This is an edited transcript.

NARRATOR: On Sunday, George Stephanopoulos asked President-elect Obama the most popular question from Change.gov's "Open For Questions" feature:

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: And he asks, "Will you appoint a special prosecutor (ideally Patrick Fitzgerald) to independently investigate the gravest crimes of the Bush administration?"

NARRATOR: But how the question may have been able to rise to the top of the pile, with 22,779 votes, illustrates a potential flaw in the system: Bob Fertik at Democrats.com was getting out the vote for his question.

NARRATOR: Lawrence Lessig is a leading thinker on Internet policy. He sees potential for Web-savvy groups to influence the process.

LAWRENCE LESSIG, PROFESSOR OF LAW, STANFORD UNIVERSITY: It's too easy to get a group that's got a mailing list of 100,000 people to jump on and to do something and it looks like it's much more significant that it is or ought to be considered.

NARRATOR: Lessig is using an independent site, Change.org, to promote his own effort for campaign finance reform. The site is inviting people to suggest and vote on policy agenda items. The most popular items will be presented to the Obama administration this week.

LESSIG: I hope the administration recognizes whatever rises to the top is an issue that is salient and important to a segment of the public -- a couple hundred thousand votes, in this context. But I certainly hope that nobody tries to sit down and set priorities on the basis of what rises to the top.

NARRATOR: Macon Phillips, who runs Change.gov, says the transition team has solicited input on health care reform from house meetings and via the Web.

MACON PHILLIPS, TRANSITION TEAM INTERNET DIRECTOR: I know that Secretary-designate [Tom] Daschle has been personally very interested in the feedback that we're getting from this, and the more he sees, the more he wants -- which has been a virtuous cycle that will continue. But the idea isn't really to sort of have people in these house parties or on the Internet make decisions on policy, I think, at least in the transition.

NARRATOR: But that might not be how online users perceive the purpose of Phillips' site. At a recent house meeting for Obama in Washington, D.C., attendees praised the online tools but asked for more checks in forums and polls to guarantee that the numbers online are truly representative.

STEVEN LOWE, BROOKLAND RESIDENT: Through by having an individual, passworded way to vote for something with him so that he and his administration knows how we strongly feel or which option we prefer, or which way we'd like it to go: That's a way of being heard, and having our voice count.

OFFSCREEN: Moving closer to direct democracy.

NARRATOR: Lowe and others like him might not get their wish. The Change.gov team is factoring in certain checks for abuse into their forums, but is putting more emphasis on creating tools that allow for the greatest amount of input. The value of that shouldn't be diminished, one open-government advocate said at a recent Google panel.

JOHN WONDERLICH, SUNLIGHT FOUNDATION: It's a bit of a straw man to say that participatory democracy or participation online is designed to create direct democracy. But what Change.gov has done is made sort of a vital place for these ideas to have a public life.