Jon Lebkowsky: Democracy as an operating system. The panel is going to focus on the how of what the panelists have done.
William Green, RightMarch.com, "the conservative version of MoveOn.org"
Adina Levin, who has affected the Texas legislature on a DMCA issue.
Cory EFF Doctorow, say no more.
Jonah Seiger of the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet.
Jonah: The most elegant technology in the service of a message that's muddled will do nothing.
Cory: We need to involve real world politics as well. It's not enough to be a nerd-determinist. Forestry designed the commenting system that silently discards some comments as "duplicative" according to a secret algorithm. When MoveOn sends a million msgs to the FCC, and the FCC discards them, Congress cares. The letters may not directly affect the regulators, but it sure has an effect on the legislators.
Adina: Our group has done state-level advocacy. She found mentors at the ACLU who know how the legislative process work. If you show up in a legislator's office with a check, it's worth 20 points. Ten points: No check but you show up physically in the office. Three points: Send a fax or a letter. Two points: Phone call. One point: Email.
William: If you're interested in doing online activism, you don't have to set it up yourself. We outsource our back-end work.
Jonah: Remember 1996's black page protest? The technology was a tiny piece of it, but the message was powerful. It's the message more than the application.
Cory: I want to plug a tool that hackers can work on. Public Knowledge is building a GPL tool for doing something with Web forms [couldn't hear him well enough. Sorry!].