"Obama's Internet Adventure: Revenge of the Nerds"?

An article today in the NY Observer has a lot of good info regarding the emerging use of Net tech in the Obama administration. The idea is to enable real networked grassroots democracy.

Talk about revenge of the nerds! If President-elect Barack Obama actually fulfills his promises to bring the White House into the Web world, the techiest among us may have the loudest voices of all when it comes to influencing our government.

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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.

Andrew and Micah are doing a lot of big work, but speaking as a total nerd, well, their social skills are too good. Maybe one might consider them in a closely related tribe, the wonks.