There’s a very interesting confluence of conversations taking place at the moment on the topic of how technology is changing politics. One is on the idea of government 2.0, or government-as-a-platform. The second is on whether the net is better for campaigning than governing. And the third is on what happens when you open up the process with real-time transparency. Let me see if I can combine the threads. (And sorry, this is a bit of a long post, thanks to all the traveling in DC I did last week.)

The prophet is having second thoughts. In comments that have received remarkably scant coverage on this side of the pond, Clay Shirky, while in London last month promoting the release of Here Comes Everybody in paperback, said the following: “All the rhetoric, including - I'm embarrassed to say - some of mine, has assumed in the past that democratic legitimation is itself enough to regard aggregate public opinion [online] as being clearly binding on the government. I've changed my mind.” This is a momentous admission from someone as influential as Shirky, and timely, as the White House hires former Google exec’s into new positions like the “Director of Citizen Participation,” and considers its web strategy for involving Americans in Federal policy-making. The good people making these decisions at 1600 Pennsylvania have some tough jobs, since the challenges to national level online participation are inherent in both the available web tools, and in the nature of our representative government system.

From the campaign through the transition period participation has been kept to the crowd-sourcing of questions or priorities, which have been, ostensibly, passed on to then candidate (or his staff), and now, President. The crowdsourcing tool, “Moderator” was released by Google last September, and, like the candidate who used it, went from long shot to prime-time in a matter of months. Interestingly, as described by its lead project engineer, Talliver Heath, local governments were the original target market for Moderator. They would use it to elicit and evaluate questions or concerns of local import. In an interview with the tech site, Ars Technica, Heath propounded, “How many city council meetings have you been to? How about school boards? There are always questions you may have about the running of your city, town, state, etc. I believe a public application like Moderator can make civil participation significantly higher in local governments." So from prioritizing policy questions like trash pick-up, and teacher pay, then President-elect Obama, had the tool installed onto his Transition website: Change.gov.

Don't miss Clay Shirky and Steven Johnson's latest ruminations on the future of journalism and the fate of newspapers; they will clear your head (if it isn't already) about how technology is driving change in this vital arena.

Carlo Scannella is a graduate student in the media studies department at The New School in New York City and one of the organizers of the Get FISA Right movement. We're happy to have him here. -- Nancy

The story of the Get FISA Right group has already been covered
heavily in the press. Here's
the 30 second version: A group protesting Barack Obama's decision to
support the current FISA legislation appeared
on his campaign website, and as tens of thousands of individuals
joined, it became not only the largest group on his site, but a
movement strong enough to force Obama to take notice. His response to the Get FISA Right group was a moment of validation; this became
something real.

Maybe a bit too real, as I found myself on Fourth of July weekend
sitting alone in a room on a conference call with 10 or so people I
had never met before in my life, logged into my email, editing a wiki,
organizing a political movement at breakneck speed -- all while my
family ate barbecue without me.

The online mini-rising to protest Barack Obama's support for the Congressional compromise to renew the FISA legislation has been getting a lot of attention, with much being made (by us and plenty of others, including Ari Melber in the Nation, The New York Times, et al) that activists are using Obama's own social networking platform, my.BarackObama.com, to organize and channel their efforts to get him to alter his stand. Indeed, as of today the Senator Obama - Please Vote NO on Telecom Immunity - Get FISA Right group has swelled to more than 14,000 members, which makes it the single largest self-organized group on the whole platform, which reportedly has close to a million registered members.

This is certainly a good example of what thinkers like Clay Shirky and Mark Pesce have been talking about, when it comes to "ridiculously easy group formation" (qua Shirky) and how "Hyperconnectivity begets hypermimesis begets hyperempowerment" (qua Pesce). But right now the main reason this development is important is NOT because the group itself is that powerful; it's because attention-amplifiers in the blogosphere and the MSM are covering the story and thus threatening some of Obama's hard-won image as a change agent, which could conceivably weaken his vaunted fundraising and organizing machine. So while the Obama campaign is keeping a poker face about the importance of some of its members using the master's tools to challenge his position, it is no doubt paying attention, too.

The fact is, we're all entering completely new territory here. There have always been efforts to influence political candidates to take or change positions during a campaign (or afterward), but we've never before had a national campaign create an open platform for mobilizing supporters AND THEN seen a salient chunk of those supporters openly use that platform to challenge the candidate on a policy position. Indeed, while the net is inherently a two-way, many-to-many medium, no politician has yet used it to listen to his supporters as a group. Yes, the Obama campaign has asked its supporters to share their stories about their health care woes, and some of those anecdotes have made it into the campaign's blog or policy papers. But we have no norms for a collective, public discussion--even though we now have the capacity for one.

Is a nationwide truckers' strike just over the horizon? As gasoline prices climb towards and past $4 a gallon, something is brewing that--with the help of the web--could very well upend the flatlining presidential primaries and force hard economic questions that none of the presidential candidates really want to wrestle with to the center of the national conversation.

Lots of people are being hurt by the emerging recession--people whose homes are being foreclosed, people who are being laid off, people who can't find a job--but for the most part their pain is private, and their efforts to seek solutions or answers tend to also remain private, even in the age of what writer Clay Shirky has aptly called "ridiculously easy group formation." By contrast, truckers have always been uniquely well connected to each other, via old-fashioned CB radio technology. But now the Internet may add a powerful boost to their nascent calls for a social response to economic pain.

Go read British Cabinet Officer Tom Watson's speech on the "Power of information" and imagine a Member of Congress making a similar speech on how technology can radically reinvent government. Imagine one of our presidential candidates making it (even Barack Obama, who has done the most thinking on this topic.) You can't. But maybe, if we pay more attention to our cousins across the pond, soon someone will.

Five years ago, Watson was one of the first MPs to blog, and notes that even though it opened him up to daily abuse, "the blog broke down the walls between legislators and electors in a way that interested me. So I persevered." Now he says, "I believe in the power of mass collaboration.... I believe that the old hierarchies in which government policy is made are going to change for ever."