David Bollier, after describing current plans of the Obama team, calls for taking up the unique opportunity of designing and mobilising a powerful social change movement.

Excerpt:

“The Obama White House has other options. It could set up an affiliated nonprofit that would “geo-target” its supporters to solicit donations to political allies. It could run ads alongside online news articles in the style of Google ads. It could use personal information about citizen’s interests to target niche groups of citizens in order to galvanize their support for a given issue.

These are both exciting and ominous developments. Exciting, because they offer new ways for a sitting President to advance his legislative agenda and to influence public opinion. Ominous, because they could be used to manipulate the formation of public opinion and political action in more powerful ways than we have ever seen, to the exclusion of worthy alternatives.

There is a long tradition of political parties using technological innovation to secure new political advantages. Think how Richard Viguerie brilliantly used computerized mailing lists to invent direct mail fundraising in the 1970s. This innovation helped create what was then called the New Right. Building on the brilliant Web 2.0 innovations developed during his campaign, Obama’s new socio-technological infrastructure could reinvent political leadership and citizenship in one fell swoop.

If taken to new levels of refinement, and applied to the challenge of governing – and not just fundraising and volunteering – the Obama administration may not only fortify its political game, it could dominate national politics for years to come. In the tech world, the “first mover” – the one who gets into the new technology first and thereby learns how to exploit it best – tends to dominate that market sector. Anyone wishing to start up a business today to compete with Google, Amazon or eBay can forget it.

One can imagine that the Obama tech advantage could become so overwhelming – millions of names, lots of personalized data, sophisticated networking tools – that few newcomers would be able to rival it. At this moment of triumph against the dark Bush years, a time of justifiable celebration, it may seem ill-tempered to entertain such possibiities. The administration that has not even taken office, for godsake.

But as any software designer knows, the early decisions can have far-reaching ramifications. The “political architecture” of the new White House digital communications apparatus could have significant implications for how millions of Obama supporters will engage with the administration and government.

If done right, the Obama it could unleash an open-source renaissance of citizenship – a new participatory arena for all Americans to engage with their government, collaborate with their fellow citizens, volunteer in their communities and incubate new ideas. Or the Obama White House could give us a more closed, walled-garden of control – a place that enables modest citizen participation and debate, but really is more intent on projecting its own top-down messages as powerfully as possible – and on containing dissent.

The Web 2.0 universe is still new enough that it is not clear exactly how the White House should proceed. But we do know enough about open platforms and open source software – not to mention the value of the First Amendment – to know that President Obama will be best-served by hosting a Web system that is as open and participatory as possible. Reinvigorating genuine citizenship in the Internet age may be the only thing that can prevent another recurrence of the Bush years.

Let’s start by codifying net neutrality for the Internet and imposing other safeguards to assure that citizens will retain their sovereignty on the Internet. And then let’s invent new forms of open citizen engagement with elected leaders and government. Now is a great time to inaugurate a new paradigm of citizenship. “