From the great state of California, land of innovation, comes WikiMeg, a crowdsourced repository a la Wikipedia for the collected wisdom and opposition research on the 30-year career of Meg Whitman, a former eBay executive who is now a Republican candidate for governor. The site's creators, the Democratic coalition group Level the Playing Field 2010 -- an outfit affiliated with nurses' and teachers' unions -- call the project "a bold new experiment in democracy," and the site's tag line emphasizes its collaborative bent, call it "a place to discover and share information on billionaire CA candidate Meg Whitman." The San Francisco Chronicle's Joe Garofoli reports on the project:

Wikimeg.com invites the rest of the world to shake the bushes for information about Whitman and enables their new research assistants to post the results on the Internet, Wikipedia-style. But this self-described "experiment in community research and information gathering" comes with potential risks in how that information is vetted.

WikiMeg.com launched this morning. The only substantive section thus far is one on her use of two eBay corporate jets. There's a placeholder for information on "Meg Sightings," too.

The Whitman oppo wiki might be a first for a political campaign, but Organizing for America recently launched something similar with its "Groundswell" project to crowdsource organize efforts amongst volunteers.

I suggested to Garofoli when we spoke for his piece that, in my opinion, that a wiki-fied opposition site on a political candidate like this would probably benefit from requiring that contributors stick to the Wikipedia rules that have somehow made that repository of the world's knowledge into a resource that is generally speaking fairly unbiased. (It also probably marks the first time I've used the word "slime" in conversation.) A big rule: contributors aren't asked for original reporting. Instead, references must be linked to another published source. WikiMeg has adopted the same spirit, though first-hand reports aren't out-and-out banned. Read the rules, "Be factual and always hyperlink to your source. If you are the source of first-hand information, say who you are and how you know what you know."

It's easy to see how something like WikiMeg could descend into mean-spirited chaos, or fall apart as a gimmick. But there's also a chance that this could be a valuable opposition research tool -- particularly since, as contacts in California suggest, Democratic candidate Jerry Brown is known for running particularly parsimonious campaigns. The people's oppo might form of bulk of the challenger-vetting that first-time candidate Whitman gets. And all available reporting suggests that, for example, it's far more of a vetting than the McCain campaign gave to Sarah Palin. So it might not be such a bad thing for the state of the political debate.

Credit: Organizing for America

Conservative dominance of the airwaves is taken as an article of faith, but Organizing for America is rolling out a new project that intends to equip progressives with the tools to get their voices heard on talk radio. They're calling it "On the Air."

The way is works is that supporters are prompted with the call-in number for a talk radio show that discusses political topics and the option to to listen to the show live. When the timing's right, the volunteer can call the number provided. Importantly, OFA's troops are asked to report back on whether they got on air, and how the call went.

Credit:Organizing for America

On the Air is a shiny new tool, no doubt. But what might be more important for the long-term prospects of Organizing for America -- and its ability to provide back-up to Obama's agenda -- is how On the Air was engineered in the first place.

Organizers say that when they began the radio project, they found that there was no one good database of call-in numbers for the many talk radio shows that dot the United States.

So OFA built a program, called Groundswell, that slices up certain organizational tasks into discrete bits that can be accomplished by individuals but add up to a substantial effort, a la the crowdsourcing efforts of Pro Publica's distributed Reporting Network.

The benefit for volunteers is that it gives them achievable, tangible tasks to do that fit into the nooks and crannies of their day to day lives. The benefit for OFA is that they get buy in to the organization's missing that also has the effect of multiplying the organizing efforts that those on the Democratic National Committee's payroll might hope to achieve.

Organizing for America's new media director Natalie Foster says that both On the Air and Groundswell are part of a drive within Organizing for America to encourage experimentation and creativity amongst staff, particularly those staff with the programming chops to pull something like this off.

The projects, says Foster, "demonstrate what’s great about the 'labs' concept, and having software engineers embedded with our New Media team. Building out the DNC/OFA Innovation Labs was an early decision last year, and Nathan Woodhull does a great job leading that team."

Reflections upon the Obama campaign's design work? A crowdsourced fundraising effort? Total techPres bait, but Obama campaign design director Scott Thomas is involved in an intriguing quest. Wanting to chronicle the art and design that both was created by the Obama for America campaign and developed organically by supporters, but to put out a book with considerable production values, Thomas decided to avoid traditional publisher, go DIY, and fundraise himself for the production of Designing Obama -- using Kickstarter, what Thomas calls an "Obama-like fundraising model."

The finished product is set to come in an 360-pages of hard-bound art and commentary.

Think few people would prepay $10 for a digital version, or $50 or more for a print version of a book they haven't seen yet? With 13 days to go, 883 backers have contributed $57,000 of the $65,000 target Thomas set for the first run of the book.

As Republicans and Democrats put away their differences last week to sign off on legislation that would pulling federal funding from ACORN in the wake of a disturbing series of video tapes, you have to wonder how many of the 173 folks on the right side of the aisle and 172 on the left actually read the text of the so-called Defund ACORN Act.

That's because it doesn't take a legislative genius to see that H.R. 3571, as written, would actually defund far more than the targeted community organizing group. The Defund ACORN Act's net scoops up, among other entities, "Any organization that has filed a fraudulent form with any Federal or State regulatory agency." Representative Alan Grayson, Democrat of Florida, reads that provision to include the fraud-committing federal defense contractors whom he has been investigating since taking office -- and he'd like to put their names in the Congressional Record.

The thing is, as a freshman member of the House, Grayson has a tiny staff. So he's looking for backup. Grayson's office has set up a quick and dirty Google Spreadsheet and is asking for help identifying and documenting the misbehaving contractors inadvertently covered by the Defund ACORN Act...

PdF friend Seth Godin has a great post up today, which he calls "The Problem With Non." It's a cri-de-couer aimed at the people who create and run non-profit organizations, especially those who imagine that they are about making change. He starts with this:

"The problem facing your group, ironically, is the resistance to the very thing you are setting out to do. Non-profits, in my experience, abhor change." More below...

Here's an interesting project out of the U.K., and a noteworthy result. The Straight Choice bills itself as a "Live Election Leaflet Monitoring Project," and serves as a hub for fliers being distributed around elections there. "Election leaflets are one of the main weapons in the fight for votes in the UK," explains the site. "They are targeted, effective and sometimes very bitter. We need your help to photograph and map them so we can keep an eye on what the parties are up to, and try to keep them honest." Mailers are uploaded to the site, and organized by subject matter or as the product of one of more than 300 (!) political parties. The public is then invited to give them a thorough vetting.

And the site has now been used to uncover some awkward stock photo usage by the far-right British National Party. "I’m voting BNP because I see what immigration has done to the NHS," says one doctor in one flier. But rather than being a real live BNP voter, the doctor pictured turns out to be a stock photograph sold on iStockPhoto under the name "Caring Health Care Professional."

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.

Micah has been calling our attention to the idea that without actually dropping the catchphrase "crowdsourcing," Barack Obama has been tipping his hat to the notion in his framing of his economic stimulus package -- particularly in his promotion of the promised Recovery.gov oversight site. Well, it seems like someone else has been reading James Surowiecki. Add New York's Mark Green, running for a second, non-contiguous term as public advocate, to the list of politicians who see some currency in Internet-driven participatory politics. Green in his new "Letter to New Yorkers" video announcing his run:

In this interconnected, web-based world, no one of us can be as smart as all of us. So please, come to MarkGreen.com and send me what you think are the key problems and the key solutions, so then I can learn as I campaign.

(Disclosure: Green was, for a short time back in 2007, my boss.)

Check out this report from Clint Hendler of CJR.org, who is tracking President Obama's comments at today's town-hall meeting in Elkhart, Indiana. He quotes Obama describing Recovery.gov in the following way:

“We’re actually going to set up something called Recovery.gov—this is going to be a special website we set up, that gives you a report on where the money is going in your community, how it’s being spent, how many jobs it’s being created so that all of you can be the eyes and ears. And if you see that a project is not working the way it’s supposed to, you’ll be able to get on that website and say, ‘You know, I thought this was supposed to be going to school construction but I haven’t noticed any changes being made.’ And that will help us track how this money is being spent....The key is that we’re going to have strong oversight and strong transparency to make sure this money isn’t being wasted.”

This could be pretty disruptive, the more you think about it...