As I said before, I was going give you all more details about the conference I attended this weekend, Votes, Bits & Bytes after it was over. Unfortunately, I did not live blog the conference — as some people in attendence did, but I did take notes, and will try and give you a sense of the whole event.

Just to get this out of the way, there was an liberal bias during the conference. Of course, it’s Harvard, what would you expect?

A little after 9 am on Friday, the first panel began in the Ames Courtroom at Harvard Law School. This panel, called “Citizenship” dealt with answering the question, “Are information and communications technologies enabling new forms of citizenship?”

First to speak was Tom Sander, of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard (KSG). He spoke about Meetup.com. During his talk, he asked “Is there a left leaning tilt toward Meetup?” He told us there were 10-15 times more Kerry Meetups than Bush Meetups. He said that the number of Kerry Meetups hit its peak in May 2004 — which he partially attributed to the belief that Meetups were more important during the primaries… Maybe so, but he didn’t seem to know that it was around this time that Kerry campaign launched their House Parties, which was their version of the Bush campaign’s successful Parties for the President. Zack Exley, of MoveOn.org fame and former Kerry campaign staffer was in attendance at the conference and did speak up explain that.

There were a lot of familiar names at this conference, plenty of people were on the left, and I generally did out of politeness introduce myself to various people who I had heard of. However, I did not put Exley on my List of People Worth Introducing Myself To.

The next panelist was Pippa Norris, who told us about the limited impact that eVoting had in a pilot program in England — even on young voters.

Next to speak was Hossein Derakhshan, an Iranian blogger. He told the attendees that in Iran, the internet is the most trusted media. We might not be there yet, but we may be getting close. How do blogs function in Iran? According to Hossein, blogs function “as windows,” “as bridges,” and “as cafes.” The “bridges” he spoke of were between gender, generations, and voters and politicians.

More on the next panel to come soon…