Off to Politics Online
Posted by Allison Fine on March 3, 2008
I’ll be speaking at the 2008 Politics Online Conference tomorrow. I’m on a panel moderated by Micah Sifry with Ben Rattry of Change.org and Randall Winston of Project Agape which manages the Causes application for Facebook.
I’ve been thinking about the intersection of causes and social networks for a while now and am intrigued more by what we don’t know than what we do. It seems to me that there is something about the networks that catalyze a cause that are fundamentally different from those that don’t. Maybe, it’s in large part serendipity, a volatile mix of people and issues at a particular time that has folks talking about Darfur or Obama or Jena Six. But, I think it is more complicated than that. I’m still exploring and open to suggestions.
One thing that separates this conference out from most others is the inside-the-Beltway make-up of the attendees. I’ll be very curious to see what their take is, so far, on the primary elections. Stay tuned!
