In the rebellion of the business users, in which top-down gets tipped over, even stodgy old project management is coming alive.

“Most of the decisions made in project management,” says Liquid Planner CEO Charles Seybold, “happen under the surface.” He’s now trying to win over the people who work on projects but haven’t run many of them. He’s using transparency and collaboration.

Liquid Planner, the cloud-based insurgent — “a Wikipedia for projects” — has its roots in Seybold’s experience organizing Expedia’s first project management office. Every time the 40 or so projects under his watch got rolled up, he says, there was “a new distortion of reality.” He had become frustrated with the usual tools. Finally, he and his team decided they had to start over.

Today, Liquid Planner discards a lot of project management fixtures, such as fixed start and finish dates. In their place, it uses ranges and “probabilistic scheduling.” That’s actually how people think, isn’t it? Other old habits are “percent complete” and “earned value,” both of which I’ve found laughable.

The tool also doesn’t allow overloading, by which team members are booked for more than 100 percent of their time. And the tool forces decisions on priority, making just one thing a first priority and not several.

Liquid Planner fights cynicism and standoffs with transparency. In a typical project, team members provide data — such as estimates, actual hours worked, re-estimates, and risk assessments — to a project manager, who a week or two later issues a schedule that can’t be traced back to the raw data. Hidden within that opaque but official schedule are broad assumptions about risk and uncertainty.

Team members have lost control but are still held responsible. So they respond however they can, he says, typically with covert adjustments within each one’s area. Team members and project managers then get locked in a hostile negotiation in which neither side can safely share information.

Seybold often hears from project managers who really don’t think team members should have a say. “Way too many [project managers] act like keeping team members in the dark is the right thing,” he says. “We hear this when people ask us to obscure and lock down information that, as far as we can tell, can only benefit team members.”

He’s busy now working on an iPad app, which he wants to make as functional as the cloud-based application. He’d like to see project managers be “100 percent mobile.”

How refreshing to stumble into a trade show that has its eyes on users and their collaboration. Enterprise 2.0 came to San Francisco early this month, and I liked what I saw.

Take, for example, Liquid Planner, the hosted project manager. Unlike conventional planners, it makes no demand for the single completion date, so laughable in practice. This planner avoids roulette thinking by asking instead for a range of dates — much easier to believe in.

“One of the biggest problems in business is keeping people engaged,” says Liquid Planner CEO Charles Seybold. “If they’re not engaged, they go away.” They disown data they’re supposed to engage with, and that accelerates their drift away from corporate goals.

The planner also makes use of collaboration in email, Twitter, and other media to measure progress, obstacles, and project creep. Did you and a bunch of coworkers sketch a revised timeline on a paper napkin at lunch? Even that could be scanned and added to the mix.

“It’s all about people working together,” says Seybold. “It’s all social” — an obvious but usually ignored fact about business.

Other vendors make more general use of social media. SocialText, for example, picks up on social media to give overall business collaboration a push. It’s already got about 5,000 customers around the world, according to the man at the SocialText booth who rattled off the features: an iGoogle-like dashboard, secure and selective access, open standards, and so on. The pricing looked engaging, too: free for operations with fewer than 50 users, then $5 per user per month.

Away from the exhibition, 116 attendees packed a room to hear Linden Labs announce a business version of its virtual world Second Life, Second Life Enterprise.

Remember when people were impressed with a computer singing “Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do”? The virtual meeting Linden Labs used in the announcement will someday be compared to TV productions of the early ’50s. Eventually, Second Life Enterprise will work out the kinks and start to walk, run, sing, and dance. As I wrote in May, someday we’ll see serious what-if scenario gaming.

This is the future of intelligent business.