Chrystia Freeland

It turns out you can govern in 140 characters. Social media is often accused of coarsening our public discourse and of making us stupid. But some innovative public leaders are taking to their keyboards and finding that the payoff is a direct and personal connection with their communities.

To understand how statecraft by Twitter works, I spoke to three avid practitioners, who are spread around the globe and work at different levels of government: Carl Bildt, the foreign minister of Sweden; Michael McFaul, the U.S. ambassador to Russia; and Naheed Nenshi, the mayor of Calgary, Alberta.

Bildt is a veteran blogger, but he was dubious about Web 2.0, as the social-media revolution is sometimes called. “I was rather skeptical on Twitter,” he told me. “I thought, ‘What can you say in 140 characters?’”

But Bildt, who has more than 116,000 followers , soon found Twitter to be “very useful” and also “fun.”

“As a matter of fact, you can say something in 140 characters,” he said. “The restriction isn’t as absolute as I had thought.”

One way Bildt uses Twitter is promote his bigger-think pieces. “A lot of the tweets are links,” he said. “If I write an op-ed, then I can tweet it.”

Bildt combines his Twitter posts with a blog. Twitter is for links and instant comments; the blog is for longer, more considered arguments. Bildt tweets in English and blogs in Swedish.

One of Bildt’s followers is McFaul, the U.S. ambassador to Russia. He likes the way Bildt mixes life and work, one moment tweeting about Syria and the next gently complaining about the long line for takeoff at the Istanbul airport.

“The thing I feel most nervous about is blending the personal and the professional,” McFaul said. “That’s new to me. I’m learning where the lines are.”

For instance, McFaul, who is originally from Bozeman, Montana, posted a picture of himself and his wife dancing to country music played by a Montana band in Spaso House, the ambassador’s residence in Moscow.

“I never would have done that three years ago,” McFaul said. “And yet the guys say any time there is something personal or something with a photo or video it gets much more pickup or retweets than a statement on Syria.”

“The guys” to whom McFaul refers are the U.S. State Department’s social-media team, led by Alec Ross, who is the senior adviser on innovation for Hillary Rodham Clinton, the secretary of state. Ross spearheads the State Department’s enthusiastic social-media campaign. As McFaul posted earlier this week, quoting Mrs. Clinton: “Our ambassadors are blogging and tweeting, and every embassy has a social-media presence.” (Indeed, Ross’s influence is global – Bildt said that the American briefed the Swedish diplomatic corps at its annual meeting last summer.)

Like Bildt, McFaul has a multilingual, multiplatform social-media strategy. McFaul is a Twitter newbie. (In just over two months, he has about 850 posts and more than 22,700 followers.) He blogs when he has a more complicated point to make and uses Facebook when he wants to converse with a community. He tries to write mostly in Russian, but occasionally uses the Latin alphabet if his Cyrillic keyboard isn’t handy, and will post in English if he wants to communicate with his followers outside Russia.

Bildt has found that by integrating social media into his normal routines – he writes blog posts in the car or on the plane and “has it in the back of my mind all the time” – “it is not so time-consuming.”

For McFaul, who is writing chiefly in a foreign language, social media amounts to a second shift: “I have my day job as a conventional ambassador, and then starting at 10 p.m. until I get tired I interact on social media.”

McFaul’s moonlighting role as social-media ambassador has particular relevance in Russia, where the government controls much of the traditional media, especially television, and civil society has moved to the Internet in response. As a result, McFaul says, social media is more than a tool for communication – it is also a well positioned window into the national debate.

McFaul’s social-media outreach has not protected him from controversy. Indeed, Russian leaders, including President-elect Vladimir V. Putin, have been suspicious from the outset of McFaul, who is a longtime student and occasional advocate of democratization. Just this week, Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov accused McFaul of arrogance for remarks made to a Russian news agency about missile defense.

But his social-media presence has given McFaul the tools to reach beyond the sometimes hostile national media and speak to any Russians who care to listen.

Naheed Nenshi, the mayor of Calgary, couldn’t operate in a more different environment. He is an elected leader in a Western democracy. But he, too, has found that social media gives him the power to get his message across directly, without relying on mainstream media platforms.

Nenshi has a salty style – he once said on Twitter that a critic should “look into pharmaceuticals” for his “limpness” issue – that has earned him more than 53,000 Twitter followers, including foreign fans who say if they lived in Calgary they would vote for Nenshi.

In a city of just over 1 million, that gives the mayor a loud and independent megaphone.

“The really interesting piece about all of this is the way it disintermediates the traditional media,” Nenshi said. “I’m well on my way to having more Twitter followers than one of the Calgary newspapers has readers. It puts my interactions with the media in a new light.”

Maybe we are all thinking too much like Bolsheviks and not enough like Googlers. For Lenin and the Russian revolutionaries, the big question was “Kto kogo?” — essentially, “Who has the upper hand?”

Kto kogo remains the paradigm at the center of the fiscal battles roiling the Western world: young vs. old; rich taxpayers vs. poor welfare beneficiaries; public sector workers vs. private sector ones; wealthy Northern Europe vs. bankrupt Southern Europe; small government conservatives vs. big government liberals.

But a few people — writers, activists, even politicians — are examining the current woes of the Western state through a very different prism. You could call it the Government 2.0 approach, and its fundamental thesis is that the biggest question is not how much to spend and how much to tax, it is how to adapt the state to the information age.

One of the first thinkers to articulate this view was the best-selling author Don Tapscott. Tapscott, who has been arguing for decades that the knowledge economy requires a new style of government, thinks the time for his idea may have finally come.

“If you look at the current crisis, we have the irresistible force for reducing the cost of government meeting up with the immovable rock of public expectation that government should be better, not worse,” Tapscott told me. “Tinkering with this will not work. When you are talking about cutting trillions of dollars, that’s not trimming fat, that is tearing out organs, and we don’t need to do that, and we don’t want to do that.”

“We need to fundamentally rethink how we orchestrate and create government value,” he said. “And now we have a burning platform, which could help us do it.”

Tapscott’s latest book, Macrowikinomics, co-written with Anthony D. Williams, suggests some ways to do that. One of his favorites is releasing government data. That information, he said, can then “become a platform on which private companies, civil society, other government organizations and, crucially, individuals, can self-organize to create value.”

As an example, Tapscott cited a recent conversation with the chief executive of Melbourne. He suggested to her that one way to apply his open-government approach would be to make public all of the city’s information on bicycle accidents and where they happen.

“I said to her, ‘If you release all that data, within 24 hours someone will do a mash-up and you will be saving lives within weeks, and it won’t cost you a penny,”’ Mr. Tapscott said.

Jennifer Pahlka, founder of Code for America, a two-year-old not-for-profit group that gives technologists the chance to work in local government around the United States, shares Tapscott’s view. She believes the rising generation of digitally native twentysomethings is creating both a demand for and the tools for transforming how government works.

“There is a certain generation who have grown up being able to mash up, to tinker with, every system they’ve ever encountered,” she said, speaking on the phone from her Bay Area office. “So they are meeting their relationship with government in a new way, with a new assumption: We can fix it. It really signals a new relationship between government and the technology community, but it is also about the government being useful to you in your daily life and engaging you in your daily life.”

Code for America’s fellows — 362 people applied for 20 places last year — bring “user-centered design and agile technology methods” to city governments accustomed to more top-down and more bureaucratic ways of approaching civic jobs.

Like Tapscott, Pahlka believes the key to Government 2.0 is creating data platforms that people can build on — as well as use. It is a redefinition of the relationship between citizen and government that mirrors the way many technology companies have changed the relationship between business and consumer: Just as much of Facebook’s or FourSquare’s value comes from content that users generate, proponents of Government 2.0 want us to participate in creating the government services we use.

“I think there is a big disjuncture between what we are served up as consumers and what we are served up as citizens,” Pahlka said. “As a society, we haven’t spent as much time building the citizen Internet.”

Pahlka’s focus is on citizens and finding ways to help government serve us better. For political leaders, Government 2.0 offers a further benefit: citizens who are more deeply engaged in how government works are more willing to pay for it.

That has been the experience of Naheed Nenshi, mayor of the western Canadian city of Calgary, traditionally the most politically conservative metropolis in the country. Nenshi has been called the Canadian Obama — he was a political outsider elected on a wave of grass-roots Internet activism — and he has brought that enthusiasm for social media into City Hall.

One example is the city’s budget, which Nenshi built from the bottom up, asking Calgarians what they wanted to spend their money on before coming up with his plan.

“I still have a job, I’m not creating a budget by plebiscite,” Nenshi told me. “But I need to have the best possible data, and that includes the best possible data on the preferences of Calgarians.” He added, “Most people in Calgary said: ‘Maintain my taxes, or increase them, but keep my services.”’

Nenshi said his enthusiasm for crowd-sourcing and for data-driven decision-making had frustrated some of his city’s journalists, who preferred simpler black-and-white narratives of one political ideology clashing with another.

Which brings us back to the debate between the Bolsheviks and the Googlers. The technorati can take things too far: Even in the age of crowd-sourcing and monster databases, vested interests still exist, and so do ideological differences. But if we could figure out how to make government as effective as Google, those differences and those disputes would matter a lot less.

Conventional wisdom has it that the Internet is dumbing us down and making politics more partisan. Sound bites are more effective than substance. The punditocracy that shapes these truisms is, needless to say, pretty certain they apply most powerfully to people in the hinterland, especially those with a history of voting for the right.

That is why the election of Naheed Nenshi, a 39-year-old former business school professor, as mayor of Calgary, was a watershed event that should be of interest far beyond Canada, where he has already become a political superstar.

When Mr. Nenshi earned his upset victory last October, the first flutter of outside enthusiasm was about the fact that an Ismaili Muslim son of South Asian immigrants who moved to Canada from Tanzania had been chosen to lead the capital of the country’s conservative heartland.

The next wave of excitement was inspired by his campaign’s sophisticated use of social media to overturn Calgary’s old-boy political establishment. This Twitter revolution, with which we are now so familiar thanks to the oil states of North Africa, made a splash in the land of the blue-eyed sheiks thanks to clever tactics like a funny YouTube video of people struggling with Mr. Nenshi’s name.

But when I spoke to Mr. Nenshi recently in the elegant sandstone building that houses the mayor’s office, he told me that outsiders are missing the point. The real significance of his election, he said, is that it proves voters care deeply about big ideas and will elect the leaders who take the trouble to engage them. This is true, he insisted, even outside political and business centers such as New York, London or Toronto.

“We called it politics in full sentences,” said Mr. Nenshi, who has the energy and gregariousness of a born politician. “We called it the ‘better ideas’ campaign.” Those ideas were serious, and against the current of what many had assumed to be the cultural propensities of Calgarians. Mr. Nenshi is an evangelist of high-density living and of public transit, revolutionary notions in a city that is spread across as many acres as New York, but houses just a 10th as many people.

Calgarians love their cars – that’s how more than two-thirds of them get to work – and they are bullish on the oil industry that not only puts gas in their tanks but also is the lifeblood of their economy. Yet these same Calgarians embraced a geeky, Harvard-educated former McKinsey consultant, who loves technocratic solutions to urban problems such as “spot intensification” and containing sprawl by charging developers more to build on the outskirts of town.

Calgary is a “city of ideas,” Mr. Nenshi said. “Calgarians were really interested in having a conversation about the future of their city.” But the province of Alberta is the closest Canada comes to a one-party state, and until Mr. Nenshi and his pals came along, no one had really bothered to bring people in to that discussion.

This engagement with the community is the second important lesson of his win. In 1995, Robert Putnam told us that Americans had started to bowl alone. And many of us worry that the advances in technology in the subsequent 15 years have served mostly to alienate us further from our real-life neighbors as we retreat ever deeper into virtual communities of the like-minded.

What Mr. Nenshi found in Calgary was a passionate desire to be involved in the real, physical life of the city – and one that could be most effectively tapped by using cybertools. He said he adapted the classic marketing and political adage that you have to “go to people where they live” to the Internet Age. “One of the things we discussed is that a lot of people live online,” Mr. Nenshi said, including the 600,000 Calgarians, in a city of 1.3 million, who are on Facebook. “Social media was the tool that enabled our philosophy.”

He said that when he first moved back home to Calgary after professional stints in Toronto and New York, his East Coast friends were baffled: “The New York people and the Harvard people were like, ‘Naheed, why are you in the middle of the Canadian Prairies?’ ” But he thinks the “Four Seasons hotel tribe” of globe-trotting elites may be missing the fact that they inhabit a world that is rather provincial itself.

“This so-called borderless world has become more insular … I am very happy to let the Four Seasons tribe do their work on global prosperity,” Mr. Nenshi said. “I’ll do my work on local prosperity.”