Power from the People

At a time when the standard Linux story
covers yet another corporate savings move or grand strategy by an
industrial giant, it's nice to run across small but terrific
efforts that happen to run on the world's handiest operating
system. I ran into two of these efforts last week in New York. As
it happened, both projects focus on what people can do for
themselves and their government.The first was
e.thePeople, which held
its launch event on Thursday, June 27th. e.thePeople's slogan is
"Democracy is a Conversation", which leverages the first thesis of
The Cluetrain
Manifesto. I'm kind of associated with the whole
Conversation thing, so I was on hand to give a brief opening talk
at the invitation of
Michael
Wieksner, who was running the event. While we were hanging
out, Michael showed me how e.thePeople has created an effective
instrument of grass roots democracy, as well as how they happened
to build the whole system on Linux and other open-source
foundations.Among other things, I was impressed at how easily,
efficiently and effectively one can create a petition on any issue
and direct it to the relevant legislators and regulators at any
level of government. The same goes for a fax campaign; those
government types apparently respond better to faxes than to less
physical forms of correspondence. e.thePeople also back-ends the
Politics sections of newspaper sites across the country, including
the Chicago
Sun-Times. Click on the "Politics" link in the
paper's list of features, and the whole section comes up as an
e.thePeople-hosted "digital town hall".The second project I learned about while in New York is
MEETUP.com. Before the
e.thePeople party started, Scott Heiferman, cofounder and CEO of
MEETUP, button-holed me by e-mail. It seems he was going to be at
the e.thePeople event and an unrelated party that followed, to
which we both had been invited. What he showed me was far more
impressive than any of the earlier dot-com efforts that tried to
commercialize the same thing, which is nothing more than arranging
get-togethers. According to the
FAQ,
"MEETUP does something that the Internet should do: It connects
people around topics of interest locally."But what really blew my mind is how simple and practical the
whole thing is--and how far it has already spread. For example, an
International
Slashdot MEETUP Day is coming up, with reports of huge
participation levels. (Here's the
Slashdot
item.)Like e.thePeople, MEETUP runs on Linux. The site's credits
page extends gratitude to "the communities behind Linux, Java,
Apache, Tomcat, MySQL, Postfix, Tux, Bugzilla and Blogger", among
others. When I asked Scott Heiferman if MEETUP could have been
possible without the free stuff that comes from those communities,
he said "No way."Over the next couple of weeks I'll be looking at both
projects in more depth.Doc Searls is senior editor
of Linux Journal.

email: doc@ssc.com