With the promise of a "Government 2.0 Policy Summit," mayoral candidate Mike McGinn drew about 25 bloggers and geeks to the Northwest Film Forum this evening. "Government 2.0" is a bit of a buzzword, centered around the concept of integrating social networking and other interactive technology into government services. "It acts as a complement to what's happening in the real world," McGinn said from the front of the room.

Most of the people in the theater (which gets uncomfortably hot on late-summer afternoons) came from technical backgrounds, and McGinn admitted some of the jargon was over his head. It did get a little confusing at times—for a journalism major—but some people had some surprisingly practical ideas. One woman proposed a way to track city legislation online (current public disclosure is apparently an archaic process involving several steps of printing and scanning). Someone else complained that the city's Department of Planning and Development doesn't update contact lists.

Better government access was the point of the meeting, but it was really a way to stir up attention in blogging and technology circles for his new Website, Ideasforseattle.com, which launched earlier this afternoon.

McGinn's new site uses a simple concept: Users post their ideas for whatever they think the city should be doing, and others can use a limited number of votes to support or oppose those ideas. "Some ideas are better than others," McGinn says. One post on the site proposes to "measure street capacity in terms of seats, not just vehicles," for example. "Having that group have that discussion is how they discover where their ideas stand."

The new site could be a good move for the McGinn campaign, assuming enough people find it. So, um, go find it.