In the case of Flint, a tragic decision to forgo anti-corrosion treatment of the city’s aging water pipes exposed city residents to lead poisoning. State and federal tests soon revealed excessive levels of lead in the water, but the results were not shared with the public for months—and not without a push by whistleblowers at Virginia Tech University and a Flint hospital.

Flint is the worst of circumstances. But even in a best-case scenario, public-health tests take weeks, if not months, to become public.

“Let me see my damn tests.”

Maybe there’s a better way. What if governments immediately posted water test results on a website open to the public? What if citizens and citizen activists were encouraged to add their water test results to the public platform, creating a muscular database that anybody could use to spot trends and raise alarms? What if government offered prizes and other incentives to any bureaucrat, business person, citizen activist or parent who creates a solution to the present water crisis or develops a better approach, in general, to protecting Flint’s water?

The paternalistic approach to government has run its course, and not just in Flint. Averting such crises requires re-inventing government—not to be smaller or bigger, but to be more efficient and connected to a tech-empowered public, where mutual transparency and data sharing can leverage the wisdom of crowds.

Crowdsourcing government—looking to the public for innovation—is not a new idea. Napoleon offered a prize to the person who could feed his hungry army across a continent of conquered land, and the French chef who won the contest sparked the modern canning movement. But technology offers scale.

Under President Obama, more than 80 federal agencies have collaborated with more than 200,000 students, entrepreneurs, and others to tackle more than 440 challenges—from developing autonomous vehicles for warfare to biomedical research serving the disabled. Napoleon’s chef won 12,000 francs. Obama’s innovators earned $150 million in prize money.

Another White House program—a start-up, actually, dubbed “18F”—leverages world-class developers, designers, and tech specialists to help agencies change how the build and buy technology services.

Governing on a social platform puts public servants under greater scrutiny. If a pothole isn’t filled or the lead levels creep up, everybody knows it. People are punished, problems solved. On the other hand, a job well done can be instantly acknowledged, rewarding bureaucrats and restoring trust in the system.

In Boston, “Citizen’s Connect” is a cell-phone application that allows users to take a photograph of a problem—say, a pothole—and send it to the city for repair. The citizen is notified when the work is done. In the Spanish town of Jun, residents use Twitter to lodge complaints with the mayor, who uses the same platform to issue orders to his staff addressing the complaints. Citizens can spot problems that governments, left to their own devices, might prefer not to acknowledge.