First: Working with citizens in the district, we hope to create an online repository of every scrap of information about the candidates, issues and campaign. This will include videos of their public appearances, as well as all advertising they and their supporters or opponents produce. Then we’ll post everything on the Web in an easy-to-use format.

Second: We will pick an element of this data collection — the advertising — and add value through further reporting and analysis. We will further create conversation spaces on our site so the district’s residents can talk about the issues and other matters.

Third, and most important: We will use what we learn to create a template for the 2008 election and beyond.

Who’s going to do all this? Lots of folks, including students from the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, who’ll create and manage the Web site. This is the class project for an online-journalism course I’m co-teaching with Bill Gannon, editorial director at Yahoo. (My own day job is running the Center for Citizen Media, a project aimed at helping honorable citizen journalism to become a vital part of a diverse media ecosystem.)

Bill, the students and I can only jump-start the project. The most important people in the experiment are the ones who live in the district, which includes part of the Bay Area but snakes out into California’s Central Valley and then southeast below San Jose.

We hope to turn them into part-time citizen journalists. We will encourage and help them do some of the reporting for our repository, and then working with the results to understand the candidates and hold them accountable for what they are saying and what is being said on their behalf.

The idea of enlisting citizen volunteers for journalistic purposes is gaining some currency these days. The Sunlight Foundation, working with organizations (including this newspaper) from a variety of political leanings, recently launched an initiative to expose some of the odious spending earmarks — money directed, behind closed doors, by individualmembers for pet projects — in legislation. More recently, when a senator stopped progress of a transparency-related bill, citizen journalists helped expose his actions. Other projects of this kind are in the works.

In California’s 11th District, we’ll encourage citizens to attend public campaign events and videotape what candidates say. We also hope to collect videos of semi-public appearances such as fundraising events. In addition, we will ask people (starting with the candidates themselves) to record and submit all broadcast/cable advertising. We’ll ask for scans of print ads, including mailers sent to people at home.

This can’t be done by remote control. So we plan to hire an in-district coordinator for approximately two to three months. His or her principal tasks will be to organize and encourage the citizen journalists; work with campaign staff and other interested parties to help ensure completeness of the data repository; and, after the election, help debrief the organizers (and the public) about what worked and what didn’t.

We expect that media organizations and political activists in the district will find the data valuable for coverage and campaign activities. But we also hope that voters, students and others will make use of it for a variety of other purposes, and that they (and, if possible, the candidates themselves), will participate in the conversations.

Democracy is about more than showing up at the polling place. It is also about participation in other ways. This seemed like a useful place to start.

Dan Gillmor is a member of The Examiner Blog Board of Contributors and is director of the Center for Citizen Media (citmedia.org). A veteran blogger and former San Jose Mercury columnist, he is also author of “We the Media.”