When Janet Murrells tried to get some potholes repaired a few months ago, she drove into the dead end of bureaucracy. Telephones rang unanswered. Pillars turned to posts. Nobody seemed willing to take any action about the gaping holes in the road in Bishop’s Stortford, Hertfordshire, not far from where she lives.

Then Murrells discovered FixMyStreet.com, a website that is a harbinger of how politics may work in the future.

“Three potholes gone into one,” she posted on the site. “The pothole in Luynes Rise is just before the watermill entrance. It is about 4ft long and a foot wide and is down to the concrete.”

That was all she needed to do. Using clever code and local government data, the website automatically forwarded her message to the relevant department at the local council and the hole was fixed.

Murrells was so impressed that she posted an update on August 5: “This problem has been reported directly to the council on numerous occasions, but going through you, it was done within days. Thank you.”

In the past week FixMyStreet.com has registered more than 450 reports of potholes, broken street lights, dumped rubbish, graffiti and other annoyances. Some are swiftly solved; others are still awaiting a response. But there is little doubt that the system is having an effect: in the past month more than 750 complaints posted on the site have subsequently been reported fixed.

The website is in the vanguard of a movement being embraced by politicians on all sides, as the internet – after much hype – finally begins to deliver power to the people.

In a similar vein the mayor of London and the Metropolitan police last week launched online “crime maps” of the capital. Details previously hidden from the public are available at the click of a mouse for anyone to use as they see fit.

The maps (only in pilot form so far) reveal, for example, that 43 burglary, robbery and car crimes were recorded in Marylebone High Street in July and 89 in St James’s – but only 10 in Richmond upon Thames. Westminster is rated as having a high crime rate, Lambeth is average and Harrow is low.

Is it a gimmick or a powerful tool for people trying to stay safe and combat crime? Time will tell, but the point is that a philosophical revolution is under way. Vast quantities of data previously held close by government are going to be thrown open for all to analyse, exploit, slice, dice and refry.

No one knows quite where it will lead. So uncharted are the possibilities that the government is running a public competition called Show Us a Better Way precisely to encourage people to invent new ways to use certain data it holds.

The Conservatives also want to harness the power of such “crowd-sourcing” and “data-mashing” – the idea that by making information available through the internet, the skills and creativity of millions of people can be brought to bear. The Tories want to put online details of all government spending over £25,000 so that taxpayers can see what happens to their money and suggest how it might be better deployed.

As David Cameron, the Tory leader, said in a speech earlier this year: “For decades information, power and control have been monopolised by well-meaning public officials. Now because of the internet . . . we can consign this top-down model to history.”

Some call it vision, others hoopla, but crowd-sourcing, data-mashing, Wiki-wisdom – whatever you call it – is coming over the horizon fast.

IF many hands make light work, why not many brains too? That was the stance taken by internet pioneers who published programming codes for free so that other users could add to and improve their work. One result was Linux, a free computer operating system that is now widely used.

The next to see the potential of internet “brain gangs” were innovative web-based businesses. One, called InnoCentive, allows companies to post their unsolved problems on a website where scientists and thinkers from all over the world can supply solutions. The best suggestions win rewards.

Sometimes the solutions come from unexpected quarters. An Alaskan company wanted to find a way to stop oil freezing in storage tanks; the answer came not from an oil industry expert, but from a chemist thousands of miles away who pointed out that concrete does not set if it is kept in motion and the same principle might apply to oil.

Dell, the computer company, has also embraced the philosophy, setting up a website called IdeaStorm for customers to suggest the “new products and services you’d like to see Dell develop”. Last month it unveiled nine new laptops incorporating the best ideas from the crowd-sourcers who had bombarded IdeaStorm with suggestions.

Public bodies soon became aware of the possibilities. In America the Library of Congress asked members of Flickr, the photo-sharing website, to identify unknown people in its picture collections. Within weeks hundreds had been correctly captioned by friends and relatives.

It is this approach that is now spreading to politics. Among the apostles of change in the UK is Tom Steinberg, one of the founders of mySociety. org, a not-for-profit organisation that builds websites to make government more open and transparent. It created FixMyStreet.com and TheyWorkForYou.com, a site that gives details of members of parliament, how they vote and what they say. It can, for example, alert you by e-mail when a specified person or subject crops up in parliament.

Steinberg believes the revolution is in its infancy. “The government is saying we have data that you might be able to use in interesting, creative ways we haven’t thought of. It’s early days, but merely the fact that they are doing them is a pretty big step. The general rule of thumb historically is that more transparency makes for more mature, less corrupt democracies,” he said.

The United States is already committed to publishing details of government spending. Independent organisations such as the Sunlight Foundation have funded new websites that are designed to make the data much more accessible than before.

At FedSpending.org, for example, you can search details of US government funding that ranges from $33 billion (£19 billion) in contracts given last year to Lockheed Martin, the aerospace group, to the $2,380 given in 2006 to Frank Smith of Kentucky as a housing repair grant.

When the Tories tried to introduce measures to enforce similar disclosure here, Labour blocked them. Giving up control-freak tendencies is never easy. However, Cameron has said that he will press ahead with his plans if he wins the next election.

Another Tory proposal is to make local authorities publish data in standardised formats so that they can be easily searched online. “It may sound like a wonky technical change, but the consequences will be profound,” said an aide to George Osborne, the shadow chancellor. “At a stroke people will be able to create online services and websites that utilise local government information in new and innovative ways.”

Some are already trying to make the patchy data that are available work better. At the PlanningAlerts.com website, for example, you can type in your postcode and it will automatically notify you by e-mail of any planning application within a specified distance of your home. Hey presto, end of worries that your neighbour might sneak through a block of flats without you noticing the application in your local paper or pinned to a lamppost.

EVEN if MPs, a defensive bunch at best, do embrace the opportunities, does the wisdom of crowds work in politics? Jeff Howe, who coined the word “crowd-sourcing” and is the author of a new book on the subject, is a keen proponent but even he can see some pitfalls. Online votes can be rigged, for a start.

Howe recently noted that in an online poll of the top 250 films, fans of the new Batman film The Dark Knight repeatedly voted against classics such The Godfather and The Shawshank Redemption to boost the ranking of The Dark Knight.

“Wisdom of the crowds, indeed,” complained Howe on his blog. He suggested that voters should be restricted to voting once a week – and only when sober.

Others fear that massive data overload will negate the benefits of transparency. Might more information lead to less understanding; might bamboozled people show no interest? Ellen Miller, executive director of the Sunlight Foundation, dismisses such fears, based on her experience in the United States.

“The more information about government activity is online, the more people begin to use it,” she said. “People want to access information about government the same way they want to make travel reservations or order books.”

Miller believes this is the dawn of a real widening of democratic engagement. In the UK critics remain doubtful, pointing with scepticism at the No 10 website which, with the help of mySociety.org, runs public petitions.

About 15,000 have appeared – but how many have had any effect? “It’s a good question, although the petition against road pricing got more than 1m signatures and seemed to have an effect,” said Steinberg.

“But one thing I can say is [as a result of the No 10 petitions website] parliament is going to have online petitions and some are likely to have debate time dedicated to them.”

The first shoots are there: in recent parliamentary scrutiny of a bill on human tissue and embryo research, a committee examining the draft legislation set up an online forum for people to put their views.

It is a trend supported by Cameron who has proposed that petitions with, say, 100,000 signatures could trigger a debate in parliament and those with more than 1m signatures could lead to a parliamentary bill being tabled.

The road to the crowd-sourcing democracy may be just beginning and is likely to be bumpy. But even if there are potholes ahead, the chances are they will be fixed.

The people’s verdict

Crowd-sourcing, although not by that name, can be dated to the 18th century. In 1714 the British government tackled problems of oceanic navigation by offering a prize to anyone who could create a method to determine longitude within 60 nautical miles. More than £100,000 was eventually dispensed to clockmakers and astronomers who were able to measure longitude accurately.

The best-known example of the form today is Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia written entirely by its users. It is policed by moderators who had to lock President George W Bush’s profile due to “textual vandalism”.

Despite some doubts about the reliability of the entries on the site, the journal Nature found it to be almost as accurate on science as the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

In July the Cabinet Office launched Show Us a Better Way, a competition to find the best ideas for reusing information collected by the government on topics such as crime, health and education. A £20,000 prize has been offered to implement the best idea. Submissions include a database of hospital waiting lists.

The American company Netflix offered $1m in 2006 for anyone who could design a system to improve by 10% the efficiency of their DVD user-rating system. After 17,000 submissions, the prize is yet to be awarded.

In 2007 Tunisian political activists launched an internet campaign to track the movements of their president’s plane. By mapping images sent in from European airports they were able to show the plane flew far more than was publicly stated.