Wake up America!!!

Hey, Web 2.0! Election Day is Nov. 7, and your country needs you.

At BarCamp, SuperHappyDevHouse, NetSquared and other hacker get-togethers, scores of entrepreneurs and engineers arrive eager to collaborate, make information easier to share and use, and mobilize groups for effective action.

Though it may not be obvious, the road marks in this amorphous thing called Web 2.0 are political: grassroots participation, forging new connections, and empowering from the ground up. The ideal democratic process is participatory and the Web 2.0 phenomenon is about democratizing digital technology.

There's never been a better time to tap that technological ethic to re-democratize our democracy.

Many Americans believe that our political system is broken, and that money is to blame. Legislators are beholden to donations from special interest groups. Regulators pass through a revolving door to take jobs in the very industries they used to regulate. Big campaign donors somehow land big government contracts, despite arcane public bidding processes.

New data-sharing technology can enable citizens to follow the money in comprehensive and compelling ways, and vote accordingly.

Today, you can already access online data on which companies donate to which political parties and candidates, and make some good guesses about what they get in return. Opensecrets.org, run by the Center for Responsive Politics, provides a startling amount of information on campaign donations, members of Congress and special interest groups. MAPLight.org provides a detailed service for tracing California state legislation, including who supported and who killed various bills.

A new, publicly accessible government website mandated by the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006 will soon list the federal government's grants and contracts, tracing exactly how tax money is being spent.

Knowing how much money is spent for which programs, and where, is a great start. Knowing what good, if any, spending that money accomplishes would be even better. Web 2.0 technology can help citizens process and understand political donations, government contracts and programs, and performance metrics in all sorts of important and novel ways.

For example, tagging information about federal expenditures, unpaved highways or toxic waste sites with GeoRSS would let citizens easily cross-reference the data with other information, including campaign donations. Data feeds that use Ajax, JSON and OpenGIS Web Map Service can incorporate externally hosted geospatial capabilities into mashups that weave data together into a single, multifeatured map.

These capabilities would make publicly accessible information publicly comprehensible, for a multitude of uses and applications, incorporating a variety of data.

Major internet players are beginning to understand the power of mapping political data. This past Monday, Google announced that it would overlay 2006 campaign data from the Federal Election Commission and Opensecrets.org on top of Google Earth. Users can see stars on the U.S. map wherever there are races for congressional seats and state governorships. Clicking on a star opens up a bubble with information about races in that area.