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• recommendation for Digital Democracy Teach-In
  2004-01-10 12:00:12  Tim O'Reilly | [Reply | View]
  
  
  I was trying to figure this message out, and then I realized that you must have fallen for the Republican National Committee's smear campaign. For those of you who don't know the background, MoveOn ran a contest in which anyone on the net could submit a video campaign ad. There were two ad submissions that compared Bush to Hitler. But these ads were not produced or promoted by MoveOn -- they were just submitted by random folks from the net. The only place they've been promoted is on the RNC web site -- in an attempt to position MoveOn as extremists!
  
  But regardless of your politics, MoveOn is interesting. (And in fact, we've invited SICM, a Republican organization that is modeling itself on MoveOn, to the Teach-In as well.) Think about this video ad campaign, for instance. Instead of spending millions of dollars producing campaign ads, MoveOn asked ordinary people, using their own videocams and video editing software (which is becoming increasingly available -- anyone on Mac OS X has iMovie, for instance.) Then they opened up the voting process to their millions of members, to actually select the final candidates to be run on television. That's the tip of a very large iceberg if you're interested at all in the way that technology is changing politics.