who have innovative ideas to solve problems, and then continue to invest in those that work. In technology these days, we rarely spend all our budget up front on a pre-planned solution. Instead, using ideas like Agile and iterative development, we try to evolve solutions that are more highly adapted to their environment. That way you can fail early and still recover. The Conservative Party's proposal to cap IT spend on major projects is a good stake in the ground in this respect, as my colleague Tim Duckett notes.

We can see the seeds of this approach in the venture funding approach of NESTA, Unlimited and other bodies, and in projects like Social Innovation Camp we have the absolute antithesis of big corporate outsourcing - passionate people who give their own time and expertise to help build imaginative public services and then scrabble around to find the funding to see them continue. This evolutionary approach - start small, fail fast or go on to serve your users and let them help you improve - is one of the best lessons we can draw from the Cambrian explosion of Web 2.0 businesses that emerged after the dotcom crash.