How bloggers should take on the government?

Among other things to be discussed at BlogCamp:

Blogging and Governance - How blogs are being used to provide assistance during times of crisis, uncovering potential crimes, activities, taking on the government, etc.

Well, the best way to take on the adversary is to infiltrate it. We should have bloggers embedded within the government.

Now you may think that is smart or plain corny, depending upon your knowledge of blogging and/or government. You might even think, it’s late on a Friday evening and I have been drinking and reading General Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. But if you already have an opinion, you haven’t understood what I want to say. Let me finish.

One evening I got talking to a delightful old woman who had been running a successful NGO for a long time. However, she had lately begun to drift away from her work. Don’t remember the precise conversation, but I recognised the problems she described in her NGO as the same that you see within the government. Her NGO had become big and taken on aspects of a bureaucracy. I said as much to her and she seemed to agree. (I told you she was charming, didn’t I?)

Okay, now my point is: bloggers are smart, honest, hardworking, polite, and very dependable people. If they interchange places with lazy, self-serving, opinionated and corrupt colleagues of mine in the government, what would happen? You’d get the same quality of governance and slightly worse blogging. People matter, but most population of sufficient size are nearly same.

However, analysing issues, like bloggers; organising information, like wiki’s; and using the emergent power from co-operating entities—these are skills that can be employed in delivering governance, as much as in taking on the government.

For starters folks, I’d be over at the camp to learn something from you.