Other Election and Democracy Issues

Expanding Civic Engagement

At the lead of Demos's work on Civic Engagement is Senior Fellow Allison Fine's important work on using social media for civic engagement.

Momentum Igniting Social Change in the Connected Age September 29, 2006 How can we move from serving soup until our elbows ache to solving chronic social ills like hunger or homelessness? How can we break the disastrous cycle of low expectations that leads to chronic social failures? The answers to these questions lie within Momentum, a fresh, zestful way of thinking about and organizing social change work. Today's digital tools--including but not limited to e-mail, the Web, cell phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), even iPods--promote interactivity and connectedness. But as Momentum shows, these new social media tools are important not for their wizardry but because they connect us to one another in inexpensive, accessible and massively scalable ways.

Social Change Wiki - This wiki - like all wikis a work-in-progress - is a hub of information about the impact that a wide variety of social media tools are having on social change efforts and civic engagement. The wiki provides quantatitive and qualitative research on the effect and impact of these tools on efforts, as well as other materials about the topic.