Like many politicians of the time, Utah lawmaker Steve Urquhart began his political career by passing out donuts to children and offering hot air balloon rides. Anything to connect better with his constituents.

At the urging of Phil Windley, a computer science professor at Brigham Young University, he sought to make virtual connections and began a blog at SteveU.com. Urquhart took another step into digital democracy when he recently launched Politicopia — a simple social-text wiki for people to congregate and discuss issues and legislation.

At a time when user-generated content and other Web 2.0 trends are all the rage, Urquhart is harnessing the Internet “for its ability to cut out the middleman.” Or in more succinct terms; “Though the Internet has moved sellers and consumers closer together, its strides in politics haven’t yet been so grand. In politics, intermediaries — like special interest groups, bureaucrats, and the media — heavily filter information between people and their elected officials.”

The idea was in part inspired and advised by Doc Searls and Micah Sifry — pioneers of fusion between technology and politics.

To bolster his new effort at interaction and transparency, Urquhart posted his school voucher bill in its entirety on Politicopia before he distributed it to his colleagues in the Utah House. Soon the page expanded with pro and con sections with findings from states like Vermont and Wisconsin accompanied by a section for comments, as wel as links to news articles about the bill.

“For six years we’ve been chasing our tail on this bill, and today the bill passed in very large part because of Politicopia. When private dialogue was made public, the main area of criticism was publicly revealed to be fictitious,” Urquhart told WebProNews in an email.

A version of the school voucher bill narrowly passed in the House of Representatives this year (see how the Representatives voted.

The Opinion Journal chimed in reported that after the school voucher bill was posted online, “thousands of people logged on to www.politicopia.com and participated.”

To follow up on how this experiment went, and perhaps to spread the idea, Uruhart will also speak about Politicopia at the Personal Democracy Forum this May in New York .

Beyond the voucher page on the wiki, other pages exist for legislation about college tuition for illegal immigrants, payday lending, and other issues facing the state legislature.

In writing about the brief history of Politicopia, Urquhart boasts that “One week into the experiment, Politicopia is working. Citizens are participating and citizens are being heard. Legislators are talking to me about things they’ve read on Politicopia. Because of input I received, I have changed a position I’ve held for years. Already, citizens are using Politicopia to shape the debate.”

With such resources and backing, Politicopia has a shot at succeeding and inspiring politicians in other states to adopt similar efforts of eliminating the middleman between constituents and their representatives while contemporaneously bridging the gap between them.

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Petersen works for a web development firm as a search engine optimizer (SEO) and writes for his blog at blog.