Right after taking office, President Barack Obama promised to open up the government, ordering officials to use modern technologies like Internet message boards and blogs to give all Americans a bigger voice in public policy. Well, the people have spoken. But many of them are not sticking to the topics at hand. The White House made its first major entree into government by the people in May when it set up an online forum to ask ordinary people for their ideas on how to carry out the president's open-government pledge. It got an earful -- on legalizing marijuana, revealing UFO secrets and verifying Obama's birth certificate to prove he was really born in the United States and thus eligible to be president. While it was not exactly what administration officials had in mind, they noted that democracy can be a bit messy. 'Even for people who want to talk about UFO's or the Kennedy assassination, we have created a forum for people to have a conversation with each other, and potentially to go off and organize and develop this further,' said Beth Simone Noveck, a New York Law School professor who is Obama's deputy chief technology officer for open government. Most of the suggestions were closely related to the topic at hand, like publishing a list of everyone who meets with the president, using computer graphics to track how rapidly agencies respond to Freedom of Information Act requests and installing webcams to monitor federal offices. The administration's goal is to devise regulations that would tell federal agencies how to make their operations more open to the public. Undeterred by some of the wilder suggestions, the White House on Monday began Phase 3 of its project using yet another format: a wiki, an online tool that allows a group of people to collectively create and edit documents. Visitors will be able to submit and edit drafts of the open-government rules, similar to how people contribute to Wikipedia, the user-created online encyclopedia. Ultimately, of course, 'this is not policy by referendum,' said Noveck. The Office of Management and Budget will consider the public comments and the views of agency officials and White House staff and then put together its own formal draft of the open-government rules. 