Are Deep South Grassroots on the Internet ?

Lucie LAURIAN

Ph.D. Candidate , Department of City and Regional Planning, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Email: lucie_laurian@unc.edu

This paper focuses on the role of information technologies for grassroots organizations and particularly their function for enhancing democratic participation and expression of political and environmentalist concerns. In this paper, I first present the background of this paper by briefly reviewing the literature on IT and participatory democracy. Second, I describe the information-technology resources available to grassroots environmental groups, as well as to political student-lead activist groups in the state of North Carolina, U.S.A. I also compare how these groups actually use (and in some instances don't use) these resources. And finally, I discuss how information-technology resources have enhanced --and have the potential to further enhance-- citizen participation in local policy-making decision processes.




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