Harnessing the Internet to reinvent democracy

By Georgina Prodhan, European Technology Correspondent

BERLIN (Reuters) - No one could accuse management guru Don Tapscott of being unambitious. The co-author of best-seller "Wikinomics" wants to teach governments to harness the power of the Internet to reinvent democracy.

Tapscott is an evangelist for Web 2.0, the second-generation Internet based on participation through social communities such as Facebook and MySpace, participatory sites like free encyclopaedia Wikipedia, and blogs.

In "Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything", published this year, he and co-author Anthony Williams dared big companies to reveal their trade secrets on the Web in a gamble to collect the ideas they need from people outside the firm.

They cited unlikely success stories such as that of struggling gold miner Goldcorp which published its secret geological data on the Web and invited people around the world to help it find new goldfields -- a move that transformed the company.

Now their thinktank, New Paradigm, is starting a project to involve governments, non-governmental organizations and citizens around the world to revitalize the public sector.

"I want to change the world," said Tapscott, grinning, when asked what he thinks his initiative can achieve.

Tapscott, who is in the middle of a multi-million-dollar international project to research the attitudes and habits of 13 to 29-year-olds, reckons young people want to take part in politics but don't like being preached to by politicians.

"My generation grew up watching TV so a broadcast model was OK," he says. But hearing: "I'm a politician, so listen to this 30-second ad where I slag off my competition," is meaningless to what he dubs the "N-Gen" or Net generation, Tapscott argues.