Students for Free Culture @ The University of Wisconsin

so, the next panel was on the topic of transparency in politics. the members of the panel were noel hidalgo of noneck.org, justine lam of politicker.com, and joshua tauberer who created govtrack.us. noel hidalgo was an interesting dude. he has been spending the past few years, through luckofseven.org, trying to get to all 7 continents on $7,777.77, all of which was donated by 700 people donating $11.11 each. i can’t quite recall exactly what it was that he was involved with as far as political transparency goes, except that he has been a big proponent of it, going so far as to get deported from china for documenting free tibet rallies during the recent summer olympics. in speaking with noel a few times over the course of the conference, i was really impressed by his work and involvements with numerous political and social groups, both national and local. justine lam was a very interesting panelist, having worked with the ron paul campaign, helping to raise oodles and oodles of money utilizing innovative grassroots methods. joshua tauberer’s site tracks bills and translates the legalese into text that most of us could understand. he made an interesting comment in regards to an audience question, where he said that he really wished that his site wasn’t as necessary as it actually is, with thomas.gov being the closest approximation, which he finds to be terribly lacking in many ways.

i should probably mention the really great software that the conference was using to pool questions from the audience. backchan.nl is a product of MIT’s sociable media group that allows internet users to post questions and vote on the questions posted by others. so, all throughout the first day of the conference, there would be a web page of questions above the panels or speakers, with the questions being ranked according to their voted-upon relevance. this was a great addition to the conference and it’s a technology that i can see being very useful to many people.

after the political transparency panel was an interview with john lilly, ceo of the mozilla corporation, makers of firefox and thunderbird, conducted with david weekly, ceo of pbwiki.

my coverage is kind of dragging on and on, and there really is a ton to keep talking about, and i’m gonna keep rolling these updates out as i’m able, but the sheer amount of what went down is so daunting. feel free to ask questions in the comments, y’all.