Speaking of Facebook, Micah Sifry and Andrew Rasiej, co-founders of New York–based Personal Democracy Forum, a daily Web site and annual conference on how technology is changing politics, and the brains behind techPresident.com, are pushing for a very Facebook-like idea for Obama’s whitehouse.gov site. Your profile, automatically created at age 18, would display your voting district and connect to local representatives. A news feed would announce public hearings, new YouTube videos of the president’s weekly address, and updates on specific issues you care about. “Sky’s the limit,” said Mr. Sifry.

They hope Mr. Obama can convince the public to channel the energy wasted on inconsequential Internet tendencies into getting involved in government. “The thing with Obama is his idea of the audacity of hope,” said Mr. Rasiej. “He has the audacity to think that .gov could be just as important as .com.”

It’s true that during his campaign, Mr. Obama proposed creating a more open, transparent government with Web tools. He promised online videos of previously closed-door meetings (exciting! move over, C-Span!); searchable databases on lobbying reports, ethics records and campaign finance filings; and a platform for public comment on bills he’s about to sign into law. His new media team is already experimenting with these ideas at change.gov.

Late last month, for example, they added a “Join the Discussion” feature, which allowed people to comment on the issues deemed most important by Mr. Obama, like the economy and health care. The forthcoming Health and Human Services secretary, Tom Daschle, looking professorial in his round, Sally Jessy Raphael red glasses, responded directly to about three of the more than 3,500 comments, via a video posted on Dec. 2. In the clip, he noted points about cost reduction and preventative care, and even seemed slightly affected by one story of struggle. “It was stories like that, probably more than all the factual information, that really moved you to want to act,” he said. Mr. Daschle insisted that he will be taking ideas from the comments, but he didn’t give specifics. Plus, the video has the look and feel of a scripted infomercial, rather than a useful document for the transition team. But … Mr. Obama’s people are listening, and maybe that’s what counts.

Just last week, on Dec. 5, transition project co-chair John Podesta announced a “Your Seat at the Table” transparency project, which will take all the written recommendations and policy documents generated from official meetings with outside organizations—from lobbying groups to think tanks—and publish them on change.gov, along with room for public comment. “Moving Toward a 21st Century Right-to-Know Agenda,” a 112-page policy recommendation document compiled by more than 65 groups and hundreds of tech-savvy individuals, was one of the first documents posted for review.

But future plans for whitehouse.gov, and how the civic-minded among us can use it, remain uncertain. As former Bush adviser Karl Rove recently pointed out in The Wall Street Journal, it’s not clear how he can legally use his database of campaign supporters, which includes 13 million email addresses and two million profiles created at his campaign home page.

“There are statutory prohibitions on the White House from using tax dollars to directly lobby Congress by unleashing emails, calls and visits. That’s up to outside groups to do,” he wrote. “Such strong-arming irritates allies, infuriates fence sitters, and enrages opponents in Congress. Lawmakers dislike grassroots lobbying by those representing people in their states or districts. They’ll be livid if the White House facilitates it.”

But who’s to say Mr. Obama needs any help from his former campaign supporters? He’s already building a new network of citizens on change.gov. It’s Obama’s Web 2.0.

STILL, THE OBAMA CAMP is perplexed about the possibilities. This past weekend, hundreds of his staffers and volunteers huddled in a Chicago hotel to draw up a plan for the network. As of press time, nothing specific had been announced (UPDATE: Although some ideas are leaking out). Perhaps they could use a few more ideas? Tech enthusiasts from Craig Newmark of Craigslist.org to Net rights warrior Lawrence Lessig have a few.

“I think what people really want is to know that they’re going to be able to take the resources and be able to do other things with it,” Mr. Lessig told The Observer by phone.

Mr. Lessig, the Stanford professor, voracious defender of Net values and author of the recently published Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy, advocated for one of change.gov’s most recent policies. Last week, Mr. Obama’s new-media team dropped their “All Rights Reserved” notice and copyrighted the site’s content under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License, which allows users to copy, distribute, display and perform material from the site (in other words, remix it) as long as the work is attributed to its source.

Mr. Lessig also wants to make sure that whatever whitehouse.gov turns out to be, it’s not controlled by one entity, “you know, the Googles or YouTubes of the world,” he explained.

“The fear is that people think that the campaign thinks they have the formula,” he added. “And the formula was, a proprietary software company Blue State Digital, writing software that kept everybody inside the walled garden of BarackObama.com. … The thing they need to think about is how they’re going to create a kind of participation that’s going to earn them respect, even if it doesn’t give them a perfect opportunity to control every turn of the news cycle.”

Mr. Lessig, along with Mr. Sifry and other Silicon Valley icons including Tim O’Reilly, signed a proposal for “open transition principles” to guide Mr. Obama’s new-media team. Change.gov’s policy section was removed without notice just days after the site went live. It later returned with watered-down language, and bashes on the Bush administration for being “one of the most secretive, closed administrations in American history” had disappeared. On his blog, Mr. O’Reilly recommended that change.gov use “revision control,” a kind of online notification system, so the public will to be able to see when government documents and policies are changed.

Mr. Lessig suggested to The Observer that MixedInk.com would be a useful tool to do just that. MixedInk is a free, collaborative online writing tool that’s a cross between a wiki and Digg.com. Anybody can add or revise a document, but changes get ranked by the community, and the ones with the most votes get filtered to the top. “It’s a collaborative environment where people can begin to work out what a solution is, and that becomes a compelling part of what this participation could be,” Mr. Lessig said.

Has your head exploded yet? We warned you: revenge of the nerds.

Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist.org, who stumped for Mr. Obama during the campaign, suggested that there could be a “Craigslist for service” on the site. “A lot of people have lots of time and energy, a lot of people have no time but a few extra dollars,” Mr. Newmark said by phone from San Francisco last week. He said Mr. Obama’s Web site could help people find a way to serve in their local communities—whether it’s job postings for teachers and volunteer firefighters—or just link to outside sites where people can donate a little cash on donorschoose.org or kiva.org, which allows lenders to give money to entrepreneurs in developing countries.

“There’s another big kind of service that I think is important, and that’s getting involved in grass-roots politics. That may mean going to the PTA, it may mean going to city council meetings, it may just mean getting started out in an area like green technology or health care or Internet technology and getting involved. All of these things are really important.”

Charlie O’Donnell, an entrepreneur in New York and CEO of Path101, had a similar idea. On his blog, titled This Is Going to Be Big, he suggested that the White House’s site become an online hub for community organizing by integrating applications from sites like Meetup.com, which helps organizers create community; GetSatisfaction.com, a site where users can complain to real company employees and other customers and answer questions about services; and Outside.in, a network of localized news sites written by community members.

Nancy Scola, Mr. Sifry’s colleague, as associate editor at techPresident.com, said Whitehouse.gov should have some kind of trickle-down effect for the rest of the government. “The White House isn’t Obama’s only domain,” she said. “He has agencies, a lot of smart people, that can integrate these Web policies between the entire executive branch, which he can get done from the get-go by making them mandatory.”

Ms. Scola added that Mr. Obama will have to get more than the tech-minded and the young to log on. Sure, the post-college somethings will sign on to a Facebook-like whitehouse.gov, but what about grandma and grandpa? Ms. Scola said Mr. Obama can do that by making good on his promises to upgrade broadband connections to the Internet in communities across the country and use modern technology and social networking tools to facilitate offline meetings. But how will the old folks know about these offline meetings if they don’t know how to get online in the first place? Should he create a volunteer corps to help Grammie on the Internet? (Or maybe they should just stick to the landlines: Old people are already pretty powerful as the No. 1 bracket in voting demographics. Things seem to be working just fine.)

Mr. Newmark smartly noted that however exciting a prospect it is to have the White House in our houses, Mr. Obama will be under a lot more pressure to deal with issues like the economy and Iraq rather than bringing the government into the digital age.

Mr. Lessig was also pragmatic. “The problem is that the DNA of Washington and the DNA of the White House completely contradicts this idea” of a Web-fueled democracy, Mr. Lessig said. “They want to manage and control message and agenda and access to certain kinds of information. And so, that’s why a lot of people are skeptical that this can be achieved. But in this moment of good faith people believe that what is going on is people are trying to get it right.”

Mr. Sifry of techPresident.com seems hopeful. “It would be some kind of top-down stupidity to say, we’re not going to let people connect, we’re not going to allow people to comment anymore,” he said. “But it’s a double-edged sword because they’re connecting to each other and commenting and if the administration falls short, they’re supercharging the super volunteers who can really make change and influence people.

“The government actually needs people pushing and catching them,” he added.

In his recent interview with ABC’s Barbara Walters, Mr. Obama seemed to agree: “I, you know, one of the things that I’m going to have to work through is how to break through the isolation—the bubble that exists around the president,” he said. “I’m negotiating to figure out how can I get information from outside of the 10 or 12 people who surround my office in the White House. Because, one of the worst things I think that could happen to a president is losing touch with what people are going through day to day.” He can certainly do that with something like Facebook for his home page.

greagan@observer.com