Reposted from "Increasing Citizen Engagement in Government," the Fall 2009 newsletter from the Center for Intergovernmental Solutions, an office of the General Services Administration.

To be effective, Internet professionals navigate between two dangerous currents: dismissal and utopianism. The challenges of dismissal are pretty obvious—the boss who forgets to invite you to the meeting, or the subtler demotion of online work to a pure marketing function.

The risks of utopianism are harder to see, but the danger is just as great: If we overstate how online tools can change the world, we ask our clients and colleagues to sail on faith into uncharted waters and we risk losing allies in the daily work that makes change a reality over time.

The Obama Administration arrived on a surge of optimism about online partnerships between citizens and government. As excitement transitions into a season of experimentation, Internet professionals, government professionals and regular people face important questions about the readiness of tools, institutions and individuals to turn optimism into operational change.

Beth Noveck, White House Deputy CTO for Open Government, is leading the effort to rethink public participation. She says the administration wants "to make government more relevant to people's lives" by providing more information, and to create "opportunities for people to share their expertise and participate in solving problems." Noveck believes that transparency and participation tools are most powerful when combined. "Data helps to focus people's attention," she says, "to develop actionable proposals based in empirical measures." Noveck and the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) have already coordinated web discussions on declassification policy, FCC rules, use of web cookies, Pentagon Web 2.0 guidelines and recommendations on the Open Government Initiative.

Despite the innovation—and fanfare—behind the White House pilots in transparency and public input, leaders in online collaboration temper their enthusiasm with questions.