Saturday morning, 8:20, sitting on a train into New York City. It snowed last night and the ground around our house is covered with melting festive joy. Sitting at home is my email box. Last night, when I went to bed, it had over 500 unread emails. I don’t even know how many it has now.

The email box started filling up while I was in Washington for a workshop on changing media for a better world. It was a wonderful experience and I’ve written a little bit about that here, and here.

The workshop fit very well with some of my recent thinking and activities around ’Investigative Blogging’. Investigative Blogging is probably a misnomer. It was one of the first names we came up with during our brainstorming, and we are still trying to nail down exactly what it is we are trying to do and what we should name it. The bottom line is that we want to find ways to help news flow more easily. Investigative reporters need to find sources and funding for their research. Can bloggers help with this? They may even need alternative outlets for their stories in some cases. Can bloggers help there? Are there other ways people in the traditional media and the new media work together to achieve a higher level of journalistic integrity and excellence? That is what ‘Investigative Blogging’ is all about. If you have ideas about this, please let me know.

At the workshop, I met people interested in a ‘Good Apple News Service’. This might fit nicely with the ‘Virtual Newsroom’ idea that we have talked about with ‘Investigative Blogging’. I heard people talk about OhMyNews and I’ve wondered if we could set up something similar here, perhaps tying together the ‘Good Apple News Service’ with the ‘Virtual Newsroom’. I heard people talk about community news (Hyper Local Civic Journalism or something like that), where small communities could set up their own online news. Could this be another leg of some great CivicNews?

The workshop I’m going to today is a gathering of technology oriented people interested in debriefing from the 2004 election. People from CivicSpace will be there. My involvement with CivicSpace led me to tag my current thinking CivicNews. It could be a great CivicSpace site.

CivicSpace grew out of DeanSpace, and is interested in taking the online community building tools from the political sphere to a wider purpose. On the way home from Washington, I joined in a conference call with a bunch of friends who are working on a book initially called Extreme Democracy. I wrote about my experiences with DeanSpace for that book. As things have changed, the idea of the book is evolving, and a suggestion I have received is to change my chapter to ‘It Came for DeanSpace’. I think this is a marvelous idea, and look forward to writing more about it.

Another CivicSpace project that is taking up a lot of my time right now is http://platform.smartcampaigns.com This is a site I set up in the summer to help grassroots activists become more involved in the drafting and ratification of the 2004 Democratic National Platform. It listed an early draft of the platform, and provided information on contacting platform committee members and delegates.

One set of delegates are those super-delegates that are members of the Democratic National Committee. There are 440 such committee members. They will decide who the next DNC Chair will be. Unfortunately, it is hard to find good contact information for them.

There is a lot of interest by various people in getting Howard Dean to be the next Chair of the DNC. To help with this, I have revived http://platform.smartcampaigns.com so that people can more easily share contact information about the Democratic National Committee members. Before getting on the train back from Washington, I joined in a conference call with people from the Progressive Democrats of America. They are interested in helping with this and we are bulding a good database. I have been cross checking this with some other efforts and this is sucking up a lot of my time as well.

Hopefully we can get people interested in the Howard Dean campaign to become more involved in the Democratic Party and get the Democratic Party to be more inclusive and transparent.

I am now sitting at the Tank, getting ready for ‘The Morning After’ symposium. So, I should probably finish this post. More later.