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The goal of the Metagovernment project is to make the governance of any community as accessible as a free software project. No one is required to participate, but everyone is allowed to participate, just as software developers can contribute to open source projects and editors can contribute to Wikipedia.

This form of governance, called open source governance, does not entail voting or majority-rule. Instead, people may help govern any community as much or as little as they wish by creating, discussing, and supporting resolutions. User input is weighed by other users through a scoring system and brought to the attention of other participants interested in that input.

Media democracy organization founded in 1972.

OpenCongress is a free, public-resource website designed to give people the best information about what’s happening in Congress with the issues they care about.  The site takes official information about legislation, senators, representatives, issue areas and votes, and connects it up with relevant news and blog coverage, user comments and social data to make it easier to find what’s really happening in the lawmaking process.  OpenCongress is a joint project of the Sunlight Foundation and the Participatory Politics Foundation, and is open source, non-profit and non-partisan. 

In January 2008, OpenCongress greatly expanded to include social networking features - “My OpenCongress” - that gives people the ability to build personal profiles for tracking all the things in Congress they care about.  “My OpenCongress” also lets you build relationships with other concerned citizens across the country.  The social data being generated by “My OpenCongress” users is also used throughout the site to help people connect with bills and votes in Congress in ways that simply were not possible before.

One of the most used (and most simple) features on OpenCongress is the ability for users to leave comments on bill pages.  In the past year we’ve seen an incredibly powerful community of users develop around a mutual interest in seeing an unemployment extensions bill passed into law.  On that bill page alone, over 26,000 comments have been left by people working to organize a campaign to pressure their lawmaers into passing the bill.  Primarily, these people found the bill page through search engines, and since there was a comment forum already connected to the bill information, they had a convenient spot to self-organize and fight for the issue they care about. 

We encourage you to check out OpenCongress to find new information about Congress and new ways to interface with your political issues.  You can also subscribe to our blog’s rss feed to keep up with the site and all of the conentious issues being debate in Washington every day.

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Future of Music Coalition — a Washington, DC based nonprofit that seeks a bright future for creators and listeners — celebrated One Web Day in Chicago Illinois, as part of a day-long artist education seminar called “What’’s the Future for Musicians?”

The event brought together indie musicians, labels, technologists and policy experts to discuss how artists will not only survive, but thrive in the digital future.

Net neutrality was a major part of the presentations, as the fight to preserve the open internet informs much of FMC’s work.

The Internet works because it belongs to everyone. All artists — big or small — have been able to use the web as a powerful tool to engage audiences. This all takes place without interference from gatekeepers and middlemen. But if net neutrality goes away, musicians lose an important connection, and fans lose the freedom of choice.

Imagine if you were only able to shop at the mall. If the net neutrality isn’t preserved, entire genres of music — from bluegrass to extreme metal — could be ignored in favor of manufactured hitmakers.

In 2008, artists use the web to alert their fans to live performances, special giveaways, behind-the-scenes stuff, limited edition music and more. If they’re forced to pay a toll to the big telecom companies, they might get priced right out of the emerging digital marketplace.

We can’t allow the old bottlenecks to determine the flow of creativity. Participating in a legitimate digital music marketplace is cruial to the livelihood of all musicians. It’s a right that needs to be preserved.

FMC is honored to have taken part in One Web Day, and hope that the future of the internet remains one of coneecitvity, inovation and the open exchange of ideas and information. Here’s to cullture and commerce online in 2008 and beyond!

Having watched her sit at her laptop at all hours doing the unglamorous work to keep Chillingeffects.org up and running, I think of Wendy as a definite e-democracy hero. She is dedicated to doing both the thinking and the doing that is needed to help protect first amendment rights in a digital age. Her Chilling Effects project, which aims to protect from the ungrounded use of legal threats to stifle speech, is critical.

I’ve been honored to get to know her through the Berkman Center. I hope that when this time capsule is opened, she will be in a powerful position to continue this work. Read more about her here: http://wendy.seltzer.org/