Partly by design (i.e., the self-locking of the Obama Administration into public participation) and partly a product of the fact that people who mix it up online and who work in government both lean nerdy, we're witnessing the White House's digital platforms draw attention to obscure, often intensely geeky issues and turn them into major policy issues.

Untethering cell phones from AT&T et al. isn't the sort of thing that traditionally rises to the level of "White House issue." It's not an emergency situation nor the kind of topic that the National Economic Council is rushing to put on its own agenda. The Library of Congress has the job of working out what's exempted from the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act's rules on circumventing copyright restrictions; this fall it dropped cell-phone unlocking from that list. And yet, last Monday -- only two working days after the unlocking petition merited a response -- just under a dozen officials from major officials and federal agencies convened at the White House to discuss tackling the topic. That meeting was one of what an administration official calls "a number of internal discussions" held in the days immediately after the petition qualified for a response.

What had been a fight between tech giants had become a conversation between the president and a pink-haired electrical engineer from SoHo.

What real authority does the White House have over the legislative branch's library? None, really. But it still did something big. It made plain that shifting device control from carriers to consumers is no mere dork obsession -- it's something worth the worrying of serious Washington people.

On other arguably esoteric topics, We the People is emerging as a sort of Mariano Rivera of policymaking, pushing stalled issues towards closure, say observers both inside and outside the administration. Last last month, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy issued a widely praised policy statement in favor of increasing free public access to federally funded scientific research, along the lines of the National Institutes of Health's PubMed Central database. It's been a long time coming. Congress mandated two full years ago that the White House science office figure out an approach on maximizing public access. But sources say it was the momentum around a petition on the topic, which reached the then-25,000-signature threshold in June, that helped focus internal processes and finally push a policy public.

Then, of course, there was last winter's debate over the Stop Online Piracy Act in the House and the PROTECT IP Act in the Senate. The bills were already on shaky footing in Congress when the White House, its hand "forced" by the massive public interest in a related petition, said it could never sign off on policy proposals that sounded a lot like SOPA and PIPA. Not that Republican Lamar Smith, SOPA's champion, would have cared much on his own. But "Pat Leahy did," explains a senior House Republican staffer of the House Judiciary Committee chairman's Senate counterpart, "and this was still a coordinated effort." Both bills went into the dustbin.