Abstract
In this essay we present some preliminary analysis of a phenomenon that we believe could transform the political process in the United States. That phenomenon is an outburst of online grass roots political action facilitated by Internet-based grassroots activist groups such as Moveon.org. In it lies the potential for an emergent participatory democracy until recently thought to be impossible in a large-scale political system. We begin our analysis with a look at political theorizing to date about participatory democracy and the arguments against its realization. This is followed by the development of a theory that Internet-savvy groups promote bottom up identification of issues, aggregate vast numbers of opinions and translate them into political action aimed at carefully targeted governing entities. These Internet groups have the potential for overcoming the scaling and deliberation obstacles to an emergent participatory democracy and this emergent democracy may be sufficient to check the anti-democratic forces that have tended to undermine our system of government. To make our basic hypothesis more concrete, we recount an instance of the emergent process and the pivotal role played in it by Moveon.org, namely, the 2003 public uprising against FCC rules changes that would permit further anti-democratic media concentration. We then describe the genesis of the MoveOn organization, its modus operandi, and its unique leadership. From our observations about MoveOn.org and other such groups, we infer certain attributes of what we have denominated facilitator networks or, for convenience, f-nets, that allow f-nets to connect with their members, traditional public interest groups and other f-nets to produce an interface between governing institutions and citizens that is necessary to a healthy democratic system. Throughout we acknowledge the central need for a systematic investigation of the many questions raised by our hypothesis. We conclude the essay with a list of questions that must be answered if our hypothesis about f-nets is to be turned into a persuasive case for an emergent participatory democracy.

I. Emergent Participatory Democracy and Its Feasibility[3]

A. Visions of ”True” Democracy
Legions of learned scholars have written elegantly and prolifically about “democracy,” but only a few hardy souls had the foresight and the courage to steadfastly insist that “participatory democracy” is possible even in the face of seemingly irrefutable evidence that participatory democracy is impossible in complex, large-scale systems. In 1960, Arnold Kaufman, a philosopher at the University of Michigan called for a set of participatory institutions parallel to representative and countervailing institutions.[4] In 1970, Caroline Pateman countered arguments against participation based on strawman attacks on “the classical doctrine of democracy” and wrote of real examples of participation in the workplace.[5]

Interestingly, scholars from the field of administration and management identified what could become the primary facilitating mechanism of participatory democracy without even talking about democracy per se. “Servant leadership,” a concept according to which leaders are servants first, was articulated by Robert Greenleaf in 1970.[6] Later, Larry Spears, CEO of the Greenleaf Center, connected the idea of servant leadership to emergence and to participation as follows: “As we near the end of the twentieth century, we are beginning to see that traditional autocratic and hierarchical modes of leadership are slowly yielding to a newer model – one that attempts to simultaneously enhance the personal growth of workers and improve the quality and caring of our many institutions through a combination of teamwork and community, personal involvement in decision making, and ethical and caring behavior.”[7] As is explained below, the notion of servant leadership, or what we choose to view as facilitation of an agenda set by group members, is central to our f-net hypothesis.

In 1984, Benjamin Barber pointed out that great advances in communications technology like the telephone and television demonstrated that scale was in effect “elastic” and that nations someday would be reduced to villages. In a truly prophetic way, he added, "Once it is understood that the problem of scale is susceptible to technological and institutional melioration and that political communities are human networks rooted in communication, scale becomes a tractable challenge rather than an insuperable barrier.”[8] Barber’s observations predated and were made well before the Internet and well before the uprising on the Internet. In 1996, David Held, in the second edition of his work "Models of Democracy," proposed as one of his "experiments" the enhancement of mechanisms that inform professional politicians about citizens' views and preferences through email and bulletin boards.[9] But, in 1994, even before those brave predictions, Steven Clift began turning theory into practice with the founding of Minnesota E-Democracy with its focus on participation in public space (commons) and the facilitating power of cyberspace.[10]

These stouthearted keepers of the faith believed that citizen participation is the absolutely necessary condition to solving the ills of paternalistic democracies and achieving a healthy civic culture.[11] They also conveyed a distant and unspecified vision of the technological and institutional means to achieve that solution. Still, as late as the mid-1990’s, no one seems to have foreseen and appreciated the empowering nature of the Internet and the citizen participation that it unchained. It has yet to sink into the general public consciousness that this is a veritable watershed juncture in history. Many people continue to regard the Internet as high tech gadgetry - at its best in eBay or stock market quotes and at its worst in Spam and dot coms.

B. Is the Search for Participatory Democracy Really a Dead-End?

A healthy democracy, in which the governed and the governors are very much one, depends on the diversity and competition of institutions and ideas that operate to ensure that no single institution or idea can tyrannize the others. This is the doctrine of the balance of powers in a complex society with multiple institutions and a multitude of competing views and preferences. By these measures, American democracy is ailing.[12] Symptoms include bitterly contested election outcomes (such as the 2000 presidential election), the erosion of civil liberties, corruption in high places, repressive government secrecy, global isolation, a widening of the gap between rich and poor, failing domestic and foreign programs, widespread distrust of government and politicians, a mainstream media that reports what it is told with little regard for the truth or for opposing viewpoints, and most especially increasing public dissatisfaction with and growing disengagement from the political process.[13]

A major source of the ailments is the natural regression of paternalistic countervailing power systems toward imbalance, as in the contemporary domination of institutions and ideas by large corporations, concentrated wealth, and un-elected shadow governments. Our perspective is that representative government with countervailing institutions provides a tenuous degree of stability and that it is inherently vulnerable to a concentration and abuse of power. We believe the antidote is a rebalancing of the system through an infusion of citizen participation, which is the only way a system can achieve and maintain a balance of powers that enables people to achieve their potential as individuals and as a collective. Change must come from the people – the only truly independent source of power in the system. The many proponents of participatory democracy share this conviction.[14] However, most also believe change through wider participation ultimately must be sanctioned by the same system sought to be changed and the special interests that are served by the existing system can effectively prevent change. In short, it has often appeared that the great quest for participatory democracy and the solution to the problems with America’s democracy leads to a dead-end. We do not accept this bleak assessment. In our judgment, the means to the expanded citizen participation that theorists have lamented will forever elude us may be found in the waves of grass roots Internet-based political participation that has been occurring right under our noses.[15]

II. The Media Rules Uprising As An Example of Emergent Democracy[16]

On June 2, 2003, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced rules changes that would result in the greatest relaxation of media ownership limitations in thirty years.[17] The rules had been promulgated in a 3-2 vote in a secretive process that only nominally included any public input. In the opinion of FCC Chair, Michael Powell, the FCC’s charge is to resolve matters that predominantly involve the competing interests of industry (which to Powell meant to leave regulation to the “invisible hand of the marketplace”) and the commission has no responsibility to pay heed to vague notions of the public interest. Somewhat ironically, given the authors belief in the power of Internet-based grassroots political activity to combat special interests, the FCC majority pointed to the increased channels of communication made possible by the Internet to support the rules changes. The fact is, however that the media conglomerates that control radio and television outlets also have websites that because of “brand recognition” tend to be the most visited “news” sources on the Internet. In any event, the courts and Congress disagreed with the FCC. On July 23, the House of Representatives voted 400 to 21 to roll back the ownership cap to 35 percent. On September 3rd, 2003, the United States Court of Appeal for the Third Circuit granted an emergency stay barring the FCC from putting the new rules into effect,[18] offering as one of its reasons "the magnitude of this matter and the public's interest in reaching the proper resolution."[19] Soon thereafter, on September 16, 2003, the United States Senate, passed a resolution of disapproval, a procedure invoked only once before in its history, effectively repealing all the new regulations.[20]

To the chagrin of many, media lobbyists continued to push for rules changes that would allow greater concentration of ownership and control and they were successful in getting the cap raised from 35 to 39 percent.[21] Consequently, efforts to make the Third Circuit’s emergency stay permanent will not succeed. But, what is of immediate importance here is not whether the rules’ roll back effort was ultimately successful. Indeed, focusing on the short term success or failure of any given grassroots effort is inappropriate because of the difficulties of measuring success or failure in particular circumstances and, more importantly, because the online grassroots phenomenon that the authors believe has the potential to cure the ills of our ailing democracy is only in its incipiency and judgments based on specific “wins and losses” are premature.

Rather, we have chosen this rather extraordinary instance of large numbers of citizens rising up and, at least temporarily, succeeding in overturning action by a governing entity with which they disagreed, for what it has to offer by way of informing our thinking about the emergent participatory democracy that we have posited is upon us and which could serve as a check on abuses of power by governing bodies. Although the FCC is a duly constituted and appointed regulatory agency that in theory is to act independently of the media industry it is charged with regulating, it is fair to say that the commission acted largely at the behest of the large media conglomerates who had the most to gain from the changes. To this extent, the FCC actions may be characterized as the product of the un-elected, unaccountable shadow government that is a root cause of our ailing democracy. Consequently, the rules roll back may be seen as an example of extended citizen participation serving as a check on the anti-democratic forces at work in our system of government. What remains is to investigate further how the uprising happened – what forces and entities contributed to its happening – and seek to generalize from what is learned to the wider political landscape.

A. Dynamics of the FCC Rules Uprising

An exploration of the dynamics of the FCC rules uprising could start with the demonstration on September 4th, 2003 outside FCC headquarters by fifteen members of Code Pink, a Washington, D.C.-based grassroots organization that often engages in rather unorthodox direct action.[22] However, in fact, this demonstration was more celebratory than influential. The real action had begun and had continued for months before and after the rules changes were promulgated and was engaged in by a remarkable coalition of traditional public and private interest groups that made its displeasure known through both offline conventional methods and online activities largely spearheaded by MoveOn.org.

In truth, it is not exactly clear what accounted for the uprising. The FCC majority certainly did the bare minimum required by law to make the proposed rules changes known to the public. Not surprisingly, the mainstream media did little to call attention to the proposed rules changes or to invite debate about them. We are able to identify many of the principal actors and what actions they took. Four groups, the Consumers Union and the Consumers Federation of America, two very traditional public interest groups, and the Media Access Project and the Center for Digital Democracy, the former a legal action-oriented group and the latter an online group organized to study the media, seem to have been the initial instigators of the “campaign” against the FCC rules changes. The Media Access Project filed the lawsuit that led to the Third Circuit handing down the emergency stay. Many other groups from both ends of the ideological spectrum also joined the fray. One such group was the Conference of Catholic Bishops, which had long been engaged in opposing what it viewed as objectionable content in the media. The Parents Television Council, an organization with some 800,000 members that monitors alleged indecency on television, joined with the Consumers Union, a longtime advocate of media reform, in an editorial published in the New York Daily News urging that the FCC rules changes would undermine community-oriented communications critical to our democracy. The rules changes were a topic of discussion at a Common Cause conference attended both by people off the street and experts on media reform, such as the founders of the Free Press organization. Labor organizations, such as the Writers Guild and AFTRA, provided resources and manpower needed to get the word out. Of considerable importance, Michael Coops, one of the two dissenting FCC commissioners, held informal public hearings on the rules changes.

We also know some of the apparent motives of those who joined the uprising. Many, such as the media reform groups, opposed the rules changes as part of a longer standing opposition to concentrations of control of the media. The more conservative groups apparently believed that ownership of the media by a few large conglomerates would mean a loss of community input into media content and that reduced local influence meant sex and violence on the levels permitted and promoted by Hollywood. The common thread among the opposition groups appeared to be a belief that too much control in too few hands was bad for democracy. It seems the opposition was not only widespread, but passionate as well. Much of the passion may be attributed to the strength of the participants’ beliefs on the merits. But, unquestionably the passion was fueled by the arrogance of Michael Powell and his disdain for public opinion.[23] The passion of those who joined the uprising certainly helped to sustain and energize the opposition.

More germane to this essay, what appears to have turned a loose coalition of disparate groups and believers into a cohesive, widespread citizens’ campaign that produced an unprecedented legislative response was the involvement of the Internet-based political advocacy group MoveOn.org. The role of MoveOn.org in the uprising has been recounted in numerous newspaper and journal articles.[24] As it became clear that the FCC majority had determined to make the rules changes despite an increasing stream of public commentary opposing the changes, the MoveOn.org staff took the matter to its membership. Over several weeks, a series of characteristically concise and to the point messages were communicated to the MoveOn.org members (who sent them on to their associates and friends). These messages laid out the salient facts – the FCC was about to significantly increase the percentage of media outlets that could be owned by a single corporate conglomerate and the resulting concentration of control threatened the open exchange of diverse points of view that is central to a healthy democracy – and urged recipients to act immediately to challenge the FCC action by signing petitions, sending e-mail, letters and faxes, and making phone calls to the FCC, using contact information provided by MoveOn.org. When the FCC pushed ahead, the campaign shifted and opposition was directed at Congress. One of the many communications sent by the MoveOn.org staff to supporters (and by them to others as well) is set out in Appendix A. The result was literally millions of e-mail messages, faxes, letters, phone calls and ultimately stacks of petitions expressing collective outrage at the FCC action and leading to the rollback described earlier.

III. Facilitator Nets (F-Nets) and an Emergent Participatory Democracy

From time to time during periods of political crises, citizens have stepped around representative government and burst into intensive grass roots political action. The battle to defeat destructive media concentration may be seen as one of those times. However, this citizen uprising was qualitatively different from its predecessors in critical ways. There were similarities to rebellions of the past in which dissenters hit the streets and marched on Washington. Thus, many traditional advocacy groups galvanized around a common belief that the FCC rules changes threatened the basic right to the free exchange of ideas that is at the core of democratic government. And, these groups employed traditional tools of protest, including legal action. But, something else was going on. A new, ultimately decisive ingredient was added to the mix. That ingredient, made possible by Internet-based high speed communications, was a new kind of advocacy entity, MoveOn.org, that knew how to use the technology and exploit its organizing power to aggregate and transform widespread, but diverse and dispersed, opposition to political influence, the likes of which has not been witnessed before. As FCC Chair Powell lamented, the political decision making process driven by those who disdainfully rejected the need to pay heed to the public interest had been disrupted by legions of citizens operating outside the closed doors of the FCC and who demanded that their voices be heard.[25]

We are not suggesting that the derailing of the FCC’s action would have occurred without the involvement of many traditional advocacy groups engaging in conventional means of protest. We are asserting that if MoveOn.org had not entered the battle and facilitated the coalition of forces that produced an unprecedented deluge of e-mail messages and faxes that culminated in the physical delivery of hundreds of thousands of petitions expressing opposition to and outrage against the FCC rules changes then the roll back of the changes quite likely would not have happened.

The observation that the technology and groups skilled in using it are dramatically impacting social and political discourse is not made for the first time here.[26] Millions of information age civilians are hitting the information highways with the message that their desires and expertise can no longer be ignored. Unlike previous movements, political actions in this new medium are at once more immediate, more informed, shorter in duration, more focused, and more highly targeted through innovative Internet technologies and collegial leadership. Participation also is different because activists move in and out as they pursue their own lives and careers. In effect, the front lines are manned by a rotating citizen vanguard. The result is that the movement is very broad-based and democratic in its composition and in important ways is the antithesis of elitist theories of social movements.

Nor are we the first to recognize that the political power of citizens coming out of this phenomenon lies not simply in voting but in huge virtual crowds that appear with some regularity at the doorsteps of the White House, Congress, and state governmental offices, and which are made possible by independence, connectivity, communication skills, experience, knowledge, skills, lightning-fast responses, and collectively very deep pocketed fund raising. Unlike the public rallies and demonstrations of earlier days, this uprising through the Internet targets every influence point in the system, including the executive, Congress, the courts, the media, corporations, and the public itself. Its tools include bulletins, issue forums, petitions, vigils, demonstrations and rallies, boycotts, litigation, lobbying, media ads, candidate support, letter writing campaigns, independent polling, and sign, banner, and flyer campaigns.[27]

We do believe, however, that we are among the first to predict that the Internet-based citizen action phenomenon that we have been describing will become an independent force in American politics powerful enough to check over-reaching governments and corporations[28] and to argue that in this phenomenon lies the solution to the problem of large scale participatory democracy that has eluded philosophers for centuries because they simply could not have foreseen today's army of educated, informed, and technically savvy citizens armed with virtually unlimited connectivity on the Internet. To this extent, the FCC media battle may be understood as but one important instance of a phenomenon that offers the potential for curing our ailing democracy by greatly expanding participation in the political process. A complete case for these rather bold assertions will require an extensive and systematic research effort such as that which the authors have planned for the future. Our more modest objective here is to make a preliminary case for our basic hypothesis by sharing what we know about MoveOn.org as something of a paradigm of the f-nets we envision, draw some inferences as to the more important attributes of such f-nets, and offer some tentative conclusions about the extent to which these f-nets will emerge to assist in restoring the balance necessary to a healthy democracy.

IV. MoveOn.org – What’s It All About?[29]

Moveon.org is headed up by the husband and wife team, Wes Boyd and Joan Blades, of Berkeley, California. It began in 1998 as an effort to force a Republican-dominated Congress to censure President Clinton and move on to the more pressing business of the country. The genesis of the campaign consisted largely of friends and family who shared the belief that Congress was mired in a tawdry effort to smear President Clinton and remove him from office for personal indiscretions that had little to do with his ability to govern. The core group consisted of less than 100 family and friends and within weeks grew to include hundreds of thousands of citizens who signed a petition that very simply asked Congress to censure and move on. Remarkably, the list of contacts and participants expanded largely by “word of mouth” and without the use of unsolicited electronic mail messages. MoveOn.org has been vigilant in protecting the privacy of the members of the MoveOn community[30] and even now, when its contact list numbers more than two million it has refused to release that list to groups that share many of its goals, including the Democratic Party. MoveOn.org was initially financed from the founders’ own pockets and, with some recent exceptions for large media campaigns, Moveon.org continues to be financed by small donations from its two million plus domestic and foreign supporters.

Among the most intriguing attributes of MoveOn.org is its leadership structure. For most of its existence, there have been only six or seven leaders at the top level of Moveon and facilitators (“servant leaders”) are distributed throughout the organization. There is no specific physical location or headquarters for MoveOn.org. Wes Boyd and Joan Blades work out of an office in their home in Berkeley. Other leaders reside across the country and work out of virtual offices. Rank and file Moveon workers are volunteers and the operation and campaign costs are generally absorbed by the Moveon supporters. Administrative and operations costs are comparatively very low. At the same time, Moveon has demonstrated the ability to quickly generate large sums of money from subscribers for campaigns and for political candidates.

Wes Boyd describes the structure of Moveon as being more organic than mechanistic and flat rather than hierarchical. Leaders and participants are thought of more as colleagues and peers than leaders and followers. Moveon leaders see their role as facilitators. They are listening and serving types and traditional fast talking salesman types are not even considered for leadership positions. But, it would be inaccurate to assume that MoveOn.org’s leaders do not lead in certain conventional ways. They do endeavor to identify those issues that are in the minds of supporters most in need of attention. This was clearly true as to the Clinton impeachment travesty out of which MoveOn.org began. MoveOn.org’s leaders also have led the way in developing media watch campaigns, such as one that led to an admission by the President of the Baseball Hall of Fame that he was in the wrong in excluding from a Hall of Fame ceremony the highly-acclaimed film “Bull Durham” because of the political outspokenness of the movie’s stars, Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins. Other examples abound.[31] Generally speaking, the leaders ask the MoveOn community of supporters for their reaction to questionable decisions or policies in gauging the need for group action. Even when MoveOn.org appears to have joined in a battle that had already begun, such as was the case as to the FCC rules’ change fray, its leaders have taken the initiative in settling on specific tactics.

As explained by Wes Boyd, the role of leaders is to frame the issues in such a way as to give people the information they need and to capture their preferences for speedy and convenient action. Moveon leaders are profoundly sensitive to the potential costs of bureaucratization and because of the threat to its collegial organization they have repeatedly resisted pressures to organize campaigns by regions, state, and local area. Likewise, the leadership must constantly balance the desire to expand the scope of its activities[32] against the tendency of such expansion to require a more top down organizational structure.[33] Two of MoveOn.org’s more ambitious undertakings, MisLeader (a daily chronicle of Bush Administration distortion) and BushGreenwatch (tracking the environmental misdeeds of the Bush Administration), have been completely or substantially outsourced.[34]

Moveon.org basically invented and implemented a bubble-up issue forum, called ActionForum, through which members identify the issues they feel are most important and urgent and the issues are ranked in terms of importance.[35] According to Wes Boyd this technology, which randomly “polls” the MoveOn community members periodically and generates reports that are regularly distributed to the leadership, has been very successful and the Moveon leadership depends on it for a continuous reading of MoveOn community concerns. Although it would be difficult to sustain a claim that MoveOn.org is completely bottom up, its organizational and leadership structure and the use of technology such as ActionForum demonstrate it is very different from traditional top down public interest groups.

Wes Boyd has reported that he thinks some of the nets that Moveon has interacted with are similar in structure and stance to MoveOn, but he does not know for certain that this is so or to what extent. It is possible to identify entities that exhibit at least some of MoveOn.org’s f-net characteristics. Among them are Steven Clift’s Minnesota E-Democracy, with its focus on “public commons” and cyberspace-facilitating role,[36] Lawrence Lessig’s Creative Commons project, with its focus on linking creative people and ideas,[37] and Howard Dean’s on-line presidential campaign, an obvious groundbreaker in electronic grass roots fund raising.[38] To this list could be added the True Majority,[39] Win Without War,[40] and the Peace Action Coalition,[41] all of which are Internet-based but are somewhat more issue selective.

Many traditional public interests group, among them Common Cause, [42] People for the American Way (PFAW),[43] NARAL[44] and a range of environmental groups[45] all are developing a strong online presence and are looking more like Moveon.org, except that their top-down structure remains largely intact. “Meetup” is an online service that facilitates individuals and groups getting together offline[46] that was effectively employed by the Dean Campaign.[47] The scope of Meetup is greater than politics and it does not function as an f-net per se, but it is an effective tool for connecting people to each other and to f-nets and the political system. The use of the Meetup technology acknowledges that for the foreseeable future there must be a significant amount of offline activity to supplement what happens online. Some observers have hypothesized an ecosystem of networks in which different networks support different sorts of activity, including creative as distinguished from systematic and applied action.[48] On this “creative level” we may well find hundreds, perhaps thousands of weblogs dedicated to politics that must compete in the “blogosphere” for attention.[49] The point is that there already are all kinds of nets out there and each type may play a different role in connecting people to each other and to the political system.

The f-net model envisions the need for a “super layer” of aggregation as an important part of the interface between the emergence process and the political system. This super layer consists of ad hoc coalitions and other cooperative arrangements among f-nets. Our continuing study of Moveon.org has revealed that there already is a substantial amount of collaboration and cooperation going on among different networks and groups. The most common situation appears to involve cooperation among two or three groups on a campaign initiated by one of them. Consistent with the emergence theme, most of the collaboration to date has been more spontaneous and ad hoc than systematic and planned.

V. From MoveOn.org to F-Nets

In this part we attempt to infer from our observations of MoveOn.org and related online entities some of the essential features of a functioning and effective f-net.

A. What F-Nets Are and What They Are Not

It is helpful to note what f-nets are not. They are not “little emergent democracies” or little political systems and they are not groups, organizations, or institutions in the traditional sense. Neither must they have sprung from traditional public interest organizations, although most such organizations have tooled up to use the Internet and the power and influence of some such organizations has been increased by the existence and operations of f-nets. Some of the traditional public service organizations may take on certain of the characteristics of facilitator nets, but they still tend to be top-down and bureaucratic in structure, which is the antithesis of facilitator nets.

Moreover, F-nets are not the creators of the emergent process. F-nets may or may not be catalysts of political action. But, they do facilitate such action once it has begun. This was certainly true of the campaign to roll back the FCC rules changes. Like the pearl in the oyster, all of the potential, the ingredients, and the means to create something unique exist, but as with the pearl it takes something akin to a grain of sand to allow it to happen. In the emergence process, the grains of sand are the f-nets. The nets do not make the process anymore than the grain of sand made the pearl.

In the future we plan to research and, perhaps, even model the process by which f-nets come into being. The more that is known about their origins, the more we can know about the basic nature of f-nets. We believe that most f-nets will spring into being as the result of the actions of one or two concerned citizens responding to special circumstances. Such was the case with MoveOn.org. Wes Boyd and Joan Blades were acting out of deep frustration to an ideology driven impeachment effort. But, we suspect that an f-net also may be less situation-specific and stem from the evolution of an entity of longer standing dedicated to more general concerns, such as civil rights, women’s rights and environmental groups. An f-net may be initially financed by its founders and continue to be internally financed for some undetermined period of time. MoveOn.org was financed out of the pockets of Wes Boyd and Joan Blades and most of its financing continues to be raised from its supporters. However, an f-net that has evolved from an existing public interest group may have other sources of funding. The question of whether a public interest advocacy organization fits our conception of an f-net is conceptually separate from the “visibility” or “prominence” of the entity. An f-net may be large or small, high or low profile, and have little or great influence in the political system.

In our judgment, informed by our observations of MoveOn.org, the truly distinguishing features of f-nets pertain to their structure, leadership and agenda formulation. Structurally, f-nets are more organic than mechanistic and their administrative structure is flat rather than hierarchical. Likewise, their agendas emerge from the bottom up rather than from the top down. In ways that are not yet understood and will be the subject of future research, f-net decisions are made through a complex exchange of preferences, options and choices between primary leadership figures and MoveOn community members and secondary leaders dispersed throughout the organization. Political events, such as the actions of the FCC and its chair, Michael Powell, may fuel f-net activity. But, supporters, with or without input from traditional public interests groups and their leaders, play a central role in identifying governmental activity that demands a response. The community members pass the information along to others, including f-net leaders, who work together to develop strategies that exploit the power of the Internet to bring to bear the bottom up power of large numbers of citizens.

So viewed, it may be said that everything, including f-net leadership emerges rather than being imposed from above. Leaders and participants are colleagues and peers. People's preferences and choices make for leaders, not the other way around. Rather than handing down and enforcing thou-shalt and thou-shalt not commandments, the role of leadership is to facilitate the will of participants. Leaders are message carriers to other nets and ultimately to the political system. The job of leaders is to frame the issues in such manner as to give people the information they need and to capture their preferences for action. The relationship between leaders and participants in facilitator nets turns the conventional sales pyramid upside down. Instead of branching downward and outward from the top to sell a bunch of products to benefit the people at the top of the pyramid, the process is one of funneling views and preferences from a broad base to a narrow top where ideas are turned into action for the benefit of all.

The MoveOn leadership understands that listening is an essential ingredient of emergent democracy for leaders and community members alike. From listening comes empathy and understanding. Benjamin Barber notes that, "It is far easier for representatives to speak for us than to listen for us" (or to us).[50] Regarding its relationship to equality, he says, "Listening is a mutualistic art that by its very practice enhances equality." Listening, therefore, is the acid test of leadership in f-nets. If leaders lapse into traditional roles, stop listening, or otherwise get out of tune with community members, an f-net will cease to get the attention and support necessary to its existence. Yet, the listening process is complex and not well understood. Leaders cannot listen to what would be a cacophony of suggestions and pleas by millions of speakers. They must filter out those messages that reflect a broad-based consensus for action. Again, exactly how this happens (or does not happen) so as to result in actions that have wide grassroots’ support (or not) is a process that needs careful research.

It is clear to us that an essential ingredient of MoveOn’s success is that the community members trust the leadership and each other. Most of those who sign on have neither the time nor the inclination to verify the claims upon which the pleas for action are based. MoveOn community members early on were labeled “five minute activists.”[51] They generally have drawn little support from the mainstream media.[52] What moves the community members to lend their names (and often their money) to a campaign must be confidence in the factual reliability of what they are told and the wisdom of the actions they are asked to take must be trust. Why the community members have such trust is a nice question demanding of further research. Perhaps, it is that they trust in the process rather than the leaders and facilitators personally. Or, the trust may be attributable to experience. It is safe to assume that if a MoveOn campaign were ever shown to be based on unreliable information or MoveOn community members were ever induced to take inappropriate action then MoveOn.org would cease to be as effective as it has been. The same may be said for any other f-net. It will not be effective without the trust of its supporters.

Closely related to the matter of trust, it seems, is the quality of transparency. Transparency is understood to be essential to a healthy democratic process.[53] Our system has broken down because of an increasing degree of secrecy characterized by behind closed doors decisions by unknown decision makers all done in the name of national security or other such pretext for keeping people from knowing the facts and excluding them from the decision-making process. The ongoing controversy with regard to Vice President Cheney’s energy advisory committee is a telling example.[54] Although much of MoveOn’s internal workings are concealed and MoveOn zealously guards the privacy of its community members, including especially its subscriber list and demographic information, MoveOn’s agenda, the reasons for its actions or failure to act, and many of the specifics of its day-to-day activities are open and readily accessible. For an online organization to satisfy our conception of an f-net it must be similarly open.

Much attention has been given to the subject of voter apathy and its causes. The “rational ignorance” theory as to the lack of participation[55] posits that an individual could rationally decide that the costs of becoming an informed voter and going to the polls outweigh the likelihood that an individual vote will make a difference in the outcome of an election. The MoveOn experience indicates that the theory has been turned upside down and people have rationally chosen to join in because they can trust in what they are hearing and because they believe that their actions can make a difference.[56]

B. How F- Nets Do What They Do

As has been explained, the general role of the f-nets in emergent democracy is to facilitate citizen input, ameliorate the scaling problem, aggregate opinions, and translate community members’ views into action in the political system. Accomplishing those aims requires unique, innovative programs and technologies. The challenge for these programs and technologies is to deal with the scaling (quantity) and deliberation (quality) problems by meeting the participants half way. The mission of f-nets, independently or in cooperation with more traditional groups, is to monitor and respond to pending legislation, media reports, and government actions that are perceived to be antithetical to the interests of citizens. Surveillance and quick response are central to this “watchdog” mission. Timely response entails an on-going outreach program primarily through campaigns launched on home sites and email to community members. Actions include petitions, mailings, phone banks, and fund-raising campaigns.

Fund raising is a rapidly growing program for some f-nets, especially those that are registered PACs and 527 organizations.[57] This includes support permitted by FEC rules for political parties, public interest campaigns, and selected individual political candidates. The case study of Moveon.org has demonstrated that raising large amounts of money can be extraordinarily fast and easy depending on the issue and timing. In its “We Will Remember” campaign, MoveOn.org was able to raise millions of dollars to target members of Congress who led the Clinton impeachment effort and to support their challengers. In its campaign opposing military action against Iraq, MoveOn.org once again raised millions to fund major advertisements and it has had similar success with its campaign to finance ads that expose the truth regarding the Bush Administration’s proffered reasons for going to war. What is notable about these and other significant fund raising efforts[58] is that the vast majority of contributions were from small donors. Most recently, MoveOn.org appears to have departed from the small donor model by accepting a five million dollar donation from George Soros, but even this gift was entirely within the spirit of the small donor model because the Soros dollars were offered as a match for each dollar contributed by small donors, thereby expanding the base of support.[59]

To the extent that the ills of democracy today are largely due to the concentration of wealth and abuse of the power that goes with it,[60] this emergent phenomenon could be a powerful citizens’ antidote. As Christopher Lyndon puts it, “Who is going to decode the Internet transformation of American politics? Not, alas, the New York Times… No mention that a huge base of small-sum Internet donors has demonstrated how to wipe the corrupting stain of money off democracy--a much more cleansing, practical, citizen-driven reform than the late, lumbering and maybe unenforceable McCain-Feingold legislation.”[61]

There is no scarcity of potential participation actions in which f-nets can become involved. The literature contains many interesting ideas, such as deliberative polling, exploring incentives for increasing deliberative participation, and jury-like task forces.[62] However, until recently such proposals sat on the shelf because they required top-down sanctions, direction, and implementation. Technological advances have begun to remove this obstacle. We need only to pull them off the shelf and give them a whirl. One of the more interesting such experiments involves a mechanism created by the authors and labeled “Citizen-Initiated Polls” or CIPs.[63] CIPs are offered as a response to the inability of citizens generally to express their opinions otherwise than through carefully orchestrated and typically simplistic and distinctly non-deliberative polls commissioned by the mainstream media or political parties and which are widely perceived as producing results that fail to capture the scope and intensity of opinions of large numbers of citizens.[64]

All f-net programs operate entirely within the existing constitutional structure, the only authority necessary being the right to free speech and the right to petition and assemble. Of course, it is possible that citizens in the future could decide that it is necessary to make some changes in the governmental structure. For example, they may decide that citizens would be better represented by a proportional representation system and they could pursue that end through grassroots action facilitated by f-nets.

C. F-Nets as Facilitators and the Technologies that Assist Them

F-Nets seek to facilitate the actions of their members and other groups to influence the decision making process, either directly by influencing decision makers, such as representatives and heads of corporations, or indirectly by supporting decision-makers who are known to support the positions taken by f-nets in response to their memberships or by widening public support through the media and ad campaigns. Direct influence actions include petitions, telephone calls, faxes, and demonstrations (real and virtual). Indirect influence actions include fund raising for political candidates and political parties, for legal actions in support of individuals and groups, and media ads. Other indirect technologies include letters to the editor and other publications and sign and banner campaigns.

F-nets deftly exploit the Internet and related technologies to permit the nets to initiate and target actions and to sustain those actions. Some are organized and executed entirely on-line. Some are organized on-line and executed mostly off-line (“on-the-ground”). Others are organized on-line and executed on and off-line. This combining of new and old forms of political action through new technologies is a major feature of emergent democracy. The campaign to roll back the FCC rules changes aptly illustrates the ways in which various traditional and online actions combined and ultimately coalesced through the efforts of the leading existing f-net of today, Moveon.org.

Actions also can be categorized by their primary purpose. Where that purpose is early detection of and quick response to legislation or other governmental decisions that are inimical to the public interest then actions are reactive and f-nets are facilitating watchdog activity. Where the purpose is to change laws or regulatory policies, then actions are proactive and the f-nets are facilitating reform activity. To date, f-nets have been engaged primarily in facilitating watchdog actions. The battle over the FCC rules changes is a prime example. But, in theory, there is nothing to prevent more proactive f-net activity.

To facilitate monitoring or reform activity, f-nets have been employing a range of technologies that assist in investigation, fact finding, and analysis on behalf of participants and enable ready response to the issue priorities that have been set. These technologies are still developing. Speedy action has been facilitated by the automation of methods for targeting particular governmental actors. The aim is to maximize the effectiveness of campaigns by reaching as many members as possible, as quickly as possible, and to enable members to take specific action with the least effort and expenditure of time.

Of course, the complex configuration of physical computers, gateways and telephonic and wide band connections of which the Internet is comprised is the core enabling technology. The technologies also include now familiar e-mail and list servers. But, more sophisticated software and online services that assist in recruitment of members and perform specialized aggregation and targeting functions may well spell the difference between the success or failure of f-nets. MoveOn.org has for some time employed a product called “Get Active.”[65] Most recently, perhaps, personalized weblogs[66] and the group-oriented “meet up” tools, discussed above,[67] have enriched communications and connectivity among various groups and group members and the f-nets that support such communications and connectivity.

There is a critical need for effective aggregation technology that allows the staff to respond to quality ideas and suggestions that originate with the members. MoveOn’s ActionForum, discussed earlier,[68] represents an important step in the direction of managing a large volume of community member input and further the objective of member-driven as opposed to top down agendas. But, although the MoveOn staff has made good use of the information captured by the ActionForum in its present form there is no doubt that the device can be improved upon.

There is much more that can and should be said about the technology necessary to make the f-net phenomenon an effective remedy to the ills of our democracy. However, a complete discussion must be left to later research and reporting. Enough has been said here to make the point that the various technologies together must serve a two-fold purpose. The first is to produce a new breed of citizen participants that, as noted above,[69] have been referred to as “five minute” activists. This label captures the important reality that citizens generally must be provided with the information they need to take effective political action and be empowered to do so quickly and conveniently. The notion of a “five minute activist” might suggest a large group of participants who are not sufficiently committed to a plan of action to overcome the many reactionary forces that can be expected to resist the action. However, what the authors envision is a dynamic phenomenon characterized by literally millions of participants none of whom is deeply engaged all of the time but many of whom are so engaged some of the time. The other purpose that must be served by the technologies is coalescing of the efforts of many f-nets to produce a “network of networks” that brings the power of often diverse groups to bear to correct an ill that the groups are in agreement must be remedied.

D. From F-Nets to Emergent Democracies

In an ideal world, the Internet will remain independent with full universal access. New f-nets will mimic older f-nets, such that views and preferences flow from the bottom up to the leadership and outward into the political system. Internet use will be universal. There will be no “digital divides” and f-net participants will be representative of the whole population. Citizen participation will be high and constant in the future. Facilitator nets will be sufficiently abundant to ensure that a diversity of views and preferences of citizens are expressed. A few f-nets will not monopolize the attention of citizens, although some will gain and hold more attention than others. But all f-nets will remain independent and flexible and will not evolve into top-down hierarchical organizations.

Further, in an ideal world, f-nets will have sufficient independent power to re-balance the American political system and act as an on-going check on the abuse of power by other institutions. Eventually, the antidote to the ailing democracy in the form of emergent participatory democracy made possible by the Internet in the United States at the national level could cure ailments in local political systems and in global political systems.

It is not known at this time the extent to which our assertions about the necessary attributes of f-nets actually will withstand rigorous scrutiny. Finding out will require extensive research. Among the first steps in that research will be creating an inventory and typology of existing f-nets and an in depth study of Moveon.org. That research will entail intensive interviewing of f-net founders, leaders, community members, and eventually the targets of political advocacy facilitated by the f-nets.

VI. A Host of Open Questions

While Moveon.org may closely approximate an ideal f-net according to many of the criteria discussed above, it is uncertain whether it mirrors an ideal f-net on other important criteria. Moreover, there are large numbers of unanswered questions about the larger system, all of which will require systematic research.[70] At the level of individual f-nets, to what extent is Moveon like other f-nets? To what extent do other f-nets fit an ideal f-net model? How will f-nets interface with the political system? Will f-nets remain independent and flexible? Will they devolve into top-down hierarchical organizations? What prophylactic measures can and should be taken to prevent this from happening?

At the level of f-nets, what are the implications of f-net coalitions for the system? How are coalitions and other such arrangements put together? What are the motives of the parties involved? How much are issue agendas and strategies narrowed to accommodate cooperation? How much competition and potential hostility is there among f-nets? Is an umbrella or clearinghouse net (perhaps like Google) likely to emerge? Is it conceivable that f-nets will unite under the aegis of a federation?

At the system level, how did f-nets emerge in the first place? Will a small number of f-nets monopolize the attention of citizens? Will the Internet remain independent with full universal access? To what extent is there a “digital divide” and will it continue? Will the levels of citizen participation be high and constant in the future? Will facilitator nets be sufficiently abundant to ensure the diversity of views and preferences of citizens? Will there be sufficient growth to ensure diversity? Will the collective of f-nets and coalitions become a separate and independent “institution,” like the “fifth estate?” Will facilitator nets have sufficient independent power to re-balance the American political system and act as an on-going check on the abuse of power by other institutions? Can the model of emergent democracy that evolves in the United States be applied successfully in local political systems and in global political systems?

It is too soon to know whether the facilitator network model of emergent democracy as a complex system will stand up to subsequent scrutiny and it is certainly too soon to know whether this model of emergent democracy will in fact “solve” the problems of contemporary and future democratic political systems. But, we can be certain that politics will never be the same and we can hope that future democrats will never again have to endure the same tired arguments about why citizen participation is impossible. As David Weinberger put it so well in his Small Pieces Loosely Joined, “The very "stuff" of the Web is profoundly social and meaningful. It thus lets us see that our traditional realism is not only wrong but dreadfully alienating.”[71]

Appendix A

Dear MoveOn member,

The response to our petition on media monopoly has been enormous. In collaboration with Media Alliance, Global Exchange, and United for Peace and Justice, over 150,000 folks have signed in less than a week, and thousands more sign on every day. For an issue with little media coverage, it's a clear sign that folks are outraged.

But despite growing opposition, FCC Chair Michael Powell seems intent on pushing through the new media rules. His plans, which were released to several media outlets this week, are as bad as we feared -- and they now stand a good chance of becoming official policy.

We need to escalate. Since Chairman Powell won't listen to the public, our Senators need to make him listen. The Senate Commerce Committee has the jurisdiction to hold hearings on and possibly delay the FCC rule change, but it won't use that power without grassroots support.

Your Senator, John McCain, serves on the Commerce Committee and needs to hear from you today. Ask the Senator to stop the FCC's rush to deregulation, hold hearings on the rule change, and work for a diverse, balanced, competitive, and fair media.

Please call your Senator now, at:

Senator John McCain
DC Phone: 202-224-2235

Please let us know when you've made your call at:
http://www.moveon.org/fcccall.html?id=1367-1242645-jbFa4tHk.1ajdteDJROCtg

Chairman Powell is trying to rush through these changes under cover of darkness. But the effects will be very visible: we're moving toward a society in which a few big companies control the entire broadcast media. The Senate's sleeping on the job: please make a call today and help wake them up.

Sincerely,

--Eli Pariser
MoveOn.org
May 15th, 2003

P.S. Here are a few good articles providing the latest details on this issue:

FCC CLOSE TO EASING MEDIA CAPS
GIANT FIRMS WANT TO OWN MORE OUTLETS
San Francisco Chronicle, May 12, 2003
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0512-01.htm

F.C.C. PREPARES TO LOOSEN RULES ON MEDIA OWNERSHIP
New York Times, May 12, 2003
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/13/business/media/13FCC.html

A NEW ERA FOR MEDIA FIRMS?

PUBLIC, PRIVATE INTERESTS CLASH AS REVISION OF OWNERSHIP RULES NEARS
Washington Post, May 12, 2003
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A47349-2003May12.html.

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(Little Brown & Company, 2000)

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Chicago Press: Chicago, 2002).

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Lewis, Charles, The Buying of the President (Harper Collins 2004).

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Mayfield, Ross. (2003) "An Ecosystem of Networks". February 18, 2003, from
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http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20030616.html

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How the Public Can Govern Essential Services (2003)

Pateman Carole, Participation and Democratic Theory (Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, 1970). Pennock, David M., Gary W. Flake*, Steve Lawrence*, Eric J. Glover*, and C. Lee Giles, “Winners don’t take all: Characterizing the competition for links on the web,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 99(8): 5207-5211, April 2002, see also, http://modelingtheweb.com/

Pinker, Steven, the Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (Penguin Books: New York, 2002).

Putnam, Robert, Bowling Alone – The Collapse and Revival of American Community (Simon & Schuster 2000)

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Shirky, Clay, “Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality” at
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Wiley, 1995), http://www.greenleaf.org/leadership/servant-leadership/What-is-Servant-Leadership.html

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[1] Lawrence H. Boyd is a former Professor, School of Social Welfare, The University of California at Berkeley, former Professor of Political Science at Arizona State University, co-founder Berkeley Systems, Inc., Berkeley, California and President of Pasadero, Inc., Tempe, Arizona.

[2] William E. Boyd is a member of the faculty of the James E. Rogers College of Law, The University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona.

[3] The review of scholarship in this section does not purport to be exhaustive and many other works are discussed elsewhere and included in the more complete list of references at the end of this essay.

[4] Kaufman, Arnold, "Human Nature and Participatory Democracy," in Carl J. Friedrich, (Ed.), Responsibility: Nomos III (The Liberal Arts Press, New York, 1960).

[5] Pateman Carole, Participation and Democratic Theory (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1970).

[6] From Greenleaf, “Servant As Leader,” (1970), available at: http://www.greenleaf.org/leadership/servant-leadership/What-is-Servant-Leadership.html.

[7] From the Introduction to Reflections on Leadership (John Wiley, 1995), quoted on the Greenleaf Center home page at http://www.greenleaf.org/leadership/servant-leadership/What-is-Servant-Leadership.html.

[8] Barber, Benjamin R., Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1984).

[9] Held, David, Models of Democracy, 2nd Edition (Stanford University Press, 1996).

[10] Steven Clift, Minnesota E-Democracy at http://www.e-democracy.org/

[11] Fundamental differences in political predisposition underlie all discourse on democracies. On one side is a top-down, paternalistic, elitist, conservative, nay-saying, guardianship, care taking view of human nature and the masses. On the other, is a help them learn for themselves, yay-saying, nurturing, bottom-up, "democratic" perspective. The authors use "democratic" instead of "liberal" as the opposite to "conservative" because virtually all large-scale democracies come down on the side of protection and freedom "from" and are often referred to as "liberal democracies." To avoid that semantic problem, the authors’ call the top-down systems "paternalistic democracies" and the bottom-up systems, “participatory democracies.” George Lakoff provides a social/psychological basis for “paternalistic” and “nurturing” predispositions in child rearing and parenting. See G. Lakoff, Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think. (The University of Chicago Press, 2002). Steven Pinker suggests that these predispositions have roots in hereditary temperaments. See Pinker, Steven, the blank slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (Penguin Books: New York, 2002).

[12] There is an abundance of literature making the point that our system is ailing. Among the efforts the authors have found most useful are B. Barber, Strong Democracy (University of California Press, 1984) (Part I Thin Democracy); R. Dahl, How Democratic is the American Constitution (2001); Debating Deliberative Democracy, edited by J. Fishkin & P. Laslett (Blackwell Press 2003) (Introduction and Ch. 1, B. Ackerman & J. Fishkin, Deliberation Day); D. Held, Models of Democracy (2nd ed. 1996); J. Isaac, Democracy in Dark Times (Cornell University 1998); C. Lewis, The Buying of the President (Center for Public Integrity, 2003); G. Palast, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy (2001); R. Putnam, Bowling Alone– The Collapse and Revival of American Community” (Simon & Schuster, 2001). See also, W. Boyd, “An Ailing Democracy and Large-Scale Political Advocacy as a Possible Antidote,” prepared for the Internet and the Democratic Process seminar, February 11, 2004, and available at: ???

[13] A most revealing indication of a system in need of repair emerges from a comparison of the depiction of a very liberal American society in a well-documented chapter in M. Moore, Dude, Where’s My Country (2003) with the policies and programs of the current presidential administration and congressional majority.

[14] Many of the works referred to in the foregoing text and notes as support for our belief that our system is ailing also conclude that the solution for these ailments lies in more citizen participation. T. Christiano, The Rule of the Many (1996) should be added to those works.

[15] Robert Putnam, in Bowling Alone, supra note 12, argues that although advanced communications technology and the Internet will play a large role in dealing with the problems of democracy the medium suffers from the absence of face-to-face dealings, which the author insists are required in building the trust necessary to a democratic process. As should be apparent from later discussion, the success of MoveOn.org is a refutation of the assertion that face-to-face contact is indispensable. As we point out, online connections can be embellished and strengthened by offline contact, but that is quite different than saying that face-to-face contact is a sine qua non of a healthy democratic process.

[16] Much of the following discussion of the FCC rules change battle is based on Gal Beckerman, “Tripping Up Big Media,” Columbia Journalism Review, Nov. 13, 2003).

[17] 47 CFR Part 73 (August 5, 2003).

[18] Prometheus Radio Project v. Federal Communications Commission, 2003 WL 22052896 (3rd Cir. Sept. 3, 2003.

[19] Id. at __.

[20] Beckerman, supra note 16.

[21] P.L. 108-199, amending § 629 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, approved January 23, 2004. A House bill, HR 4069, that supportive of further changes is currently in committee.

[22] Beckerman, supra note 16.

[23] Beckerman, supra note 16.

[24] See, e.g., Beckerman, supra note 16; M. Goldberg, “MoveOn Moves Up” Salon (December 2003).

[25] Beckerman, supra note 16.

[26] Among the increasing number of books and articles that address the phenomenon, are The Civic Web, edited by D. Anderson & M. Cornfield (2003); D. Bennett & P. Fielding, The Net Effect – How Cyberadvocacy Is Changing the Political Landscape (1999); S. Davis, L. Elin & G. Reeher, Click On Democracy—The Internet’s Power to Change Political Advocacy into Civic Action (Westview Press, 2002); H. Rheingold, Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution (2003); A. Boyd, “The Web Rewires the Movement,” The Nation, Aug. 4, 2003.

[27] See Rheingold, supra note 26.

[28] Others who have contemplated such a development in less explicit terms include: Davis, et al., supra note 26; Rheingold, supra note 26; J. Ito, “Rebuilding Democracy: Can the System Fix Itself” (2002), available at http://joi.ito.com/joiwiki/EmergentDemocracyPaper (which is Ito’s wiki or weblog).

[29] In this section we attempt to identify some of the salient features of MoveOn.org that are most relevant to the f-net entity we envision. Truly understanding MoveOn.org and why and how it functions as well as it does is the subject of a separate research project. See “MoveOn.org – A Paradigm of an Effective Online Grassroots Political Advocacy Organization” (examining MoveOn.org in the context of organizational and social network theory), available at ??. A recent best-selling book, MoveOn’s 50 Ways to Love Your Country – How to Find Your Political Voice And Become A Catalyst For Change (Inner Ocean Publishing 2004), authored by MoveOn, contains 50 individual accounts of how MoveOn has given citizens a sense of empowerment.

[30] Much of the reporting on MoveOn.org refers to its supporters as “members.” Membership in an organization traditionally conceives of members as persons who formally join an organization and commit to the organization in more conventional ways, such as paying annual dues and attending meetings. As is explained more fully below, “membership” in MoveOn departs from this model in important ways, including the fact that MoveOn supporters become “members” simply by subscribing to MoveOn e-mail action alerts and taking requested action as they may deem fit. They may cease to be “members” by “unscribing,” something they may do with great ease. As is explained more fully later, MoveOn “membership” does not fit the traditional mold of membership because it is more fluid in the sense that individuals may support a MoveOn campaign or not as they so choose and a vote of the “membership” is not necessary for the “members” to take collective action. Indeed, it is well understood that not all “members” will be actively engaged on all campaigns and instead individuals will be more or less actively engaged as their schedules and the intensity of their feelings may dictate. For all the foregoing reasons, the authors have chosen to refer to the “MoveOn community” and “members of the MoveOn community.” The concept of a community is important beyond any discussion of MoveOn.org and may well be central to a functioning participatory democracy. Moreover, although we agree with Robert Putnam and others who insist that a large organization whose “members” support actions taken by a centralized and select group of leaders only by paying some modest annual dues and do not otherwise participate in decisions as to what actions to take with respect to which issues is not really a “community.” See R. Putnam, “Bowling Alone, supra note 12. See also, Davis, et al., supra note 26. However, as our use of the description “MoveOn community” indicates, we believe that MoveOn (and organizations that operate the way it does) has those ingredients of community that are important to participatory governance.

[31] See, e.g., Goldberg, supra note 24.

[32] The best way to get a sense of the nature and scope of MoveOn.org activities is to visit http://www.moveon.org and to sign up to receive action updates by submitting your e-mail address.

[33] As to this tendency towards top down organizational structure and employment of the Internet as a means of resisting the tendency, see E. Ehrlich, “Q: What will happen when a national political machine can fit on a laptop? A: See Below,” Wall Street Journal, Sunday, Dec. 14, 2003, at p. B1. In a provocative article, “Smart Mobs vs. Amway,” Alternet (May 6, 2004), Brad deGraf contrasts the organization of the major party re-election organizations with emerging grassroots groups, such as MoveOn.Org, and predicts if John Kerry wins the November presidential election, the latter, not the Democratic Party Organization, will be the reason.

[34] The MisLeader home page is at http://www.misleader.org and that of BushGreenwatch is at http://ga3.org/bushgreenwatch/home.html.

[35] The description appearing on the home page of the Action Forum, http://www.actionforum.org, states that: “ActionForums are reader rated discussion forums. They are structured to promote a productive dialogue by the rise of ideas with broad support. They make clear where agreement and disagreement lie. ActionForums support threads of comments and replies to comments ordered by the preference of the participants rather than chronologically. ActionForums are fair and non-partisan because they operate according to a content neutral set of rules, which are applied automatically.”

[36] Steven Clift, Minnesota E-Democracy at http://www.e-democracy.org/ For a recent Clift paper, see E-Democracy, E-Governance and Public Net-Work, September 2003. A complementary 7MB Power Point presentation is available from OneFish.

[37] For Lessig’s Creative Commons, see http://creativecommons.org and his book, The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World at http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/future/.

[38] One of the more informative assessments of the Dean Campaign published after Dean’s failure to secure the nomination is R. Hickey, “Onward Deaniacs,” TomPaine.Common Sense (3-19-04), available at http://www.tompaine.com/feature2.cfm/ID/10111. For other information related to Dean’s e-campaign, see Ed Cone at http://radio.weblogs.com/0107946/. Also, Dean’s Space created by Zack Rosen at http://www.deanspace.org/, which is described as “an open development community providing powerful web-tools, quality support, and expert advice to Howard Dean/s grassroots supporters.” See also, Brit Blaser, Dean advisor, at http://www.blaserco.com/blogs/ For a thoughtful assessment of the role of the Internet in U.S. elections that looks not only at what campaigns and candidates do, but also how what they do impacts voters, see B. Bimber & R. Davis, Campaigning Online – The Internet in U.S. Elections (Oxford University Press 2003).

[39] http://www.truemajority.org

[40] http://www.winwithoutwarus.org/

[41] http://www.monroe.lib.in.us/databases/cominfo/B10007210.html

[42] See http://www.commoncause.org/

[43] http://www.pfaw.org/pfaw/general/

[44] http://www.naral.org/

[45] E.g., the Environmental Defense Fund at http://www.cehn.org/cehn/resourceguide/edf.html

[46] See “Politics and Activism,” Don Means, political advisor, Meetup at http://www.meetup.com

[47] http://dean2004.meetup.com/

[48] Mayfield, Ross. (2003) "An Ecosystem of Networks". February 18, 2003, from http://radio.weblogs.com/0114726/2003/02/12.html

[49] Clay Shirky suggests that the reason there are so many of these weblogs is freedom on the Internet and the reason the bulk of them remain small is that freedom plus diversity creates attention economies in which a small “A-list” of webloggers will inevitably account for a majority of the traffic. As Shirkey put it, “The very act of choosing, spread widely enough and freely enough, creates a power law distribution.” See “Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality” at http://shirky.com/writings/powerlaw_weblog.html

Eugene Volokh, a law professor, thinks of the blogosphere as the public square rather than a new kind of journalism. See http://volokh.com/ Wednesday, November 05, 2003 For an entertaining and educational description of blogospheres, particularly regarding the connection to journalism, see John Hiller, “Blogosphere: the emerging Media Ecosystem,” at http://www.microcontentnews.com/articles/blogosphere.htm

[50] Barber, Benjamin R., Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1984)

[51] See The Civic Web, supra note 26, Ch. 6 (Digital Grassroots: Issue Advocacy in the Age of the Internet).

[52] That the mainstream media regularly fails to report fully or fairly on matters of urgent interest to citizens is now well documented. See A. Franken, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them (2003); R. McChesney, The Problem of the Media – U.S. Communication Politics in the 21st Century (Monthly Review Press 2004) (Identifying and responding to eight myths associated with the media that the author maintains are undermining democracy). See also, Moore, supra note 13; Palast, supra note 12. Charges that the mainstream media has been especially remiss with regard to covering the Iraq war are ongoing. For a particularly scathing report, see A. Goodman, Independent Media in a Time of War at http://www.democracynow.org/static/IMIATOW.shtml

[53] G. Palast, J. Oppenheim & T. MacGregor, Democracy and Regulation – How the Public Can Govern Essential Services (2003).

[54] “The Cheney Energy Task Force,” Natural Resources Defense Council, available at: http://www.nrdc.org/air/energy/taskforce/tfinx.asp

[55] See, e.g., B. Ackerman & J. Fishkin, Deliberation Day, in Debating Deliberative Democractic, edited by J. Fishkin & P. Laslett (2003) (discussing the rational ignorance arguments of Kenneth Arrow).

[56] For poignant evidence of the truth of this assertion, see MoveOn’s 50 Ways to Love Your Country – How To Find Your Political Voice And Become a Catalyst for Change (Inner Ocean Publishing 2004) (containing fifty essays in which the individual authors reveal how participation in MoveOn has given them a sense of political empowerment that they did not have before).

[57] Organizations registered under section 527 of the federal tax code are permitted to engage in voter education and turnout work but not outright advocacy for candidates. A group called America Coming Together (ACT) has raised $35 million to spend on the 2004 campaign, $10 million of which was donated by George Soros, the currency trader and philanthropist. The group hopes eventually to raise $75 million. See ACT at http://www.americacomingtogether.com/.

[58] See D. Gilgoff, “The Democrats Internet Gain – MoveOn’s Unlikely Success Story is Shaking Up the 2004 Campaign,” Nation & World 10/6/03 (reporting that when Moveon solicited its membership in the summer of 2003 to right the Republican-led redistricting effort in Texas it brought in $1 million in donations in one week); AP Analysis of MoveOn Ad (discussing an ad aimed at stopping Arnold Schwarzenegger from winning the California Recall Election and pointing out the group had raised over $500,000 to assist the ad campaign) at http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/local/6926622.htm.

[59] See Goldberg, supra note 24 (reporting on the general success of MoveOn with regard to fundraising and specifically discussing the matching gifts of George Soros and Peter Lewis). Much of the money raised by MoveOn was used to fund a “Bush in 30 Seconds” ad campaign that resulted in the submission of over 1500 anti-Bush ads, the winner of which was selected on January 12, 2004 and is to be aired during the week that President Bush gives his State of the Union message. The group was successful in raising enough money to show the winning entry during the Super Bowl. See http://www.moveonvoterfund.org/superbowl/. However, in a decision that led to an outpouring of critical articles and editorials, CBS refused to air the ad. See, e.g., Jonathan Darman, “Censored at the Super Bowl,” Newsweek (Friday 30 January 2004) available at: http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/020104A.shtml; John Nichols, “CBS Under Fire -- Members of Congress are taking aim at the network for its refusal to air a MoveOn ad during the Super Bowl,” The Nation (January 29, 2004) available at: http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=17689.

[60] For a truly damning revelation of the corrupting role of money in politics, see Lewis, supra note 12. Molly Ivins, in Bushwhacked (2003), refers to the buying of access and influence as “legalized bribery.”

[61] Christopher Lyndon, “The Blogging of the President 2004”, November 4, 2003, at http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/lydon/. The formal title of McCain Feingold is The Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act of 2002, PL 107-155, 116 Stat. 81, 2 U.S.C. § 431. In what must be seen as something of a surprise, the United States Supreme Court recently upheld the major provisions of the McCain Feingold law. See McConnell v. FEC, et. al., 124 S. Ct. 619 (Dec. 10, 2003). However, the underlying problem emerging from the Buckley v. Valeo, 434 U.S. 1 (1976) that spending, as distinguished from fundraising, is protected political expression, remains.

[62] See, e.g., Debating Deliberative Democracy, edited by James Fishkin and Paul Lasett (2003). See also, James Fishkin, Democracy and Deliberation: New Directions for Democratic Reform (Yale University Press 1991) and R. Putnam, Bowling Alone, supra note 12.

[63] See L. Boyd, “The Feasibility of Citizen-Initiated Polls” (in progress).

[64] Id.

[65] See http://www.getactive.com

[66] J. Dvorak, The Blog Phenomenon, PC Magazine, February 5, 2002.

[67] See text and note supra at note 46.

[68] See text and note supra at note 35.

[69] See text and note supra at note 51.

[70] The authors, one of whom is an experienced research methodologist, currently are examining relevant literature that has a more empirical than philosophical orientation for assistance in designing appropriate studies. B. Bimber & R. Davis, supra note ?? is a useful example of a careful statistical investigation of the use of the Internet by political campaigns and the effect of these campaigns on voter behavior. Deepening Democracy – Institutional Innovations in Empowered Participatory Governance (The Real Utopias Project Verso 2003), edited by A. Fung & E.O. Wright, contains reports on four case studies that the editors assert in the aggregate disclose many of the essential elements of effective participatory governance.

[71] D. Weinberger, Small Pieces Loosely Joined at http://www.smallpieces.com/