This evening and over the weekend, I’ll be attending a conference on “free culture” organized by Kathryn Montgomery and colleagues at American University. I’ll be the least hip person present, since everyone else will be either techno-savvy or into some kind of subversive cultural form (such as political hip-hop), or both. My plan is to listen and learn. There’s a pre-conference blog with a list of participants. Facilities have been arranged so that everyone can be online and blog away during the whole meeting, if so inclined.

The Prince George’s Information Commons is our local attempt to use the new electronic media to support community and civil society. (It’s my own small effort at the kind of civic development that I called for in yesterday’s post.) I recently installed MovableType on the Commons webpage. That’s software that was designed for blogging; I also use it on the page you’re reading. The Prince George’s Commons doesn’t look much like a blog. I’ve downplayed the date of each contribution, because entries won’t be posted all that frequently. Some entries will be very long and labor-intensive. For example, the “oral history of desegregation” that’s posted near the top of the homepage took me, two colleagues, and 10 kids most of an academic year to create.

I turned to blog software because I wanted to build a database into which many people’s projects about the County could be entered. On the homepage, you can now see short intros to the latest projects. You can also browse all the current and past work via an intertactive map, a set of timelines, a set of category headings, and a search function.

All these features are operational in a preliminary way. Thus one can use the map to look for archaeological digs in the County, or use the timeline to find all the projects concerning the 1800s, or look at a category like “work by Northwestern High School students,” or search for a phrase like “Mt Rainier.” You can also easily post comments on all pages, thus creating a “commons” feel.

There isn’t actually much work on the site as yet. However, I am guiding 17 undergraduate students who are conducting research projects right now; and a group of high school students is completing a large project on nutrition in their community, funded by National Geographic. So the database will grow rapidly. Meanwhile, I’m excited by the idea that I can now approach another professor or a school teacher–or church or neighborhood group–and easily explain to them how they might conduct some kind of research project and contribute the results to the community by putting it on the Commons website.

A brief post from California–The New Voices project at the University of Maryland has released a list of the ten micro-news projects that we decided to fund this year. In these projects, citizens (not professional journalists) create high-quality news stories and share them with their communities, using all kinds of novel media. Several of my colleagues on the New Voices Advisory Board have contributed comments about the funded projects.

I spent most of last Monday with my colleagues on the J-Lab New Voices Advisory Board, going through 250 applications for “micro-news” projects so that we could pick the top ten to fund. (J-Lab will announce the winners soon.) I was impressed by the exciting things people are doing today with community blogs, elaborate “content management systems” that allow many citizens to contribute news to local websites, and “podcasting” projects (in which people make audio news files that others can elect to receive automatically over the Internet). Jay Rosen and Jeff Jarvis (who’s also a J-Lab advisor) have been describing many of these projects on their blogs.

It makes me think that maybe we’re seeing a second wave of efforts to use the Internet for civic purposes.

The last surge occurred in the mid-1990s, when grassroots civic groups often provided free email accounts and helped local citizens and organizations to establish free web pages and discussion forums. For example, in Charlotte, NC, a community computer network called ?Charlotte?s Web? once offered free email and Web access to at least 6,000 people, including residents of public housing projects and homeless men. Hundreds of local churches and civic groups created pages for the Charlotte?s Web site with help from volunteer webmasters.

However, private companies soon offered the same basic services (free email and Website hosting), and the Charlotte Observer started its own Website devoted to ?community.? Local government agencies decided that they no longer needed to fund Charlotte?s Web, since residents could get all the same goods free of charge from the private sector. When government grants vanished, the bank executives on Charlotte?s Web?s board judged that it was no longer viable. The Observer offered to join forces and was rebuffed by the volunteers at Charlotte?s Web, who were suspicious of a corporate enterprise. But when Charlotte?s Web ran out of funds, the Observer bought all of its assets and canceled the free Internet access program. Gradually, the community-oriented, civic, and political aspects of the new commercial site have vanished. Today, it has nothing to say about local nonprofits; and there is no space for citizens to describe their own work. It is a glitzy, professional site, full of advertising.

Charlotte?s Web failed because there were insufficient nonprofit resources to produce goods such as email accounts and web hosting that the market can provide more efficiently. This was a typical story in the mid- to late-1990s. However, the new wave of collaborative, community-oriented work uses technologies that have developed since 2000: blogs, wikis, podcasting, and the like. The cost of these activities is lower and the potential may be greater.

I didn’t share in the enthusiasm for Howard Dean’s campaign, and partly that was because I feared that the very methods he pioneered would work much better for the right than for the left. Decentralized networks like Dean’s are perfect if you have a constituency that’s habitually engaged in politics, rich in connections and network ties, able to make financial contributions, and technically savvy. If, on the other hand, much of your constituency is alienated, demoralized, offline, and without money, then big, disciplined institutions like labor unions, conventional parties, and churches are awfully useful.

Marty Kearns has picked up a telling article by Michael Barrone that describes the Bush-Cheney campaign in the same terms that many leftists used to celebrate Dean. Bush’s reelection campaign was, to a large extent, a volunteer-driven, broad-based network. To be sure, Bush raised big bucks–but so did Kerry. The difference may well have been the strength of the decentralized network that supported Republicans.

Some people argue that new network technologies lower the cost of participation, thereby “empowering” ordinary people. That may be true to an extent, and I hope it is. But participation also requires a civic identity: a sense that one is an effective, responsible, committed, important member of a community. A civic identity is much more common, and much easier to develop, among wealthy professionals than among poor and middle-income people, who have good reasons to doubt that they can be effective, valued participants. Networked technologies rarely create civic identities; instead, they amplify the power of the engaged. Thus the decentralized networks that played roles in the 2004 campaign were dominated by relatively affluent volunteers–as shown by the rise of Dean, the victory of Bush, the impact of the “527” groups, and the irrelevance of labor unions.