US presidential campaign & election '08

We've assembled a sampling of recent Internet and politics-related activities and writings from the Berkman community.

November 18 update: Join us on Monday (11/24) for a discussion of participatory governance with Irving Wladawsky-Berger.

November 4 update: the video of Professor D. Sunshine Hillygus' talk today on "Information Technology and Political Campaigning" is now available.

The Citizen Media Law Project has taken the election, and voting, head on:

• David Ardia reflects on how citizen media can help ensure fair elections, providing a list of pointers to initiatives and platforms like MyFairElection.
• The CMLP also provides information about legal issues associated with documenting your vote, including several state-specific discussions.
• And check out the CMLP's Video Your Vote legal primer video, produced by Berkman digital media czar Dan Jones.

Some projects have been, for many months, aggregating online conversations around the election:

• With a host of collaborators, the Public Radio Exchange features local, "regular people" perspectives on the campaign at BallotVox.
• Similarly, Global Voices' Voices Without Votes collects blog/citizen media commentary from non-Americans (last week, Ethan Zuckerman commented here).

Other projects have reflected critically on the role and uses of the Internet in this election cycle and beyond:

• The Internet & Democracy blog considers everything from the blogging of polling data to the Sarah Palin email hack to differences in the campaigns' approaches to the blogosphere.
• The Digital Natives crew approaches questions of technology and civic engagement, too, with an emphasis on youth activism (addressed in the penultimate chapter of John Palfrey and Urs Gasser's Born Digital, the challenges of which John blogged in March).
• The Publius Project has collected a number of relevant essays, most recently Doc Searls' infrastructure investment plan for the next administration and Tova Andrea Wang's "Vote Suppression in a Digital Age."

On a more specific note, the McCain campaign's October letter to YouTube regarding the DMCA provoked debate among Berkman fellows and friends, including, for example:

• Wendy Seltzer, "McCain’s YouTube Takedown Inspires Fair Use Fervor";
• Harry Lewis, "Strange Bedfellows Department";
• Chris Soghoian, "McCain seeks special 'fair use' copyright rules for VIPs";
• Lawrence Lessig, "McCain/Palin seeks 'special rules'?" and "Copyright and Politics Don’t Mix";
• and the Citizen Media Law Project, "Copyright, Politics, and McCain's Request for Special Treatment" (and, via the CMLP, here is the YouTube response to the McCain campaign (PDF)).

Many other Berkman people have weighed in, individually, including, to cite just a couple:

• John Palfrey, "The Risks of a Digital Blindspot";
• Gene Koo, "A network analysis of the Obama 08 campaign";
• and Persephone Miel, "Anne Kilkenny – citizen journalism heroine."

Finally, we've been slowly but surely piling up tags in the Berkman Center site, and, while they're not comprehensive, there's more to explore in elections, civic activity, and related categories.