The Open Voting Consortium (OVC) began from "a proposal to develop a pilot project in one county in California" and has spawned the voter verifiable, open-source
Electronic Voting Machine project:

The Pentagon has long been one of the most net-savvy of all government departments, especially in its dealings with the media. (Take for example its posting of verbatim transcripts of reporters' interviews with top DOD officials, as a way for the public to judge whether reporters are being fair in their articles.) But this Washington Post article by Thomas Ricks suggests that while the military is trying to convince the public that the battle for Fallujah was a success (using a 59-page Powerpoint presentation called "Telling the Fallujah Story to the World"), a part-time blogger is matching them click-for-click with a far more critical take with a site called "Fallujah in Pictures: The War You Won't See on TV."

Ricks reports:

"As far as the blog site, this is information operations at its finest," said one Marine officer who has served in Iraq. "IO is about influence, and this piece tries to influence people by depicting the human cost of war."

Unfortunately, Harvard restricts access to its students during class hours, so attendees at the "Votes, Bits and Bytes" conference won't have wifi until Saturday's sessions. But, if you ask the conference organizers nicely, they'll give you a pass. So here I am, sitting in the august Ames Courtroom at Harvard Law School, listening to Hossein Derakhshan (Hoder, a leading Iranian blogger) give a fascinating talk about the role of blogs in his home country (he lives in Toronto).

Blogs in Iran, he says, function as a) windows into and outside a closed culture; b) bridges, between men and women, older and younger generations, and voters and politicians; and c) as cafes, where people can talk to each other outside of the government controlled media.

Before him, Pippa Norris of Harvard University gave a talk about the limited impact of e-voting in England (details on her blog). And Tom Sander reported on his research into Meetup attendees.

Scott Heiferman, the CEO of Meetup (and a member of PDF's advisory board, I should add), just gave a terrific keynote address on the future of connected politics. Here's his vision: We're going from flash mobs and bricks-and-mortar organizations to flash, emergent, people-powered, long-lasting, open, influential, agile, chapter-based, institutions/organizations/unions that have card-carrying members and meet regularly face-to-face to act on common concerns. He called this the "Napsterization of organization." (I told Mary Hodder, sitting to my right, that she should ask for a fee--she grinned and said she'd take a nickel.)

We need a "Constitution-wizard," he said, in other words tools that help people create such new kinds of powerful federations. One step in that direction is going to come from Meetup, which starting next week, Heiferman announced, will allow all the members of a Meetup category group (Pug owners, Townhall.com fans, knitters, or the fastest growing Meetup category of stay-at-home-mom's) to talk to members of the same group, worldwide.

It's a little hard to understand everything Oh Yeon-ho is saying about the role of OhMyNews in the transformation of South Korean politics, because he has a strong accent. But the gist is clear: by introducing the new/old concept of "every citizen is a reporter" and creating a Internet-based news site that celebrates c itizen journalism, an authoritarian society and media culture has been turned upside down. (Details on its impact on the 2002 election can be found here.)

He started with about 750 citizen reporters and there are now over 75,000. People are paid for their reporting, but top rate is just abut $20 a piece. Why do they write: for a large audience, a ton of feedback and to change their country. One recent article by a constitutional scholar critiquing an anti-democratic court decision generated $30,000 in tips from readers!

In general, OhMyNews' model differs from traditional New York Times journalism in the following ways, he said:

Old media thinks of itself as a pipe delivering stories to readers; OhMyNews sees itself as a playground for readers.

In old media, "I produce, you consume and leave." In the new model, "we produce, consume and stay."

In old media, feedback is limited. In the new model, readers can write, comment and give money to reporters!

Privacy isn't always a matter of unprotected data or unconstitutional seizures.

The A.C.L.U. is facing new scrutiny for compiling public data about its donors' affiliations. Is there a penumbra of privacy around the lives we live publically, but somewhat facelessly?

In a December article about "dating blogs," author and constitutional scholar Jeff Rosen talks about the growing need for "new social conventions to resurrect the boundaries between public and private interactions."

As technology makes the traces our actions more visible, a new category of data is emerging: the "ripples" we leave behind.

Is this information fair game? Like the stories ex-girlfriends tell about contestants on reality TV shows?

Or do we need new "quarantine"-style rules around who can collect our ripples, and what they can do with them?

Initial response from the A.C.L.U.

Quoting from Editor: Myself - Hoder, No more blogging and net-socializing:

Friends in Iran, journalists and technicians, are saying that judiciary officials have ordered all major ISP to filter all blogging services including PersianBlog, BlogSpot, Blogger, BlogSky, and even BlogRolling. They have also ordered to filter Orkut, Yahoo Personal and some other popular dating and social networking websites.

Joi Ito posted this question about Six Apart's two hosted blog services:

Anyone know if TypePad or LiveJournal are being blocked? Is Google doing anything about this?

...and then this update from the #joiito irc channel on freenode:

[Catspaw] Joi: Livejournal and Typepad both accessible form the major Iranian ISPs

The role of blogs and other forms of online citizen's media in spreading first-hand accounts of the tsunami disaster and in mobilizing relief aid has been phenomenal. Bloggers deserve to pat themselves handily on the back.

Bloggers rock. OK. Now what?

Can this new model of citizen-journalism and aid coordination be extended to disasters and human tragedies that don’t get so much mainstream media attention?

What can we do for Darfur, other victims of war and famine in Africa, and AIDS victims?

What can we do for the victims of yearly natural disasters - earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, typhoons, doughts, etc. - for whom U.N. agencies have such trouble raising money?

How can we help organizations like Doctors Without Borders bring aid every day to the millions around the world in danger of dying deaths every bit as tragic as the tsunami victims?

"Undoing Industrial Revolution on Political Organizing," recently posted on Marty Kearns' blog, Network-Centric Advocacy, builds on points from Jakob Nielsen's post .

[The organizational forms of organization fostered by the Industrial Revolution are] a haunting legacy. Big groups are now effectively marginalized and a bulk of resources and talent are locking into industrial age advocacy operations. The writing is on the wall. The movement slowly moved away from a distributed public and into the hands of professional advocates. The challenge continues to be "feeding the beast" of industrialized advocacy which is driving resources away from the edges into the centralized leadership.

He goes into more detail about each point in his post but here are the highlights...

Quoting from Boing Boing

Xeni Jardin:
Reader Emily Fish sez:

Newly-elected Ukrainian President Viktor Yuschenko is blogging! Unfortunately, I don't know Ukranian (Russian?) so I have no idea what is written here, but none the less, it's pretty impressive that such a political figure is blogging. He's even got an RSS feed!

Link to blog in Ukrainian, and Link to English language version (thanks, D.A. Fonda)