Beth Simone Noveck has written a seminal piece on "Wiki-Government" for Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, and I recommend you read the whole thing. Noveck is Professor of Law and director of the Institute for Information Law & Policy at New York Law School and the McClatchy Visiting Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at Stanford University, who has been advising the U.S. Patent Office on its new open-source approach to involving the public in helping review patent applications, and that experience informs her vision. She lays out a powerful case for reinventing government with "civic software" (a term I once floated and still love) that "can shift power from professional sources of authoritative knowledge to new kinds of knowledge networks" and create a kind of "collaborative governance." I love it.

On any given day, I've got about four or five books that I'm currently reading--or trying to finish--and I can understand why some people try to take a "reading week" (or month) where they do nothing but catch up with the piles of things that we wish we had time to read. I'm taking a break from my own piles to offer some capsule reviews of several books I did manage to read this year that cover the emerging world of technology and politics.

Deval Patrick, the new governor of Massachusetts, has rolled his old campaign web site into a new site that opens the door to citizens who want to directly propose and discuss important issues, and for the Governor himself to get into the fray. In doing so, he is going where no top elected official in America has ever gone before -- into a real online dialogue with constituents about the decisions that affect their lives. Here's hoping the presidential candidates take notice.