I like the sound of Government 2.0: Collaborate with citizens online and you can change government from a sewer-dwelling raccoon into a purring housecat.

Social media lets us try for a kind of politics that was impossible until now. I hope for great results. For many, Government 2.0, or “collaborative government,” will mean just “friending” a local cop. But in full flower, Government 2.0 can mean far better service, and far more government-and-citizen collaboration than ever before.

Even before we had social media, the glare of public attention was a proven antidote for bad politics. Citizens getting up their elbows in policymaking has always been another strong medicine.

Trouble is, that “sewer-dwelling raccoon” is always smarter than people think. When he’s hungry, he purrs like a housecat and covers stinky laws with high-minded names. Advertising fools just enough voters — so often complacent and impatient — to throw a new law onto the books. On and on it goes.

Such a stinky new law is just what Californians got in 2000. Proposition 34 was sold to voters as campaign finance reform. It was a ruse. (A few days ago, a report confirmed suspicions, and a major drafter of the proposition insisted he was “outraged.” Yeah, and round up the usual suspects.)

One other fix, more honest, came 100 years ago: California amended its constitution to give citizens the ballot proposition. It was the only way for voters to bypass the paralyzed Legislature and loosen the Southern Pacific Railroad’s grip. It worked. But more recently, ballot propositions have helped tie the state’s budget in knots.

In the long run, who knows how social media, visual analysis, and other tools may be used in government? What will matter most of all is who uses them. If it’s “the people,” which people?

I hope this new, pervasive politics mobilizes a new wave of smart activists — the way desktop publishing and, later, weblogs enabled editors and writers. Or the way tools like Tableau and Lyza are enabling independent-minded, creative analysts today.

As these activists learn about politics, I also hope that more citizens than ever before step up to watch, push, and verify. Such a voter would be Citizen 2.0, the real hope.

Otherwise, it’s going to be that raccoon again — this time on Twitter.

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.

Don’t say “cherry picking” to people at information-intensive businesses like banks, airlines, and telecommunications companies. You can spoil their lunch if a big customer has just run off to a competitor.

Mark Albala says he has a tool that will warn of such a move. He’s president of InfoSight Partners, and he’s about to offer a new Twitter and blog sniffer to companies in the upper-midmarket and bigger.

Customers often precede their moves with questions about the competitor. Asking “what do you know about …?” on Twitter could be the first and last hint. Albala’s tool monitors such chatter on social media, industry blogs, and other external sources to know when something’s up.

“Your surprises aren’t all coming from your own data,” he says, “but from outside your organization.”

This thing will push notifications to iPhones and Blackberries. It won’t be expensive, he says. He expects the beta to launch in November.