Folks,
Emergence of tools like Twitter and Facebook has been given a jump start by Obama campaign which used them extensively and continues to use these as forums to guage opinion and ideas on issues and debates and provide voices for the under represented.
I recently attended an event at the National Press Club in Wash DC - Open Sourced Democracy sponsored by
http://www.change.org which is an offshoot of Obama's campaign run by members of his internet team. They are heavily vested in leveraging online technologies to bring ad hoc groups of people together, organize and vocalize issues and solutions.
What we really need though is more uses like Belgium and California - where official results are posted to normal accredited sites throughout the day and then these can be referenced freely by traditional media and then online sources such as Twitter et al - are just interesting ways (driven by our good friend RSS incidentally) of providing "Open Sourced" access to same.
What we're missing is that vision from local election officials - that they too can easily do what California is doing - from a simple SQL database and some scripting. Again - some open source toolkit in that area for election reporting would be cool to see...
Thanks, DW