David Plouffe, one of Barack Obama's top advisers, sent me an e-mail today. Not that I'm claiming special status here: he sent it to about five million other people, too. In it he announced something that struck this particular observer as seminal and extraordinary.

"On December 13th and 14th," he wrote, "supporters are coming together in every part of the country to reflect on what we've accomplished and plan the future of this movement. Your ideas and feedback will be collected and used to guide this movement in the months and years ahead."

In essence, Plouffe was announcing that the collective energy that fueled the Obama campaign's success would continue to be nurtured by the new Administration. He was inviting direct ongoing input from Obama's supporters and, more broadly, the American people.

This is new and big, nothing short of a 21st Century, Internet-friendly form of government. The Obama Administration is plainly envisioning a much more participatory form of democracy, driven by a "clicks and mortar" combination of online organization and in-person connecting.

I read Plouffe's e-mail while taking a break from an article I've been working on about a smart-grid project in Texas. What's a smart grid, you ask? Good question—because the term means different things to different people. For many, it means net metering: if I put solar photovoltaics on my roof and generate electricity, I can sell energy back to the grid.

But "smart grid" can also mean more than that. Imagine thousands upon thousands of people doing net metering in a mid-sized urban area. At this level, a different picture starts to emerge, of a grid where energy is generated at lots and lots of local nodes, like the proverbial "thousand points of light." In this expanded definition of a smart grid, the energy transmission system largely or wholly leaves behind the old downstream model and effectively transforms consumers into producers.

I couldn't miss the parallel. With his announcement, Plouffe was announcing that the Obama administration would be doing for democracy what smart grids do for electricity. With apologies for the bad pun ... they both enable participatory power generation.

In area after area, old patterns of control are being stood on their head. Once upon a time (like, roughly, yesterday), decisions traveled in a top-down direction. Corporate CEOs determined corporate policy. Media gatekeepers decided what people would read or see. All the king's men decided on government policy.

Utilities operated in a similarly top-down manner. They were the producers; they generated the electricity and drove it downstream to their customers.

Plouffe's announcement was one more indication that technological advances are sweeping this old model away. The open source movement has undermined much of Microsoft's top-down hegemony. Blogs are stripping the media gatekeepers of much of their power and transforming people from journalism and commentary consumers into producers. Websites like YouTube and Flickr are doing much the same for consumers of visual media.

In their way, smart grids are working the same magic as they empower energy consumers to become energy producers.

And now, pulling up alongside the smart grid, we're getting smart democracy.