Microsoft challenged design firms to come up with a new approach to Web design to encourage participation in the democratic process.

The winner of the PhizzPop Design Challenge was the Washington, D.C-based design firm Cynergy System's "ben" system interconnected, cross-platform applications

ben is dedicated to Ben Franklin, who no doubt would be a blogger extraordinaire if he were alive today. And it is a play on the phrases "be informed" and "be involved."

ben, which is not yet available to the public, has the ability to analyze mass quantities of news content, print or video, and put them on a political array from left to right. It also can find political events in which a person can participate.

Dave Wolf , VP of sales and marketing at Cynergy, presented ben to several hundred attendees at the Chicago New Media Summit. ben and its brother apps earlier in the year had won PhizzPop at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas.

A third part of the ben--known as "Tiny ben"-- enables users to communicate online with their reps.

Wolf explains:

"When our grandparents, listening to Walter Cronkite, heard a story that excited them or upset them, they picked up the phone and called their representative.

"That level of engagement is gone these days, and to a large degree, technology and the Internet have pushed it away. So we asked ourselves, can we bring it back? How? And that's where the mobile device and VoIP work came in."

His team built a phone application into Facebook. ben can browse Facebook for news. Then, the user can click on an image of an application known as "Tiny ben," which enables users to respond immediately to the news by calling their representatives.

In the demo at South by Southwest, a call was put through to the Obama campaign. A message was left in VoiceMail.

I asked Wolf afterward if ben could work with Skype. He confirmed that it did. For demo purposes, he used another VoIP product.

Ben was only an experiment. They say democracy is an experiment as well. But let's hope that ben is unleashed to encourage the democratic process.

Gotta' believe that Ben Franklin would have approved of Tiny ben.