I happen to be in a meeting at the Google headquarters in DC. The place is hip and techie enough that I feel moved to try a little live-blogging, but without quoting or citing any individuals. So…

2:26: Picture an ordinary office building not far from the White House. The interior space has–I suppose deliberately–been left largely unfinished. There are heating ducts everywhere, simply wrapped in foil. There are also a half-dozen large hanging monitors in view, plastic blocks for playing with, and free soft drinks in an open kitchen. Most of the people in room have federal grants for service projects in schools, colleges, or nonprofits. One could imagine a bit of a cultural gap between the audience and the space we’re in, although I don’t know my peers well enough to guess how they feel. Right now, we are listening to a presentation about Google for Non-Profits. The speaker is wearing a YouTube fleece.

2:32: Just heard about Google’s election page, which seems fairly cool overall and has a nice feature that tells you where to vote.

2:45: The Google guy is telling us about how Google Maps can be used to organize a neighborhood cleanup. The Google corporation itself has done that, enlisting its own employees. It interests me that cleaning parks is the inevitable example of a service or volunteering project. I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, cleanups are limited because they are episodic, completely noncontroversial, and not very educational. On the other hand, litter in public spaces is a classic collective-action problem, and it is interesting to find new ways to address such problems.

2:52: We’re getting a dose of advertising for Google’s various software offerings. No complaints from me, but I just wonder whether my peers–community-organizers and activists–like this or not. Twenty years ago, they would have been reflexively anti-corporate.

3:15: OK, that’s enough. I’m not sure I’m a live-blogging kind of person.

P.S. Later on I figured out the iconography of the Google office design. All the wiring and pipes have been left exposed. Transparency–get it?

For practical reasons related to my work, I have recently joined two social networks that function roughly like MySpace or Facebook: The Five Freedoms Project Network and TakingITGlobal. A third such network is Puget Sound Off. I wouldn’t join this youth site, but I have an official advisory role to Puget Sound Off and spent a few days last week visiting its organizers. And then there’s always my regular old Facebook page.

Joining lots of social networks is a bit of a drag. For instance, I have my various passwords saved in one place and don’t always have ready access to them. And every time someone pings me through one of these networks, I have to log on. I wondered why these other groups couldn’t just use Facebook or MySpace (or both)–as we intend to do when we build a network for college-student volunteers and activists in the Boston area. The answer seems to be that there are quite a few practical barriers to doing political or civic organizing within the major proprietary social networking sites. It can be expensive to build applications for these sites, and the owners can change their policies or even shut you down.

I’m one who tends to defend corporate products that function openly or democratically. The fact that they are privately owned and profitable doesn’t turn me off–in fact, I’m glad for the investment. But there seems to be a question about whether the really big commercial social networking sites are sufficiently open to support democratic activism.

Most kids are now online, but inequalities persist in their online civic engagement. I just posted a comment on this topic over at “Engaged Youth: Civic Learning Online,” which is a blog worth visiting.

Here is Allison Fine’s important new paper for the Case Foundation on young citizens and the Internet. It’s an excellent summary. As I read the first 50 pages, which are mostly celebratory, I kept asking questions about the drawbacks or limits of online engagement. But then Allison asks what I consider the three main questions: Who doesn’t use the online media for political/social purposes? Do “bubble” cultures inevitably form online because it’s a medium of choice? Can online activism link effectively to government and policymaking? I might add a fourth question: Are young online citizens right to feel “a higher degree of confidence in corporations than in government institutions”? They “are drawn to brands with strong socially responsible cultures, such as Patagonia, Nau,Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods, and Ben & Jerry’s.” But is that naive?