“Geek engagement!” is a note I underlined. It was hot in the room, and people were talking longingly about APIs and datasets. But outside of the hotbox of new ideas, it was underwhelming for campaign season.

Monday afternoon, August 31, Seattle’s two (yes, just two ) mayoral candidates were in distinctly different places. Joe Mallahan was adding $30,000 of his own money to his campaign fund, and Mike McGinn was standing in front of a motley group at the Northwest Film Forum on Capitol Hill, pitching what he calls “Government 2.0.” The public face of this push is a new website, Ideas for Seattle, which solicits ideas from Seattle citizens for improving the city (leading the list: “open city data” and “build the Green line”).

Called a “policy summit,” the meeting drew an audience consisting of McGinn’s aides, hyperlocal bloggers, Seattle Weekly‘s Damon Agnos, neighborhood planning activist Dennis Waxman, and various people who spend their time lobbying city, county, and state governments for information.

The McGinn campaign consistently struggles with framing its message at these public events. At campaign launch, McGinn’s talk was about schools, broadband, and buses. Only later did he decide to make a central issue of opposing “Greg Nickels'” deep-bore tunnel, and begin to gain in the polls.

So too with this event, from its stale “2.0” title to amorphous talking points about “doing more with less,” “democratizing data,” and “revolutionizing community engagement” with the power of Seattle’s “collective IQ.” When the floor opened up up, people suggested ways to make data more accessible (if it’s written in Word, don’t print a document out, then scan it to post on a city website), cool mashups like OneBusAway, and referenced DataSF a lot.

It’s like the joke about socialism, McGinn said early on, describing the Seattle process: the problem is too many evening meetings. (For a panicky moment, I thought I was going to be trapped a meeting about having too many meetings.) But it doesn’t take a policy summit to commit to making city data accessible. And while the new website is fun, it’s not addressing McGinn’s primary handicap at all–that he has little governmental leadership experience.

But to implement a real governmental upgrade, just that kind of firm and steady leadership will be called for. Anyone who has ever participated in the creation of a company’s website is familiar with the emotional conflict involved, once it becomes clear how disruptive the internet is to existing processes. There it is, 24×7, disseminating information and accepting data packets, and installing an Always-Updating Now into the public consciousness: “I sent you an email at 2 a.m., where’s your response?”

The internet itself is a Trojan horse; once you let it in, things are never the same. McGinn did not take responsibility for that potential transformation, as he could have as a known crusader. (Cool new ways to look at data? Fine–I’ll read about it on the blogs later.) But you don’t have to look too long at governmental structure to realize how inimical it is to the internet paradigm. If you want to reinvent government for the internet age, say so. If not, it’s campaign season, and the clock is ticking.