Unfortunately, Harvard restricts access to its students during class hours, so attendees at the "Votes, Bits and Bytes" conference won't have wifi until Saturday's sessions. But, if you ask the conference organizers nicely, they'll give you a pass. So here I am, sitting in the august Ames Courtroom at Harvard Law School, listening to Hossein Derakhshan (Hoder, a leading Iranian blogger) give a fascinating talk about the role of blogs in his home country (he lives in Toronto).

Blogs in Iran, he says, function as a) windows into and outside a closed culture; b) bridges, between men and women, older and younger generations, and voters and politicians; and c) as cafes, where people can talk to each other outside of the government controlled media.

Before him, Pippa Norris of Harvard University gave a talk about the limited impact of e-voting in England (details on her blog). And Tom Sander reported on his research into Meetup attendees.

Sander's findings, which he cautioned are preliminary, are:

-Meetups are not a young people's phenomenon

-They are not engaging the specifically unengaged; most attendees have high level of education

-They are not disproportionately attracting newcomers to communities

-While 60% of his sample (325 survey responses from 40 Meetups in 8 cities) said they were strangers when they first came to a Meetup, 25% said they knew someone already

Two odd findings, that I think can be easily explained:

-There was low member stickiness--i.e., people were not coming back month-to-month

-The political Meetups showed a strong leftwing tilt: 379 pro-Bush vs 2014 with anti-Bush themes.

My off-the-cuff explanation:

-doing research on Meetups during the summer may be a mistake--people are more mobile then (Sander says that his data draws on people who were coming over a broader period then just the summer)

-the campaigns weren't using Meetups in the same way. Dean's campaign pushed people to use Meetup; the Kerry campaign didn't encourage people to use it and in fact stopped mentioning it on their site (as Zephyr Teachout pointed out) and the Bush campaign had their own tool for creating meetings.

Zack Exley, who ran the Kerry Internet campaign, just confirmed this point, and is wondering if Sander's concern about the low stickiness of Meetup attendees is all that bad, compared to what else. Good point, Zack.

More here from David Weinberger, and here from Jeff Jarvis.

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