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A discussion with Allison H. Fine and Micah Sifry Thursday, September 28, 2006 Noon Lunch | Program from 12:15 - 1:45pm Demos
MOMENTUM outlines a new, open way of working, what Allison calls in her book "working side-to-side" that allows citizens and volunteers to participate in meaningful ways like never before. "To succeed," Allison writes, "we don't have to get bigger, just smarter, more agile and more open. We need not become techies to do this, just more connected."
Over sixty people joined us to find out how we can collectively answer these questions by using social media-the emails and text messages, IMs and iPods that blend the intimacy of a phone with the vast reach of broadcast media-to shift power from a controlling few at the center to the vibrant, passionate many at the edges. Allison Fine is a Senior Fellow at Demos. Fine is the original founder of Innovation Network (Innonet), which has engaged the independent sector in Web-based tools for more than a decade. She is also the former CEO of the E-Volve Foundation, which provides seed grants for online democracy efforts. Micah L. Sifry is Executive Director and co-founder of Personal Democracy Forum. He is also, with his colleague Nancy Watzman, co-author of Is That a Politician in Your Pocket? (John Wiley & Sons, 2004), a book on how money in politics affects people in their everyday lives.
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Do you remember the last time you had a "light bulb" moment; that aha when suddenly everything changed? Demos and 
So, 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 lead to chronic social failures? How can we change our electoral system so that voters are not intentionally kept at arms length by elected officials and viewed only as ATM machines during the political process?
