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Later in the evening, I’ll be going for a book reading session of ‘Netroots Rising: How a Citizen Army of Bloggers and Online Activists Is Changing American Politics’ by Lowell Feld and Nate Wilcox at Busboys and Poets.

Surprisingly, neither the Netroots Rising website, nor the book’s Amazon page offers a blurb! So, here’s the blurb from the Busboys and Poets events listings –

The 2006 elections will be remembered as the year when the center of power in American politics shifted from traditional “top-down” central broadcasters to new “bottom-up” decentralized activists in the blogosphere and netroots. The authors give firsthand accounts of the burgeoning power of the netroots to determine the outcome of political contests, most notably as when the national balance of power was tipped by Jim Webb’s “rag-tag army” of bloggers and netroots activists who provoked and exposed the gaffe that proved fatal to George Allen’s senatorial bid.

It seems to me that the prominent use of social media tools in election campaigns has introduced social media to a set of Americans who wouldn’t have been interested in it otherwise. As a result, there’s suddenly a lot of interest in the use of social media to engage (young) citizens in civic issues. Books like Rebooting America: Ideas for Redesigning American Democracy for the Internet Age and ‘Netroots Rising’ are an indicator of this interest.

I’ll be spending some serious time this year working on MobiChange, a social entrepreneurship venture that will leverage mobile social networking for mobilizing social change.

No, I don’t know enough about either “mobile social networking” or “mobilizing social change”, but I do know that mobile-based communities can be critical catalysts for transforming youngsters into committed change agents. So, I’ll start from whatever little I do know and learn the rest.

I was inspired to dream up MobiChange by Umair Haque’s exhortation to use technology to solve real problems and Po Bronson’s advice to search for something you can devote your life to.

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‘Rebooting America: Ideas for Redesigning American Democracy for the Internet Age‘ is an anthology of forty four essays by some really smart people on how to use communications technology to engage (young) people in civic issues –

The Personal Democracy Forum presents an anthology of forty-four essays brimming with the hopes of reenergizing, reorganizing, and reorienting our government for the Internet Age. How would completely reorganizing our system of representation work? Is it possible to redesign our government with open doors and see-through walls? How can we leverage the exponential power of many-to-many deliberation for the common good?

In her foreword to the anthology, Esther Dyson sets the stage for the rest of the essays by saying that new communication technologies will continue to be at the core of civic engagement, for better or for worse, so we should better find ways to use them constructively –

This anthology of essays is intended to shine light, to spark conversations among citizens, and between voters and elected officials, about how we can engage more people in public problem solving and community building. Just as the Net created new business models, so can it foster new governance models…