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There’s been a lot of action since Obama took office in the development of the idea of Government 2.0 – an increasingly transparent and open sharing of information collected by the federal government with its citizens.

Extreme communities must be closely involved with the actions of government at all levels. Government – to the extent that it is honest and open to the scrutiny of its citizens – will serve vital roles in re-localized communities.

At the current Gov 2.0 Summit in Washington, D.C., the importance of bringing its impact and input down to the street level has been emphasized by some key participants. Note this report from the Good.is blog, describing what success will depend on:

A sense of place, especially local
Google’s chief economist Hal Varian reminded us that the advantage of a federal system is that we have “fifty state-level civic experiments going at once.” So even though government can handle issues at a massive scale, its role as partner and service provider is best done locally. Street level makes things meaningful to people, which is a refrain we heard throughout the day. When Tom Steinberg introduced MySociety’s FixMyStreet, he made it clear that people just want to raise their civic gripes one street at a time—and they don’t think about what inter-agency dynamics take place behind the scenes to put things right. FixMyStreet’s self-generating archive suggests the range of concerns it tackles, from the pedestrian (potholes, fly-tipping) to the comical (now thankfully addressed), but also builds legitimacy for the authorities that address them. Later in the day, Monica Guzman, a news-gatherer for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, lauded the grass-roots authority that citizen bloggers now command in local news journalism for the city, simply because readers appreciate that these reporters live down the block.