Since posting my thoughts on YouTube’s activities around the presidential candidates race, I’ve been in conversation with Stacy Becker who runs the Minnesota Anniversary Project (MAP150), a forum for reinventing policy-making by reconnecting the vision, values and voices of Minnesotans with policy-making on the issues that matter most to their future.

Like me, Becker worries that most of what passes for Politics 2.0 today is a mere veneer on a fundamentally broken system. Just because you can post a video or a comment on a public policy forum does not make you a genuine co-producer of public policy. At best, most 2.0 initiatives provide citizens with one more means to provide input into an effectively undemocratic process where the real decision get made behind closed doors.

I think Becker put it well when she said “Politics 2.0 is not about finding different way to “engage” citizens by plugging them into tightly controlled, rarely informative, almost always boring policy process. Policy-makers need to make citizens an integral part of the process…and not just those citizens with an axe to grind.”

Becker points out that Politics 2.0 today looks a bit like what happened when computers became widely available in the 1980s. As she put it, “Organizations automated existing processes, rather than using technology to improve and streamline their processes.”

Some politicians and public officials would genuinely like to strengthen representative democracy. The reality is that getting to genuine citizen engagement is hard–it entails a truly massive shift in the culture of government and the apparatus of political decision-making.

Reflecting on her experience with MAP 150, Becker points to a few of the toughest barriers: 1. Many people in positions of power don’t really believe that citizens can add value. 2. Most people in positions of power are reluctant to give up the control they have over processes and/or are scared to be held accountable for something they can’t control. 3. It’s not been done before, so we’re making it up as we go.

The editors at Mother Jones got it pretty much right when they recently said:

At best, the potential exists for the political equivalent of software’s open-source movement: a system in which the best results are accomplished not by secretive, commercial, top-down, individual effort but by communities of interested people wielding collective, uncopyrighted, free, and yes, democratic tools. . . [Open source politics] also has the potential to become exactly what Web 1.0 turned into—a delivery system where most of us are mere “customers.”

As Howard Rheingold would say: what it is —> is —> up to us. If you want to follow-up on this topic, check out the recent MotherJones feature on Politics 2.0 where you can read views from folks like Howard Dean, Esther Dyson, Larry Lessig, and Kevin Rose.