By the end of today, the Bush administration will have published a flood of new regulations, pushing them into the 60-day pipeline that gets them enacted just before the Obama administration takes office. The blowback on these “midnight regulations” centers on the minimal opportunity for the public to review and provide input into the process. The speed with which these rules have been shoved through mocks public participation: the Interior Department reportedly had 15 experts, in 32 hours, filter over 200,000 comments on proposed relaxation of the Endangered Species Act. Unsurprisingly, the final rules are little-changed from the original proposal.

Can new technologies, and new techniques for applying technology, address this problem?

It featured minimal graphics, no sound effects, and deeply flawed gameplay. Yet one of the most important game titles of 2008 was played by thousands and helped change the face of American politics. That game was My.BarackObama.com.

"Yes we can," as an election slogan, implies a relatively simple mission: get more people to cast a ballot for your candidate than for the other one. But as Barack Obama’s creed pivots from a battle cry to a governing philosophy, what, exactly, “we can” becomes a much larger and more complex matter. So, too, is the potential role technology can play in an Obama administration.

In this series of essays I’ll look at how Obama’s new CTO might transform American democracy in three areas: civic engagement, administrative transparency, and legislative advocacy.

The morning of November 4, 2008 found me — like thousands of others all across the nation — rushing from door to door the final phase of the get-out-the-vote (GOTV) effort. In those pre-dawn hours in rural New Hampshire, the fate of the election came down to the mundane work of footsoldiers armed with low-tech (yet high-gloss) door hangers and paper walksheets. But only this literal last mile was low-tech. Everything leading up to this moment was built on a solid, database-driven foundation. And so it’s easy to imagine how the mechanics of campaigning might evolve over the next four years.

Watching the Obama campaign message, "Yes we can," morph into a music video and then once again into a user-generated participatory project is to see the beginnings of Web Politics 2.0.