We’re entering a new age of government transparency because the Net makes so much more information available to so many more people. Some of them are going to want to do something with it.

A good and recent example is My Left Nutmeg, “where Connecticut Dems scratch that progressive itch.” It created an investigative network around some strange figures in the campaign spending habits of Senator Joe Lieberman. Originating in politics not journalism, the project demonstrates the potential that open source methods have to reveal portions of the campaign that would otherwise go unnoticed.

Nutmeg writer Matt Browner-Hamlin noticed that Lieberman spent over $380,000 in petty cash during his campaign — an obvious red flag. But rather than make outrageous accusations, Hamlin wanted someone to investigate Lieberman’s spending habits.

But without a look at the books there was no way to know what the $380,000 figure meant. The amount of “petty” cash that was moving around seemed exorbitant to Hamlin, so he offered it up to his readers: work as a team and find out if Lieberman’s cash flow was out of the norm. He asked them to look into the October FEC filings for 15 different Senate candidates to see how their petty cash disbursements compared.

“together we’ll build a list that we all know will show Joe Lieberman’s petty cash expenditures as grossly unusual and not something that his campaign or the media can brush off without full investigation.”

And engaged, they were. My Left Nutmeg readers used blog comments to organize their research and reported the petty cash spending of 20 Senate members. They found that sixteen politicians didn’t spend any petty cash and another three spent a combined total of $2,650, leaving Lieberman’s $387,000 both unexplained and looking highly questionable.

Hamlin’s idea proved fruitful and journalists began to react. In Connecticut an Op-ed piece in the Courant asked the same question that motivated him.

“Joe Lieberman needs to explain immediately and in detail to whom and for what purposes his campaign spent on average $32,000 a day in unaccounted-for cash in just 12 days.”

The topic also received a brief mention in the New York Times New York Times’ coverage of the hotly contested senate race.

“Several campaign finance experts said that while the expenditure was an unusually large sum of money to be listed as petty cash, it would be legal as long as each of the payments was less than $100.”

Well, it’s not a smoking gun.

What’s interesting to me is the political motivation behind this investigation. While journalists are supposed to be fair, balanced and neutral this group is obviously focusing their energy on discrediting the Lieberman campaign.

Does this make their research any less valid? No. Out-of-line petty cash spending by the Lieberman campaign is a valid finding by Nutmeg and its users. Notices in the press (“… an unusually large sum of money”) confirm it. That’s another system of checks.