When then-Governor Howard Dean used the Internet to boost his fundraising, many other political animals looked at the web as another tool to bring in the money. They were using it as a one-way street, a tool for their immediate needs. But they were using it in a controlled, focused way to achieve a conventional goal, getting money.

Senator Barack Obama’s approach to the Internet was a step in a different direction. Sure, the campaign used the Internet as a way to reach out and bring in contributions, but they changed things and made it more of a two-way street, by providing more links to social media. They involved themselves in the fabric of the web more than other candidates. Mr. Obama (OK, his staff) twittered and blogged and YouTubed.

The money machine was still there and the candidate’s website was a holding area for position statements and policy pronouncements in a brochure-ware way, but the new social constructs of the web were also used. Mr. Obama spoke about a technology czar type of position within the government in recognition that this series of tubes we call home could make a difference.

But how? That’s the question? Can the Internet be used by regular citizens, corporations, and non-governmental agencies as a way of finding solutions to the problems and issues that we face? Sure, it can. Will we get a lot of spam with it? Oh, yeah! Big time spam and vile comments by whack jobs from every spectrum of the landscape will abound. Already the new administration has mentioned things like live feeds of cabinet meetings and job applicants are having to, gasp, apply online rather than having someone who knows someone else talk to someone else on the transition team.

Open source government has the opportunity of providing we the people more opportunity to exercise our voices and provide our inputs. The Obama campaign succeeded in involving people up even to the point that the same people who add their cell numbers to Do not call lists were signing up for campaign text messages.

But the new job as president will change things as well. Mr. Obama can’t just send messages out any more to only those people who texted him – he’s president of everybody now, not just those people. And there are Federal disclosure laws that say piece of correspondence is now handled differently, including his crackberry and his IMs. They are now covered by the Freedom of Information Act. The “U R SO LAME, ASOL”  text message President Obama just sent Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel is now public information. I hope so. After all, those people appear human, maybe they actually are.

Technology provides the means for a level of transparency and openness to the workings and deliberations  in government that we have never seen. This will lead to a radical shift of how politics works (if not right away, eventually it will happen) on a national level. It has the potential to kill off much of the sordid side of politics. Neither mold nor corruption can survive the light of day. Can you visualize a budget process wiki where individual aspects of budgets are debated and analyzed? Or a site where everyone gets to vote on an issue, like closing the Guantanamo Bay prison?

Why, it could even bring honest Democrats out of the shadows and back into state government. Now, that’s crazy talk.