What's propaganda when it can be publicly critiqued?

I keep coming across remarkable collections of Obama photography, except in this case...

...it's from "Obama for America" itself.

I am so not used to having a voice in national government that I got an odd feeling about this slideshow. It triggered the skepticism switch in my head, and I started thinking about folks I knew in Prague who grew up in the 60's, 70's, and 80's knowing never to believe a word they heard from the government. In America, as elsewhere, the government, especially the Executive, always has an agenda.

Except in this case, the public can leave comments on the photos. Granted they're entirely positive comments at this point, but if someone wanted to express displeasure with something they saw about Obama, they could say so and have others see it.

I got the same feeling from Obama's transition team website: change.gov (which, despite it's .gov suffix, is run under the non-profit 501c(4) called the Obama-Biden Transition Project). What in the world is happening when a President-elect has a section on their website called "An American Moment: Your Vision" to solicit suggestions from the public? Or when they prominently post the Government Services Administration's Transition Directory? Not to mention a job application page. It's both brilliant and engaging but so out of character for a government website, so slick, that it's almost suspicious. (This didn't stop me from signing up for email updates though.)

As the Center for Future Civic Media's Communications Manager, I want to keep an eye on how this site ultimately functions--it was rushed out so fast this week that many pages were still filled with lorem ipsum text. Questions I'm interested in:

• How does it complete the feedback loop from those in the public who submit suggestions?
• Will its blog be updated frequently, and with what content, and will the blog allow for public comments?
• Will this site ultimately affect the design and openness of other government agency websites?
• How might these sites change the media's relationship with the government?

The answers to those questions will go a long way toward figuring out if propaganda as we have known it--either government's directing idealized messages to the citizenry or government's manufacturing consent through the media--no longer exists in America. And if that's the case, it begs other questions: how does an Executive persuade the public in this new forum, when it goes beyond weekly radio addresses and the State of the Union; if an Obama administration is radically more open that previous administrations, would the public tolerate anything less from its successors; and how would Americans react to the feedback that would come in from those in other countries?

All this of course takes for granted something major: that Obama is actually interested in and able to project the inner workings of the government to a busy public and that the public is afforded the mechanisms to respond. Neither is guaranteed.