By Justin Pope
The Associated Press

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - Its creators hope it will become a Google of government, a massive Internet clearinghouse of information to help citizens track their leaders as effectively as their leaders track them.

Friday, Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab debuted a Web site called "Government Information Awareness," a project that aspires to be far more than just another assemblage of government documents and resources.

Instead, GIA hopes to create an enormous but self-sustaining community where, as occurs with popular Web sites eBay and Google, the users do the work of keeping it running and credible.

Its creators at Media Lab - a research center whose eclectic projects bridge technology, the arts and media - view the project not just as a way to pool the collective wisdom of government watchdogs but also as a tool to counter new government technologies that are consolidating information about citizens.

GIA's name and mission are a kind of reverse version of "Terrorism Information Awareness," a $20 million project created by the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Project Agency to help sift through electronic information with the goal of preventing terrorist attacks.

"It seemed very odd that the same level of effort isn't spent working on technologies that help citizens understand the government's links, networking and influences," said Ryan McKinley, 26, the graduate student behind the project.

McKinley isn't sure it will catch on. But he hopes it will offer new ways to pull together disparate political information, helping users, for instance, identify politicians who belonged to the same fraternity, then cross-referencing the list to their voting records or campaign contributions.

GIA will work like this, at least in theory.

McKinley has "seeded" the site with a number of politics-related databases to get it started. But for now it will rely largely on users to contribute any information they like: posting an environmental group's ranking of a senator's voting record, for instance, or a nasty comment about the bathing habits of a judge who lives next door.

Much of that information will prove unwieldy, not to mention inaccurate or unfair. Because postings are anonymous (users pick their own screen name), attacks on enemies are a virtual guarantee.

But GIA hopes useful, fair information will "rise to the top" just as useful Web sites rise to the top on the popular search engine Google. Users will rank postings for credibility, and, if all goes well, sort the wheat from the chaff, similar to what is done on the popular techie site slashdot.org.

Liberals and conservatives are welcome; in fact, balanced postings are essential. But users will develop their own definitions of credibility, building a "circle of trust" that reflects their values.

One user may favor postings from gay rights groups, another from gun rights groups, while someone looking simply for reliable numbers could limit a search to official government documents.

Posters are asked to provide contact information for their subjects (the site helps them find it), who are automatically contacted and given the opportunity to confirm or deny information posted about them. Their response figures into the credibility equation.

The original poster must then re-post the information with any reply, which has another benefit: It requires just enough work to defend against hackers or "robots" who might otherwise try to flood the system.

Attempts to use the Internet to revolutionize how citizens interact with government have largely flopped (the documentary "Startup.com" portrayed one such failure). But Steven Johnson, author of the book Emergence, likes McKinley's idea because "distributed masses" on the Web already keep watch on government, there's just no obvious way to pool their information and the endless but disorganized stream of data the government itself produces.

Government Information Awareness Web site.

Terrorism Information Awareness: Web site.

Center for Democracy and Technology Web site.