Internet tools to shake up a broken political system

Thanks to Reshma Saujani, our first pro.act.ly candidate, we got a lot of buzz this week at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in NYC.  She gave a first glimpse of pro.act.ly on a panel with Chris Hughes (Facebook, Obama, Jumo) and Scott Heiferman (Meetup) about using social networking to create social change.

Marcia Stepanek from Justmeans covered the event:

Social media can help you to "build your own machine" to change the status quo, says Reshma Saujani, a congressional candidate for the 14th District in New York who has been organizing her campaign for the last 18 months, mostly on social networks. "I believe technology can really disrupt the Establishment," she told the panel. "Normally, you need to belong to a political party or club that brings endorsements, contributions and visibility ... and outsiders, therefore, find it hard to run." But social media change that, Saujani said.

She is testing a new social media organizing platform created by Jim Gilliam (Brave New Films) called pro.act.ly, which Saujani described as being "Obama 3.0." She said "we knew that we would need 30,000 votes to win our campaign on September 14 and we knew we would not get the support of the party or the labor unions, so we had to build our own machine." Pro.act.ly, she said, enables movement organizers to look up any single supporter and learn instantly how many people in their networks are supporting your campaign. "It measures the intensity of their commitment," she said, a kind of digital dashboard for community organizers of all stripes.

"Jim (Gilliam) wants to give pro.act.ly to a lot of people in 2012 who want to run all across the country and get them to change Congress," she said.

Watch the full 30 minute panel, see the transcript on TechCrunch, and more coverage from TheNextWeb.