Deval Patrick, the new governor of Massachusetts, has rolled his old campaign web site into a new site that opens the door to citizens who want to directly propose and discuss important issues, and for the Governor himself to get into the fray. In doing so, he is going where no top elected official in America has ever gone before -- into a real online dialogue with constituents about the decisions that affect their lives. Here's hoping the presidential candidates take notice.

On any given day, I've got about four or five books that I'm currently reading--or trying to finish--and I can understand why some people try to take a "reading week" (or month) where they do nothing but catch up with the piles of things that we wish we had time to read. I'm taking a break from my own piles to offer some capsule reviews of several books I did manage to read this year that cover the emerging world of technology and politics.

Beth Simone Noveck has written a seminal piece on "Wiki-Government" for Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, and I recommend you read the whole thing. Noveck is Professor of Law and director of the Institute for Information Law & Policy at New York Law School and the McClatchy Visiting Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at Stanford University, who has been advising the U.S. Patent Office on its new open-source approach to involving the public in helping review patent applications, and that experience informs her vision. She lays out a powerful case for reinventing government with "civic software" (a term I once floated and still love) that "can shift power from professional sources of authoritative knowledge to new kinds of knowledge networks" and create a kind of "collaborative governance." I love it.

Joi Ito's Hecklebot is going global tonight. That is, assuming Twitter doesn't crash. And if Twitter holds up under the traffic of most of its estimated three million users all chattering at once, we're all going to be participating in the birth of something new. You can call it the Global Brain or the Hive Mind, but the Machine that is Us/Using Us (to use Michael Wesch's brilliant phrase) is going up a level tonight, and media and democracy in America will never be the same.

Are we going down the tubes, or can we use the tubes to save us from ourselves? When I'm not distracted by the latest news, that's what I'm trying to think about these days. Here are some unfinished thoughts on the topic...

The election is a week away, but two new online projects were just launched focusing on involving the public in what comes next. BigDialog.org and Whitehouse2.org are complimentary efforts that seek to crowd-source the process of putting pressing questions before the President-elect and identifying the top priorities of the public. We don't know yet if the next President will join in and respond, but if these sites garner a lot of participation, he'd be wise to pay attention.

What happens to the Obama "network" after the election? Lots of people are turning their attention to this question, and here at techPresident and our sister site, PersonalDemocracy.com, we're going to be exploring it from a lot of angles. What follows is a re-post of one intriguing take from Prof. David Lazer, director of Harvard University's Program on Networked Governance.

What happens to Obama's network after the election? The answer depends a lot on decisions Obama and his top aides will make, but thanks to the lateral networking tools available to everyone online, the answer to that question is also up to his base, and the organizers and grass-roots leaders who are the nodes of his network. Thursday, I'm going to be speaking on a panel with Al Giordano of The Field and Nate Silver of 538, that Al has put together called "The Organizing of the President," where we'll offer some thoughts on this topic. But, as expected, the answers are also starting to bubble up on their own. Here are some promising indications from the heart of the Connecticut for Obama network...

I'm going to be speaking on a panel tomorrow organized by Al Giordano and the FieldHands, along with Nate Silver and Sean Quinn of 538 and Tara Brownlee, the head of Obama's Illinois Field Department. The topic, which Al has already been doing a lot of writing and talking about, is "What's Next for the Obama Movement? The Organizing of the President."

It's this Thursday, in Chicago, at 7 p.m, at DePaul University's SAC building # 254. 2320 N. Kenmore Ave. Al's got more details here, along with downloadable flyers for the event.

I'm still mulling what I'm going to say tonight at "The Organizing of the President," but here are two hints.