The Berkman Society at Harvard is focusing its Internet + Society conference in December on politics and technology (Is the Internet Still on the Political Fringe?). Looks like PDF editor David Weinberger is speaking there, so maybe he can tell us more about the event. Wish I could make it, but I'm hoping there'll be good online coverage.

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.

Now the discussion turns to the ways that the Internet is enabling new forms of business (eBay, Amazon) and what lessons might be learned from that for politics.

Esther Dyson had the most interesting observations. In business you have the luxury of getting rid of customers you don't want (you can segment your market), but government has to serve all the people, which is why government is slower than business. In politics, she said, you can define a target market but you're hoping to enlarge it. Kerry and Dean, in her view, failed to succeed because they talked mostly to their core supporters rather than trying to enlarge their base. And their mistake was that they weren't listening enough, especially beyond their core supporters. She urged businesses and politicians alike to use the Internet to listen more and broadcast less. I agree.

eBay, she added, is itself a political phenomenon because it changes how people see themselves in relationship with others, and that empowering people in one sphere spills over into other spheres. She cited her experience in Russia, where friends of hers who work in software development are far more honest and happy than the average Russian, who feels irrelevant and depressed. That may be true, though I'm not sure how it proves the eBay experience itself is changing political expectations or behavior.

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.

The heart of the last panel of the day, which was focused on how the Internet affected the outcome of Election 2004, was in the divergent presentations from Zack Exley and Chuck Defeo, who had parallel jobs running the Kerry and Bush Internet campaigns.

Exley was a tad defensive, given the complaints from the left that Kerry's online effort was too top-down and fundraising-obsessed and didn't do enough fostering of grassroots conversation or power. He parried those critiques by pointing out that they used the net to get thousands of people on the ground talking to voters, and given the Bush campaign's expected fundraising advantage, they felt it important to raise the money needed to keep pace in the ad wars. "We did listen to our base," he noted, describing how the campaign solicited stories from its supporters on how they had been affected by the Bush economy. "We got 100,000 responses which were put into a database. So when you saw people standing at a Kerry rally telling their life stories, those were real people telling real stories," he said.

I may not be able to blog as much today as I did yesterday, and unfortunately there are four concurrent workshops underway every 90 minutes. But here are my notes on Richard Freeman and Robert Fox's reports on "Open Source Unionism."

The idea, Freeman said, is to take people where they are and find a way to involve the millions of Americans who sympathize with the union movement but don't work in an unionized setting the opportunity to join in and gain some of the benefits of collective action. Thus the AFL-CIO launched WorkingAmerica.org in the summer of 2004, with the idea of signing up people, charging them little ($5 dues are voluntary), delivering info to them over the net about their rights as workers, organize them where possible by firms and by regions. Members vote on its priorities. It started in 10 cities in 5 states with 400 paid door-knockers and very quickly signed up 500,000 people. The list is now at 750,000, and there's a fair amount of excitement about the potential for future growth.

There was a fascinating semi-prospective collision between what John Palfrey calls the "classical" and "jazz" styles of doing politics in Dan Cantor's "Why Parties Still Matter" workshop this morning. Cantor is the director of New York's Working Families Party, one of the few successful third parties in American politics. It's currently a one-state phenomenon, thanks to NY's longstanding fusion law that allows parties to cross-endorse candidates of other parties (though that may begin to change as the party is already active in Connecticut and is hoping to pass ballot measures legalizing fusion in more states in 2006.)

I won't go into the details here of why fusion allows a third party to play a sustainable and powerful role; suffice it to say that the six-year-old WFP, which is a coalition of progressive unions, community organizations and individual members organized into local chapters, just won its biggest victory with the passage of a $2 increase in NY's minimum wage, which took place when the Republican-run state senate overturned the Republican governor's veto of said legislation.

I am on 'assignment' blogging emergingprogressives.

During the opening panel, I heard the word “internet” once and there was no reflection of how online tools were used during the campaign. Instead the focus was on getting young people out, non-traditional organizing, training for field organizers, and door knocking.

Eli Pariser spoke as a closing keynote for the evening. He said that MoveOn gave 3 million people a voice. Really? Why does everyone think this - it is a ONE to MANY organization as the title of the first panel tomorrow says “Old Tactics – New Tools.” I hope there will be some reflection of how new tools mean new tactics are possible. The audience is young mostly under 30 – so perhaps this is possible.

Karen Mulhauser conceived of the gathering and supported the emerging leaders who pulled it together over six and a half weeks. The event came out of the work of over 100 people, who had three conference calls and gave shape to the meeting, and a planning committee of 30 people. During dinner she was saying how she had never met anyone on the opening panel and was really looking forward to actually meeting them.

I'm blogging my impressions over at BOP.

At emergingprogressives:
One of the subplots of election cycle is the use of new technology in traditional organizing – basically using databases and maps well to get out vote by calling and knocking on doors. AFL-CIO used logistical assistance to support volunteer field workers and Palm pilot use by ACT. Kerry campaign mainly used the web to recruit volunteers.

Technologies identified - DB management, wireless field organization, websites, maps of union members, Blogging. (No wiki’s, online community sites, meetups.)

I made the closing remark that new tools mean that new things are possible and that there could be a whole weekend discussing what is possible.

Jeff Blodgett Director of Welstone Action opened the session with the age old goals of organizing and use technology tools to help with these.

Harnessing the energy of the base – technology has helped us better connect people together and use volunteers in more efficient way.