If you've heard of Tim Walz, and you're not a Minnesotan, there's a good chance that it's because he's the geography teacher-turned-member of Congress whose class experiment seemed to predict the Rwandan genocide.

Now Walz is putting a little bit of that creativity and collaborative thinking to work on Capitol Hill. Last Friday, Walz, who represents Minnesota's 1st District as a member of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, posted online the 98 different applications for earmarks received by his office.

For one week, he's asking the people of his district to help him vet the applications, running the gamut from a "new aerial port facility" for the 934th Airlift Wing, worth $7.7 million, to half a million dollars for dental care for the underserved and uninsured people of southern Minnesota. He's asking that they judge the projects based on accountability, impact, and the level of public support they would receive.

"We cannot fund all of these projects," reads a Walz press release, "so I am counting on southern Minnesotans to take some ownership of the important decisions I will soon be making on their behalf."

Credit: GRITtv

Yesterday's episode of Laura Flanders' daily GRITtv program was on the topic of whether or not the United States Senate has outlived its usefulness, and whether it should be done away with like past American traditions like powered wigs and shooting squads. Discussing the topic was the New Yorker's legendary political writer Rick Hertzberg, Harvard and Change Congress' Larry Lessig, and your humble writer who focused on the possible grassroots aspects of the topic. It was exciting to discuss the prospect of blowing up the Senate, figuratively speaking of course -- not because it's a good idea on its own merits, necessarily, but because it speaks to a bigger conversation about Americans approaching their institutions of government not as reverent, impotent observers of a stage play about nation governing that has gone on for more than a 200 years, but as tinkerers. Open-sourcers. People who see the world as it is and say, "hmm, well why not something else?"

And as a former congressional staffer, I have to admit that that sort of talk is thrilling, naughty even, and downright exhilarating. (Though the fact that my place of employ was the House might have something to do with the charge it gives me to think about overhauling that other chamber on the other side of the hill.)

If you'd like to watch video if that discussion, it's over here. But there was one exchange about how changing Congress could come about, in some small way, through, yes, congressional staffers that I'd like to highlight here...

Credit: Gregory Skibinski

Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer is blogging out the White House's anger over the news that Republican Sen. Richard Shelby has signaled a hold on 70 or so of President Obama's nominees as he seeks to get favorable treatment on some projects in his home of Alabama. In case you're not sure about how Pfeiffer feels about Shelby's behavior, how post on WhiteHouse.gov is titled, "Another Day, Another Disappointing Political Ploy Obstructing Progress."

That the Obama White House is wielding its official blog to directly and pointedly challenge (in)action in the Senate is interesting enough. But the Shelby hold episode might suggest a "what if?" question of interest to us digital politics geeks here. Namely, what other Internet assets might a White House and its allies have in a political situation like this? Or to put it another way, is anything different about the calculus of an entrenched practice like a Senate hold in the age of Twitter and Facebook and Google Groups and the rest?...

Several House websites were hacked during last night's State of the Union, replacing the congresspeople's home pages with anti-Obama screeds. A Hill contact points out that among the targets was Joe "You Lie" Wilson. Which makes sense. Because he's such a big Obama fan.

The congressional homepages were replaced with a single line of text reading, "F___ OBAMA!! Red Eye CREW !!!!! O RESTO E HACKER !!! by m4V3RiCk ; HADES ; T4ph0d4 -- FROM BRASIL." (That's been cleaned up slightly, since this is a family blog.) Some of the defacements were still visible this morning.

One observer says that the commonality between the few dozen effected sites is that they all run on Joomla.

With the dustup between China and Google, and the related attacks on more than two dozen American companies, cybersecurity has already been in the spotlight of late.

The word came via email on Monday that Danny Glover, a veteran editor with National Journal and other publications, had taken over the editor's role at Capitol Hill Tweet Watch Report. The Tweet Watch Report was itself launched by techPres contributor David All's David All Group early last month, a daily email tracking what members of Congress, members of the press, and other relevant people are saying and doing on Twitter.

Glover's new gig is an interesting little mix of the state of modern journalism, new media, and old school politics, and so I asked him to walk me through his vision for the product. With the caveat that he's only been on the job three days now, Glover says he sees Capitol Hill Tweet Watch Report as having a two-pronged goal. The first is providing those people working in and around Congress with an easy way to get a sense of what's going down on Twitter, much in the way that The Hotline's Blogometer tracks what's being said on blogs. "I look at it as a news barometer of what people on Capitol Hill care about, what they're watching, what they think is important," he says. "Members of Congress and their staff need to be informed, at a minimum. Even if they don't use Twitter themselves, they need to be aware of what people are saying." The second, though, is to increase the pool of those on the Hill using Twitter by encouraging non-adopter members and staffers to model their tweeting colleagues...

As a friend on Capitol Hill pointed out to me yesterday, even the Congressional Bourbon Caucus has an issue to rally around. It's not a drinking club -- they're committed to protecting and promoting the production of that wonderfully delicious elixir. (Your country thanks you.) A similar thing can be said of the African Great Lakes Caucus, the Parkinson's Disease Caucus, the Shellfish Caucus -- even the Congressional Baby Caucus (seriously), which is of course united by their great love for all things baby. (The full and rather varied list of House caucuses is here.)

But as the Republican New Media Caucus and the new Joe Sestak-led Congressional Caucus on Blogging and New Media take their tentative first steps, the important open question is becoming whether these members of Congress appreciate that there are, indeed, real policy and political issues at stake. Getting more members of Congress tweeting away is one thing. But there's a bigger opportunity that these "new media" caucuses can seize. That's re-architecting the political process in ways that expand the participation of the citizenry and empower voters with greater knowledge of what Congress is up to, even and perhaps especially when it becomes politically uncomfortable to do so.

As things stand, though, these caucuses look a lot like self-involved efforts to upgrade the messaging operations of Hill staff...

At Beth Noveck's event for her new book "Wiki Government" this afternoon in Rockefeller Plaza (write-up forthcoming), the deputy U.S. CTO for open government touched on an intriguing project called Aristotle, a new social networking experiment from the Defense Department. The White House Open Government Initiative describes Aristotle as "a social networking system that provides government and contractor personnel with transparent, but appropriate, access to information regarding tens of thousands of science and technology projects, topics of interest, and collegial networks." After a small pilot launch, Aristotle is being rolled out to 200,000 DOD personnel and contractors this summer. If you're interested in how we can build small but powerful networks of experts in a field to the end of creating better government, this is one project to keep track on.

Also just launched: National Journal's new 3121 project, described by the organization as "a first-of-its-kind network, directory & collaboration tool for people on the Hill." But why's it called 3121? Go ahead and guess. I'll drop the answer in the comments.

Are we quickly nearing the day when reporting on technology and politics becomes simply, you know, reporting on politics? The horror! But you can't open a newspaper know without reading about how Congressman Jones going straight to constituents using this newfangled thing called the Twitter. Case in point: this Time Magazine by Jay Newton-Small rounding up who's tweeting what on Capitol Hill. For what it's worth, Pete Hoekstra isn't making any apologies for all that posting to Twitter while on a codel in Baghdad. And if the thrill has worn off of Claire McCaskill's refreshingly honest and slightly zany tweets, might we suggest a new senatorial tweeter: Iowa's Chuck Grassley. It seems to be Grassley, all right. A staffer couldn't get away with "On way bk to frigid waterloo. Will my car start at airport." Fully spelled-out words and correct punctuation are about as common in Grassley's Twitter stream as an ethanol-hating politician is in Des Moines.

It was the sweltering late summer, 2007, in Washington DC. The House of Representatives was smack in the middle of debate over the controversial Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. And members of Congress, expected to render judgment on legislation that would fundamentally impact core America rights, hadn't laid eyes upon the latest copy of the bill. It's "just absolute lunacy," said California Republican David Dreir of the situation at the time...On the point above, one of the fundamental questions of our time is this: how do we use all the government information the Internet might set free for public good? An open debate over that question is now taking place on the Google Group of the Sunlight Foundation's nascent Open Senate Project...The latest email from Obama campaign manager David Plouffe announcing the selection of the incoming administration's national security and foreign policy team includes a big ol' red button asking for contributions...and much more.

Some netrooters have launched a campaign to push retired General Wes Clark for the Dem VP spot; Capitol Hill is all abuzz with an on-going Republican protest that's being live-Twittered/Qikked/blogged; the hashing over of John McCain's tech-savvy continues; Germans are checking out McCain's "Celeb" ad, but they might not be enjoying it; and so much more that it would take a dozen tweets and three Qik accounts to contain it all.