Macrowikinomics by Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams has been so widely reviewed and praised that it hardly needs another review, but I've read it so it's getting one. In the interests of product differentiation, I'll say little about the thesis as a whole, and concentrate on one specific section, about public value. I have a particular interest in this, having co-authored a (free, pdf or text) book, Public Value in Practice: Restoring the Ethos of Public Service, for the BBC Trust, as the Trustee with responsibility for steering public value tests of significant changes to BBC services. (In fact, I recently bumped into Andy Parfitt, the very cool head of Radio 1 and popular music, in a cafe, and he told me he was reading the public value book – what better recommendation could you need to read it too?)

Anyway, back to the general theme of Macrowikinomics. In case anybody is unaware, it continues where Wikinomics left off. Its theme was the beneficial impact of mass collaboration in business, and I enjoyed the many examples it gave of how successful companies were using information and communication technologies, and specifically social networks, to innovate. The new book gives more examples from business but turns specifically to larger-scale collaborations being undertaken by other kinds of institutions. The examples are health, higher education and research, climate change and the media, as well as the 'public square'.

I fundamentally agree with the key point that most of the knowledge anybody in any organisation needs will lie outside, rather than within, its boundaries. Macrowikinomics makes plenty of interesting points about its examples. Having said that, I found it less satisfying than its predecessor.

One reason is the purely stylistic – personally, I find the management guru style acceptable when applied to corporate stories and a bit tooth-grinding when applied in other contexts. The cliches stand out more. There's a lot of taking things to the next level and making ideas a reality – and what on earth does 'opening the kimono' mean? I'm sure it's meant to be a cliche but is new to me. We all have stylistic tics, even me, so this is a question of taste.

More substantively, Macrowikinomics skates over the complexities that inevitably arise when it comes to big institutions or policy matters. The authors overstate their claim that applying wiki principles will solve all problems. For example on higher education – where I agree with their fundamental point that mass production of graduates was fine for the mass production age and unsatisfactory now – they write as if students never used to skip lectures or work together. And they do not make the link between the exploratory learning they advocate and some very traditional educational theory (hello John Dewey!)

Having quibbled, there are lots of interesting examples and ideas in the book, and that goes for the section on the public sector too. One of the essential aspects of public value is the process of exploration and debate with the public, the procedural justice which Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum have emphasized as an aspect of meaningful human capability – see for example the essays in The Quality of Life (1993)).

The new technologies certainly make that process meaningful in new ways. The open data movement is incredibly valuable: the motivated crowd can discover things no bureaucrat would ever have time to do. The people can even generate their own data, and – as Steve Levitt noted in his recent talk at the American Economic Association meetings – data-generation via social networks is already playing into social science research. Tapscott and Williams vastly understate the risks to public sector organizations of opening up in this way – risks that essentially arise because of the inevitable dynamic between public sector and politics. After all, participation via social networks and online communities of interest could easily start to challenge the legitimacy of classic participation by voting in an election for people whose job is to take decisions on behalf of everyone. But this is certainly the right direction. I'd love to see some debate between public officials and politicians about how to address the challenges posed to each group by increasing openness and participation on specific issues.

So in sum, Macrowikinomics has loads of interesting suggestions and examples, and is definitely a worthwhile and not all that time-consuming read.