(Cross posted at Gather)

As I as driving home from the store this afternoon, I heard an interesting juxtaposition on the NPR show, On the Media. I tuned in during their interview with Zephyr Teachout, director of the Sunlight Foundation. The Sunlight Foundation has been working with a lot of really interesting projects such as The Punch Clock Campaign, which is encouraging elected officials to post their daily schedule online, and Congresspedia. I’ve been told they are also helping fund ReadtheBill.

Key messages of the interview were about the importance of strengthening the relationship between citizens and their representatives and changing the behavior of citizens to get involved in political life in more ways than just voting.

I became friends with Zephyr back when she was working on Gov. Dean’s 2004 presidential bid. The idea of increasing citizen involvement has been a consistent through line in her work.

I was struck by the article that On the Media followed this with. The rise and fall of YouTube sensation, lonelygirl15 was discussed. They spoke of lonelygirl as participatory art and interviewed an expert in collaborative play. Complaints about the whole lonelygirl experiment were that it wasn’t transparent enough, it wasn’t authentic about its inauthenticity, and perhaps most interestingly, that it never gave the public a chance to fully and actively participate in the game.

When you bring the two articles together, they make particular sense. Our government hasn’t been giving the public a chance to actively participate in the game of politics. It has become too much of a big money, lobbyist, inside Washington incumbents’ game. It isn’t transparent enough. It isn’t authentic enough.

The Punch Clock Campaign is a great start, but is it enough? Back in May, Tom Watson wrote about Ned Lamont as the YouTube Senator, in part because of the great success of the Ned Lamont group there. Senator Edwards’ leadership PAC has a videoblog. Yet these are all campaigning, and not governance.

When I worked as Blogmaster for the John DeStefano campaign, people would ask him, and me, if he would have a blog if he gets elected Governor. We both said we hoped so. But perhaps, that isn’t enough anymore. Who will really be the first YouTube Senator? SenLamont? Not only putting his daily schedule online, but also posting a personal videoblog about what went on in the Senate? How about the first YouTube President? Prez44? Talking about what has gone on in the Rose Garden and the Oval Office the way lonelygirl15 talked about the hike she went on?

As a side note, I did write a blog post, Like Joe is so Emo, talking about the video Hope is Emo, and thinking about Sen. Lieberman in the context of YouTube culture.

Perhaps, if we get elected officials communicating with the electorate via something like YouTube, we can give the public a chance to actively participate in the game of our governance in a way that no one yet has imagined. I think this would be a wonderful thing.

Full disclosure: I was BlogMaster for the DeStefano campaign in 2005. During 2006, I have been working with the Lamont campaign as Technology coordinator. I have been in discussions with people close to Sen. Edwards about possibly working with his campaign in the event that Sen. Edwards decides to run for President in 2008, and I’ll be speaking on a panel with Zephyr on Oct 7th at the Action Coalition for Media Education conference in Burlington, VT.