P2P May Help Transparency In Politics Emerge

"The US Congress offers webcasts of their hearings but these often evaporate into the ether unless citizens take the initiative to make live recordings," says Click to Vote founder John Parres, who's spearheading the launch of the non-partisan P2PCongress.org.

"The P2P Congress website helps coordinate those efforts and enables visitors to find audio and video copies of hearings via P2P networks," he states. "The P2P Congress website helps coordinate those efforts and enables visitors to find audio and video copies of hearings via P2P networks."

Here in Italy, the Radical Party has been able, through an official convention with the Italian government, to archive all of the parliament hearings for many years now. Nonetheless such unique and very comprehensive collection, the radicals are now looking for the first time to the best ways to digitize, categorize and index all of this content. While needing to identify the most appropriate share-reuse licensing scheme to adopt, the Italian Radicals need also to identify the best ways to leverage the enormous potential that their active supporters could have when enabled to rapidly search, edit and compile specific multimedia dossiers covering hot topics that have been strongly influenced by government decisions.

And here as well, P2P may prove to be an excellent grassroots distribution vehicle.