You're walking home when you notice a big, dangerous hole in the pavement. It looks pretty old, but has no tell-tale lines of spray paint that would indicate that the council knows it needs fixing.
What do you do? Ring the council? But do you know precisely where you are? Just pull out an iPhone and use the "FixMyStreet" application. Take a photo, and its GPS location will be added, ready to report to the authorities.
Phones with both cameras and GPS will be commonplace in five years' time. Councils could still send out road crews – but why not get ordinary citizens to report problems first? The rise of the internet, with broadband in more than 60% of UK homes, has meant the rise of a different model for interaction. Community efforts – where "community" means people with alike interests, not a geographical one – are easier to create online: given an exciting target, you can get hundreds or thousands of people to contribute, Wikipedia-style.
That's in marked contrast to top-down efforts that are the habit of government, both central and local. The most difficult mental adjustment needed in both groups is to stop trying to tell people how to use services, and let their services find people. That means letting them become available on other websites; or letting them be repurposed, as the website theyworkforyou.com does to parliamentary debates that initially appear on the parliament.uk site. The parliament site is the official one; but theyworkforyou is far easier to use if you need to find your local MP, or find out about an MP's voting tendencies, or search for a topic in debate. MPs themselves prefer it. One might wonder why the parliament website exists; it could be replaced with a "feed" of its data that anyone could use on their own website.The top-down approach, habitual to central and local government, with its necessity to dictate how everything works, is part of the reason why big government IT projects so often overrun on costs and under-deliver. The internet wouldn't work with a top-down approach; instead it sets (comparatively) simple rules for how its edges interact. If the NHS IT project were designed like the net, hospitals and GPs would have more flexibility in the choice of their systems – essential when technology doubles computer processing speed and halves storage costs every 18 months. The plans made at the start of any large project imagine machines already out of date when it begins to be used. The internet, by contrast, is going stronger than ever after 40 years.
The question is, can the Whitehall departments, local councils and NHS trusts who shape public services grasp the opportunities provided by digital technology? Too many council sites are impenetrable and complex; too many see them as digital information leaflets, rather than a chance to converse with citizens and so improve services. Making them more accessible means citizens get more utility, for less money.
It's a huge step – but only in management terms. The irony – and the compelling justification for it – is that it's cheaper to operate that way.
Charles Arthur is the Guardian's technology editor