Much as I love Wikipedia — and I love it so much that I'm giving it candy hearts on Valentine's Day — its policy of neutrality sometimes forces resolution when we'd rather have debate. Yes, competing sides get represented in the articles, and the discussion pages let us hear people arguing their points, but the arguments themselves are treated as stations on the way to neutral agreement.

So, there's room for additional approaches that take the arguments themselves as their topics. That's what Debatepedia.org does, and it looks like it's on its way to being really useful.

The Chris Lydon radio show, Open Source, did a show on hyper-localism that featured Ed Remsen, mayor of Montclaire NJ, who isn't above commenting on posts on to Baristaville. As Brendan Greeley, of Radio Open Source, points out, Remsen isn't a born-on-the-Net hip guy. But he sure seems to get that the Net is an unowned conversation, and that his constituents are talking.

Jock Gill over at GreaterDemocracy urges his fellow liberals to drop-the-hub and spoke model and to go Gnostic, getting rid of the intermediaries.

It is a partisan piece, of course, and raises the question of whether any particular party's politics makes it better suited to adopting the new tools of directed, connected democracy.

HumanRightsFirst.org is live-blogging the Gonzales hearing. (They also have links to the Real Player feed from C-SPAN.)

The Republicans are continuing to use the Net to encourage local political action. At the Republican Party site you can sign up to host an inauguration party. So far, 31,457 people have done so. I wouldn't be shocked if, in addition to Pin the Tail Real Hard on the Donkey, fund raising were a suggested party activity.

You can also buy your branded Republican goods on the site: $2.95 for a Bush-Cheney "yard sign system" (it's a system because it comes with little wire posts) and items such as a GWB medallion or a Ronald Reagan t-shirt.

This Flash documentary by Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson on the future of media describes a possible path from here to 2014 for Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and the NY Times. I think it eventually goes off the rails, but it's well done and, IMO, worth the 11 minutes.

Here's a first person account of Black Box Voting serving Teresa Lapore with papers for failing to comply with a public records request. Snippet:

"This is what democracy looks like," she said, as the officials
scowled and shouted for the sergeant at arms.

There's an email going around (thanks, Jock!), from Tom Atlee:

In 2003 the government of British Columbia convened a Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform...

This Assembly was formed with 160 randomly selected citizens charged with reviewing existing and innovative voting systems. After ten months of study, reviewing hundreds of written submissions, holding public hearings, hearing from experts, and deliberating together, they finally announced their recommendations in October 2004...

...The Citizens Assembly meetings have been public and shown on TV. There have been regular news releases and postings on their website, which includes history of the Assembly, FAQs, the materials they reviewed and more -- all made very public.

Salon has a point/counterpoint on election fraud in Ohio featuring Greg Palast and Farhad Manjoo.

NPR's On Point on Thursday had a call-in featuring Farhad as well as Heather Gerken and Steve Ansolabehere, from Harvard and MIT respectively, and Thom Hartmann.

Bruce Schneier has a useful overview of the problems with e-balloting machines.