I really like a new post on the Urbanophile blog.  It's by a private consultant on how the "networked" and "open" approach to collaboration and communication is allowing government agencies, organizations, and citizens to accomplish new and different things:

One of the areas in which we've seen this transformation start to emerge is to look at how the new economy is bringing new capabilities to, for lack of a better term, the grass roots movements of our communities. How people like President Obama used the power of social networking technology to mobilize grass roots supporters is well known. In my view, however, this is simply putting a new tool into the toolbox of traditional types of organizations. I'm more interested in the new totally new types of things the new economy can enable, and what it means to our cities.

I'm going to discuss three specific examples of this today:

• New Platforms for New Voices
• Expanding the Network of Networks
• Open Source Economic Development

Read the whole post here.