By ROB CARPENTER

Our local governments need to adopt a bolder Web 2.0 strategy.

Of our many city councils and municipal agencies located in Los Angeles County, only a few have made some attempts at using Facebook, Twitter and other popular social media networks as a way to more easily distribute information and increase civic participation. But even these agencies have achieved limited success in employing these new cybertools. This is because they only use two or three of hundreds of available social media technologies in a superficial way and lack a coherent strategy to maximize their potential.?

The entire purpose of Web 2.0 is to allow users to have mass conversations and collaboration in real time with each other. This is pretty revolutionary and it is time we aggressively and meaningfully apply it to all public institutions here. After all, our local governments are very involved with and connected to our daily lives and communities so it makes sense to identify ways to enhance communication, interaction and collaboration between Angelenos and municipal agencies. In other words, we need a comprehensive, coherent and bold strategy to understand and apply social media technology to our city and county budgets and services.

Think of this strategy as something akin to Bill Bratton? CompStat for institutions like education, transportation and parks services but with inexpensive Web 2.0 technologies. Not only can we make government more intelligent and responsive by doing this, but we can save millions of dollars and improve desperately outdated public delivery systems.

With the proper adoption of social media, we can improve the transparency, cost-effectiveness, efficiencies, civic participation, communication, collaboration, idea-generation, and overall legislative and governing processes. This is not simply referring to a political leader or municipal agency creating a fan page for themselves on Facebook, sending tweets about what meeting they are attending, or posting blogs and podcasts. Not to be mistaken, these tools are absolutely crucial but our governments need to be serious about taking logical next steps to harness the complete power of Web 2.0. Here? how it can start to happen:

Following the money

First, every local government and municipal agency should upload their entire line-by-line internal budget online to an interactive and easily navigable Web site so that any government employee or Angeleno can publicly identify inefficiencies and waste. They should also put all of their financial transactions on the Web so the public can see all payments made from or received by the government.

The way to encourage city workers or residents to point out inefficiencies online or off- is to allow them to keep a percentage of whatever waste or abuse they identify. So, if someone works at LAUSD and notices a program is wasting $50,000, they get to keep, say, 5 percent of that savings (the percentage could be based on a sliding scale, with a bigger percentage for a small savings and a smaller percentage for a large savings). By offering carrots to employees, residents and watchdogs to call out inefficiencies, we would save millions.

Second, Los Angeles should adopt tools like Google Moderator to allow Angelenos to post suggestions about public policy and governmental systems, and then vote in a ranked Web forum on the best ideas policymakers should implement. As Wikipedia and similar technologies show, mass user collaboration increases civic participation and has the potential to generate extremely innovative concepts and approaches that bureaucrats might never think of. Ever had a great idea and wanted to get it out there for serious consideration but didn? have the time or connections to advocate for it? This would be one convenient and helpful way to inject fresh thinking from busy Angelenos into our public policy processes.

Third, governments should use technologies like Google Maps to show where government-sponsored neighborhood or capital projects are and enable residents to collaborate on them. They should then allow any citizen to see (by searching by city or ZIP code) when and where a project is authorized, how much it costs, how long it is going to take and who is building or fixing it. Feedback from individuals and communities would come via a simple real-time e-forum anyone can access and track to make suggestions for improving a project? budget, timeline and effectiveness. This would empower residents to participate in the civic process without requiring them to attend the Byzantine maze of multiple government hearings that can last for years.

These three tools, as well as more boldly and strategically employing the likes of Twitter, YouTube and other technologies, will serve as a way to improve our civic processes and service delivery systems. By properly thinking through new and different ways to improve information sharing, responsiveness and collaboration, we will save a stunning amount of money, increase civic participation, and potentially transform government budgets and services.

We might even create Government 2.0 along the way.

Rob Carpenter is an entrepreneur and writer. He lives in Los Angeles.