We're bringing some of the ol' Twitter Vote Report gang back together again for a panel discussion Wednesday night at Beka Economopoulos's Change You Want to See Gallery/co-working space in Williamsburg.

Nathan Freitas, Deanna Zandt, and yours truly will be discussing case studies of "new" (read tech-enabled) activism, with the goal of leaving people with concrete examples of how web 2.0 goodness can help them to create change and the like. I'll be focusing on organizing around this summer's political conventions with a few examples from Africa thrown into the mix. I'm mostly an observer who scribbles down notes on this stuff, but Nathan and Deanna have deep experience in using these tools for good:

[We] will present case studies and highlight how they leveraged these tools to have broader reach and greater effectiveness. We'll also delve into issues governing internal organization and communication among political actors, including: transparency vs. security; command and control vs. autonomous affinity groups, and the power of organizing without organizations vs. the tyranny of structurelessness.

Should be fun. If you're in the area, hope you come out. There have been some discussions starting about how we can build on what is (she says in a perfectly non-judgmental fashion) New York City's remarkably sucky young-ish progressive community, and we'll likely at least pass around an email-list sign up to get the ball rolling.

(Photo is by noneck, a.k.a Noel Hidalgo. Creative Commons, natch.)

Last week I attended a talk at NYU by Andrew Rasiej -- raconteur, visionary, and founder of Personal Democracy Forum and techPresident -- in which he mentioned something called Project Masiluleke. I was intrigued. In brief, because cell phone air time in South Africa is so expensive, even those people lucky enough to have a cell phone had taken to texting each other what became known as "Please Call Me" messages. (In case this isn't obvious, you get a PCM and realize that you're intended to use up your minutes to call the person back.)

PCMs, though, are short. About 120 characters are left on the table. And so what Project Masiluleke does it to use that leftover bit of abundance to send messages encouraging South Africans to get tested and treated for HIV/AIDs. The infection rate in KwaZulu-Natal, where the project had its trial run, is an astonishing 39%. Only 10% of HIV-infected South Africans are in treatment. But about 8 in 10 of South Africans have access to a cell phone. Bingo.

I dive into Project Masiluleke over on Worldchanging. This is exactly the way that we need to start thinking about scarcity vs. abundance in the U.S., especially in these days when our resources appear to be quickly dwindling.

(Photo credit: Pop!Tech)