Searching for community online
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Tuesday
Miles Fidelman responded with a few suggestions. Now I'm visiting the one at the top of his list:
www.e-democracy.org, the Web site for Minnesota Democracy. It's an impressive site, with hundreds of Minnesota-based political directories, forums, and election information. I poke around the site for a few minutes, and then it hits me: Hey, this is the state that elected Jesse Ventura governor. Two clicks later, I'm at JesseNet (www.jesseventura.org). Am I safe in assuming that this is the only political Web site that offers candidate action figures for sale? This could be huge: democracy meets commerce. The site itself, maintained by the Jesse Ventura Volunteer Committee, appears to have successfully
morphed from a
campaign site into a political action site. Jesse and his supporters (JesseNet has slightly more than 7,000 members) clearly haven't lost any of their zeal. One Internet appeal to JesseNet members, to head off a demand by legislators to call a special session, proclaims, ''It's time to kick some legislative butt!''
Back at e-democracy.org, I link off to an attempt to replicate the Minnesota model nationwide, www.webwhiteblue.org, an impressive collection of national and state voter information. But since it's clearly tuned to the '98 election, I feel as if I've arrived just after the party is over. Maybe I'll check back in October.
Fidelman's final recommendations betray his pre-Web on-line roots: Communet, a community and civic network e-mail discussion group, and a Usenet news group, ne.politics. Both appear to be percolating along just fine in the shadow of the Web. The latter, for example, contains an informative exchange on the future of Tech Square (as the Kendall/MIT area of Cambridge is known) and an arch discussion of the spoof site, www.armthehomeless.com. It's interesting to note, however, that even when the subject is giving guns to the homeless, the denizens of ne.politics manage to steer the conversation toward a discussion of citizenship and voting rights.
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