Nicco Mele, EchoDitto co-founder and adjunct lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, was interviewed last month for the Kennedy School Insight series. The conversation covered the influences of the internet and social media on civic engagement, especially in light of recent revolutions and uprisings in the Arab world.

Rather than creating a whole new system, Mele argues that social media amplifies and facilitates the networking of already-existent grassroots groups. In essence, social media and digital technology are, “facilitating a range of conversations that are happening already. In that sense it really makes traditional grassroots organizing much more powerful, but it doesn’t demonstrably change grassroots organizing. It makes grassroots organizing more important, easier to do, with higher value, and harder to shut down.”

The interview goes on to discuss how that the US government is using the internet in new ways to make the institutions of power more transparent and participatory. From sites like seeclickfix.com, which allows citizens to contribute to infrastructure upkeep in their cities and towns, to Whitehouse.gov, whose traffic occasionally rivals that of major news sites like MSNBC.com - the internet is changing the ways that citizens interact with government. It removes some of the power of old institutions, while creating entirely new, online institutions.

I think that the challenges of the future involve these new institutions, the values that are already embedded in them, and the way we think about, assess, build these new institutions, and the way we hold them accountable is going to be really crucial to the future of civil society.

To read the full text, and watch a video clip of the interview, Click Here.