The article substantiates the necessity of establishing a constructive dialogue between the regional authorities and society in the conditions of growing social tension and crisis of public trust in political institutions. According to the authors, this process should be facilitated by the use of a number of social technologies aimed at maintaining a full-fledged continuous discourse between the participants of the communicative field on the part of authorities at all levels and representatives of civil society. In order to substantiate the main technological elements, the authors use the results of their own empirical research conducted in the capital of one of the Russian regions. The proposed range of communication technologies is aimed at regular diagnostics of dispositions of communication participants, support of civil initiatives, including crowdsourcing projects and active use of virtual communication space. In addition, the authors analyze the likely risks, the occurrence of which may hinder the creation of an effective communication system between the government and society. The most significant risks that negate the effectiveness of the state-public dialogue are: the probability of formalization of the applied technologies, inconsistency of values and priorities of communication participants, social passivity and lack of intellectual and material resources. The article offers certain recommendations how to minimize the impact of the above risks.