Dear Mr. President

E-President:  Xplanations by Xplane

First, a word on where we are today. I'm sure you've noticed that WhiteHouse.gov isn't exactly brimming with Web 2.0 community-enabled features. The last user question posted to the "White House Interactive" section dates from March 2007 and could be answered in about a tenth of a second on Google ("George W. Bush is what number as president of the U.S.?"). Still, the federal government has made a significant IT push in recent years.

The E-Government Act of 2002 set the stage for the most significant developments, by calling for a set of standards and a public directory for government-agency Web sites, and pushing agencies to post proposed rules and take public comments online.

These are worthy initiatives, and they've made life easier for many of us; we enjoy the benefits of having more government services online when we pay our taxes electronically, download passport forms, or sign up for the national Do Not Call registry. But much of what has been done so far has amounted to little more than digitizing paper, or "dragging the file cabinet into cyberspace," in the words of New York Law School professor and political-technology pioneer Beth Noveck.

To make matters worse, much of the information that's been posted is very difficult to access, and even harder to search. Congressional votes, for example, are available online, but there's no simple way to search government Web sites for a given lawmaker's personal record. Imagine a voter in Ohio last week who hadn't yet decided whether to vote for you, in part because she didn't know your full record on, say, reducing gas prices. She might have tried to check how you voted on every energy bill that came before the Senate. But to get that information from the government, she would have had to click through literally hundreds of Web pages, scanning for your name.

I hate to say it, but some of our friends in Europe are already ahead of us in experimenting with Web-enabled government. The supposedly stuffy Brits have set up YouTube and Flickr streams for their prime minister (a riveting Twitter feed gives updates on his meetings with foreign dignitaries). And for two years now, 10 Downing Street has hosted a platform for citizen-government interactions called E-Petitions.

It's just the kind of interactive government initiative that gets talked up so often in the media. E-Petitions allows anyone to post or sign a petition to the government, and the ones that get the most support online receive a response from the prime minister's office.

The E-Petitions site appeals to a simple and powerful notion about how the Internet might broaden involvement in government: Let the public talk to you. This may gibe with the efforts of many lawmakers to host interactive chats and the like, but in many crucial respects, it's still woefully old-school. Visionaries for Web-enabled government see the British site as more of a PR machine than a vehicle for truly innovative change. Sure, the government provides written responses for the most popular petitions, but these appear to be more like canned media statements than genuine attempts to engage the public. In some respects, the site functions as "brochure-ware," another venue for messaging from on high.