[Statements within brackets are comments and can be safely removed]
Progress
One major breakthrough to our progress has been [IMHO] discovering Howard Rheingold, an expert on technological social movements. Rheingold was an early participant of the seminal online community The Well, and he has written many books related to society, computers, technology, and politics. In one of his most recent books he urges people to collaborate with the help of technology, and in one chapter of another older book he discusses what he calls Grassroots Groupminds.
The Prix Ars Electronica International Competition for CyberArts will occur this year, we have found, and, as it did last year, it will have a themed competition called Digital Communities. To support and bolster technologically enhanced collaboration and communication between people worldwide, it urges groups with social, cultural, and political projects to submit work related to many phenomena and fields of activity including open-source, creative-commons, social software, emergent democracy, digital cities/urban development projects, and citizen involvement initiatives/citizen conferences. The competition has a substantial prize, and the entries are due March 18th. [I think that seeing the results will be very useful for our research.]
Our research has also led us to a case study regarding class, politics, and technology in New Haven, Connecticut. The paper, which was published in 2001 and deals with fairly rudimentary technology compared to mobile phones and wireless handhelds, does not predict that tehnology will make a mass social upheaval possible for the disenfranchised. At least not in New Haven.
[I suggest we limit our research to successful social change enabled by technology. We may want to focus on Howard Rheingold's work, and I think I may read Smart Mobs. –Dave]