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After spending a week discussing with the global south about the digital divide, I find my self back in NYC, amazed at New York City Council Member Gail Brewer's staff bridging our own digital divide.

Opencongress.org just installed a new sunroof on the big dome.

This weekend, Civicspace on Demand (CSoD) launched. For $50 bucks a month you get a "complete, integrated solution for your community website, online donations, blast email, and supporter database needs." If you thought Drupal and CiviCRM were too complicated, think again. CSoD has spent the past two years, rethinking the layout and workflow. Instead of harvesting the open-source community, they have spent a considerable about of time providing feedback and improvements to the community.

Karen Matheson and Eve Fox of M&R Strategic Services ask, "Are you one of the many email fundraisers, organizers, advocates or marketers who view their online statistics with a sigh? Do you fantasize about sky-high open, click-through, and response rates... a list with zero unsubscribes?"

If you fit the bill and need to figure out how to get your open rates up and your op-outs down, you should check out Matheson and Fox's new report titled "Do Email Silences Matter?" The crux of the report is that "on-again, off-again conversations" -- inconsistent email campaigns with long gaps in communication -- cause supporters to lose interest in campaigns.

Or rather, Rep. Stephen Urquhart's legislative wiki, Politicopia, is having a good showing in its first week. Urquhart emailed me to say, "The first week has been good. Citizens are participating and leaders are taking notice. Politicopia made both of the major newspapers, and the Governor, the Senate President and the Speaker of the House have all been on the site."

Indeed, the Salt Lake Tribune reports that Urquhart used the site to put up a preview version of an education voucher bill he is sponsoring, and Democrat Minority Whip Brad King responded positively, saying he "really kind of liked" the idea. "We'd much rather have it out there where we can all see it," he said.

A couple of months ago we wrote about AirCongress, a site started by Danny Glover of the National Journal's Beltway Blogroll. The site had just launched and while the idea behind it was interesting -- it wanted, and wants, to be "the one place where people can go to hear and see the latest news of, by and about Congress" -- it was so new it was hard to judge it beyond its mission statement.

The site collects video and podcasts published by legislators, advocacy groups, journalists, and others. It's just Glover doing all the work -- it's not a Digg-like community site -- but he's doing us a potentially valuable service. Especially useful are his frequent posts featuring video from across the political web; see his roundup of post-SOTU video commentary from Josh Marshall and the folks at Americablog and audio commentary from Ed Morrissey of Blog Talk Radio.

Continuing with our map-happy coverage here at PDF, Will of onNYTurf, the man behind the Health Care That Works mashup that we covered yesterday, has produced another Google Maps mashup. This time Will overlaps data showing which New York City city councilors support or oppose proposed rules restricting the assembly of large groups of pedestrians and bicycle riders (it's particularly aimed at the group Critical Mass that organizes large-scale bike rides around the world).

I've always been struck by the language many of us use to describe working with technology and politics and advocacy; people commonly use the phrases "social change" and "revolution" to mean a host of different things.

The folks at Policy Link have similarly high-minded ideas about the role of technology in social advocacy. They've released a primer on online advocacy called "Click Here for Change: Your Guide to the E-Advocacy Revolution," and they appear to be refreshingly focused on social issues (it's unfortunately only available as a PDF):

The struggle may be for housing that’s affordable to people of all incomes, secure jobs and accessible transportation to reach them, or healthy communities with clean air, parks, and supermarkets that offer quality food and produce. Whatever it may be, we, the people, have the right to take action when our rights are threatened or denied.

The guide is specifically directed at advocates for low-income communities and communities of color "who are eager to to use state of the art technology techniques to challenge old policies and create new ones that will enhance the quality of life and access to opportunity for everyone." They clearly mean social change on a large scale. We'll report back after we've had time to digest it.

Jerome Armstrong started a pretty interesting thread over on MyDD by asking "What emerging technology or web-based practice do you think will have the biggest impact in 2008?" Among the answers coming in from participants (many of whom are at the beating heart of the netroots phenomenon):

-OpenID (coming soon at netroots.com, Jerome notes)

-Video blogging where commentary can be added into news clips (I think Viddler may be a useful tool in that regard, by making it possible to tag specific times on a video)

-BlogTalkRadio

-local blogs (helped by platforms like Soapblox).

-cellphones

-Skype

-free municipal Wifi

-widgets

Matt Stoller responds by arguing that technology by itself doesn't matter; what does is the "interaction of technology and politics." He adds, "The innovation comes from the unification of the revolutionary technology with a revolutionary idea about how citizens should relate to politics. TV wasn't just a revolutionary model for communications, it was a statement that communication should be exceptionally powerful and top-down in nature."