An open book for economic reform

In an ideal world, such facilities would have been built by governments, but FixMyStreet shows how much can be done by citizen action - and how governments can then come to the party.

Here the "national resource" is information, which, in the first instance, is in the possession of the populace, not government. But the internet permits that information to flow to government in the best possible way, allowing all to observe how well government is collaborating with the citizens it serves.

Which brings me to the other main way in which openness should be thought of as microeconomic reform, rather than just a principle of ethical and constitutional hygiene. It's a truism that what gets measured gets done, and strong information systems generate strong incentives to get things done. Before FixMyStreet there were the usual pressures on government agencies to fix things, but the citizens were the amateurs with poor information except for their own knowledge of their environs. Now the scales are tipping in their favour in their relationship with the professionals who deliver services.

Finally, gentle reader, did you get turned off when I referred to openness as microeconomic reform? A lot of people do. (Whispered aside to the Prime Minister's economic advisers: people's eyes glaze over when you tell them you want to increase the per capita productivity growth rate by 0.6 per cent. They'll be much more interested in making things work better - schools, hospitals, workplaces and all those other things, like waiting in traffic snarls, that make up their lives).

As a general principle, the more government information we can get out into the community - and the more information from the community we can bring back into the mix, using the kinds of Web 2.0 tools exemplified by FixMyStreet, and the more we can allow people to innovate in the way they display and manipulate that information on the internet, smart phones and in the next generation of information platforms that come our way - the better things will work; the more effective our governments will be.