lawrence lessig

Items of interest on the interwebs today:

• Jim Wallis has an interesting article about a new "Great Awakening" among young people of faith who are looking to increase the common good and drive our politics towards real progress on issues of social justice.
• Forbes (yes, Forbes) looks at increased youth participation through the lens of young presidential campaign staffers (including FM friend James Hannaway).
• The New York Times takes a look at Green Collar Jobs.
• Mobile Voter is rolling out an interesting new program that will use your cell phone and spare minutes to distribute pro-bono consulting and expertise to the masses.
• Larry Lessig will be speaking at UPenn on March 29th on behalf of Obama. I'm sure he'll also be talking about his recently launched "Change Congres" initiative. If I lived in PA, I wouldn't miss it for the world:

• Press Think takes a look at how McCain got in so good with the media. On this topic I would also recommend an essay by David Foster Wallace called "Up, Simba," in which the author followed McCain on the campaign trail for a week during the 2000 primaries.
• Finally, video of Barack Obama's speech on race has become the most popular political video on YouTube, netting over 4 million views, an audience that rivals most cable news networks.

This is not entirely youth related, but it hits a topic that is only second to youth organizing in my heart and head - free culture and technology. Lawrence Lessig, founder of the Creative Commons movement and author of some indespensible books like Free Culture (which helped spawn the student Free Culture Movement) and the Future of Ideas just launched a new website - Lessig 08 - to explore a run for Congress in a special election to replace the late Rep. Tom Lantos.

After 10 years fighting for an open internet and sane copyright laws that encourage innovation and embrace remix culture, Lessig is now dedicating the next 10 years of his life to tackling the problem of corruption in government. A seat in the House of Representatives would be an amazing platform for Professor Lessig in his new fight against corruption, and will bring sorely needed knowledge about how the internets actually works to Congress (hint: it's not a series of tubes).

He's raising money now through Act Blue. Once I get my next paycheck I'll probably throw him $25.

And of course, what would anything Lessig be without the requisite power point presentation:

Update: Fred Stutzman of Unit Structures also ran a panel on Social Networking at PDF. There's no video, but I'd encourage everyone to go read his take on the opening up of the FaceBook API.
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Last week I was at the Personal Democracy Conference, a yearly geekathon for politics and technology folks. The snooze-fest that was Thomas Friedman aside, there were some really interesting presentations, including this one by Dana Boyd on "Digitally Shaking Hands:"

So what happens is they gather online. They gather online to hang out with their friends. They gather online to jockey and share material. And they gather online to figure out what's going on in this world.

So if you want to reach out to them it's not about holding a rally for the young people, because often they don't come out, because it's not part of their narrative. But they will come out to the online spaces as a place to hang out.

Danah has great advice for campaigns looking to engage young voters online.

Other highlights of the morning included Lawrence Lessig about the false either/or choice in our copyright debate, and Yochai Benkler on the networked public sphere and what it means for information production and dissemination in our society. I encourage everyone to nerd out.