Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Connecticut), who helms the Senate's government affairs committee, is annoyed enough that he bypassed the administrators of the system and sent a letter Friday straight to the Judicial Conference of the United States.

He's asking Judge Lee H. Rosenthal to explain why in the age of Google the Public Access to Court Electronic Records, or PACER, system isn't free for citizens. He'd also like to know why federal courts still aren't blacking out sensitive information in court documents as required in the 2002 E-Government Act (a piece of legislation dear to Lieberman).

He writes:

Seven years after the passage of the E-Government Act, it appears that little has been done to make these records freely available with PACER charging a higher rate than 2002. Furthermore, the funds generated by these fees are still well higher than the cost of dissemination ...

If the complaints sound familiar, perhaps you know of public.resource.org's Carl Malamud who's been running a virtual one-man campaign against the clunky and costly PACER system. It's just part of his campaign to "open-source the nation's operating system."

He's also been vigilantly searching through court documents and using automated tools and has found that some judicial districts routinely fail to redact information that would be very handy for identity thieves to have. He's also found just plainly embarrassing and invasive information like medical records of patients not even involved in litigation.

Malamud is running a campaign to become the nation's public printer, and from the looks of this letter, he's already got one senator's attention.

See Also:

• Online Rebel Publishes Millions of Dollars in U.S. Court Records ...
• Rogue Archivist Campaigns to Be Obama's Printer
• Contrarian Libertarian
• Death to Sleepy Stock Data

Seth Godin needs no introduction to this crowd. And there's a good chance many of you already have a copy of this latest book, Tribes.

If not, Tribes is all about leadership in a post-geography world. The Internet allows anyone to become a leader of tribe big or small, with members from across the planet. And people want you to lead them in all sorts of contexts.

But how does one become a leader? What's the process and why does it happen?

I asked Seth 5 questions about the dynamics of tribal leadership, and here's what he had to say:

1. How does a member of any particular tribe know she's ready to lead one of her own?

Seth: Well, everyone is a member of a tribe. A community tribe, perhaps, or a spiritual one. The time to go start your own tribe is when you realize the obligation you have to contribute your leadership and when you are passionate enough about a goal that you will make the commitment the tribe demands to get there.

In other words, do it when you care.

If you don't care, don't whine, don't complain. But if there's change you want to make happen (business change, social change, any change) then this is the way to do it.

2. You've stated that the most interesting things happen at the edges, and I suspect this is true with tribes of all types. I think it's also true at the intersection of neighboring tribes. Are the edges and intersections the most fertile ground for new leaders?

Seth: If you look at the innovations that we've seen online, they've all been at the edges. No one wins by saying, this is a better version of AOL or this is a better version of Yahoo. Google won by finding an edge that Yahoo cared little about (search) and embracing it.

With tribal behavior, we see that most people aren't interested in joining a new tribe. So who does? Fringe types. Restless folks. Dissatisifed seekers. That means that your earliest members are fellow travelers, people willing to take a leap. THEN they bring in their friends and the growth happens.

It's rare that we have a schism between different tribes (Arabs and Jews, Shiites and Suunis, Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich). For more likely is apathy. Far more likely is that most people are just sitting there doing nothing. The big middle. Your opportunity is to peel folk away from the middle and give them what they want, which is movement and connection.

3. We here at Copyblogger are obviously big proponents of using quality reader-focused content to become an online leader. Where's the fine line between giving people what they want and leading them where they need to go?

Seth: Most people have no clue what they want, and if you ask them, you'll get a lame answer. Most people don't know they want Pretty Woman or Slumdog Millionaire. They don't know they want Purple Cow or one of your killer articles. So if you want to have an impact, all you can do is lead. You can't ask.

4. You mention repeatedly that Tribes is not a how to book, since all tribe-building is unique and context-dependent. Are there any universal principles you can share?

Seth: There are many:

• People want to belong, they want to be missed when they don't show up.
• Charisma doesn't make you a leader, leading gives you charisma.
• Most of all, people care about themselves.
• Faith is belief in the future and it is critical. Religion is a set of rules designed to amplify faith at the same time it guarantees the status quo. As you can guess, heretics have a lot of faith, but not so much patience with religion. And heretics are the ones who make change.
• When in doubt, work with small groups. If you can't find 5 followers, how will you find 1000?
• Talk to people with respect, don't advertise at them.
• Transparency is your only option, because the tribe will smell artifice.

5. Does a real leader make moves that the tribe may rebel against, even if only to understand the tribe better?

Seth: It's not a democracy. It never is. It's about acting in a way that you're proud of, that the tribe can interact with. Often, the leader's job is to come quite close to destroying everything but she does it to get to the end goal that everyone needs.

Many thanks to Seth Godin for his time. Pick up a copy of Tribes at Amazon today.

What about you? Do you consider your current online publishing and marketing efforts to be a form of leadership? Why or why not?

About the Author: Brian Clark is Executive Editor of Copyblogger and co-founder of DIY Themes. Get more from Brian on Twitter.

Last week, we wrote about how Twitter, our Best Web LittleCo of 2007, was quickly morphing into a viable platform for serious discussion. One can see that happening today, as Super Tuesday primary elections take place across the US and people report and debate the results across Twitter. But what about Facebook? It was, afterall, our Best Web BigCo of last year, one that we called a "company that really came of age this year; and [...] was the catalyst for some important Web trends."

So we started wondering, could Facebook be a catalyst for something else: social change. Dry mentions the Causes application on Facebook, and groups which "connect thousands of people with common interests in humanitarian efforts." Dry also talks about Facebook as an organizational tool, writing, "it's very easy for people to organize races for cures and alert their 547 nearest and dearest to articles on under-covered international tragedies."

Facebook as a Vehicle for Social Change

Indeed, on Facebook's graduation day a massive political protest in Colombia demonstrated Facebook's power to rally people to a cause. Monday afternoon hundreds of thousands of Colombians took to the streets to protest the Marxist rebel group FARC. Estimates on the crowd size ranged from 500,000 to 2 million people, which in and of itself isn't all that extraordinary -- millions of people get together to protest things all the time. What is extraordinary, is that the protest was organized largely online through Facebook.

A Facebook event page created by protest organizers attracted over 106,000 confirmed guests with 18,000 maybes. Almost 320,000 people were invited to the event, which demonstrates the ability for Facebook to get the word out to a massive number of people about social and political issues, quickly and effectively.

Another example of someone successfully using Facebook to enact change is the "For Every 1,000 that join this group I will donate $1 for Darfur," which was started by NYU student Marek Grodzicki. The group has 424,000 members -- or $424 -- and Grodzicki is renewing his pledge for next year. That may not be a lot of money, but it's almost half a million people who may now be more aware of an issue because a single person was able to reach them simply by announcing an altruistic act on Facebook and letting viral nature of social networking take over.

But how common are examples like the FARC protest and the Darfur donation group? It's really hard to tell, but what we can look at, is the effectiveness of the previously mentioned Causes application to raise money. Just how charitable are Facebook users? It turns out... not very. Or at least, Facebook isn't prompting people to be charitable -- they may give plenty via other channels.

The Causes app, which allows anyone to create a cause and link it to a registered non-profit organization in the US or Canada, is one of the most popular on Facebook with 10.8 million registered users. Because Causes interfaces with Network for Good, users can set up donation pages for thousands of charities, making it difficult to figure out how successful the application is as a whole. However, looking at the top five campaigns by users, the results aren't so promising in terms of money raised:

Cause	Users	Donations	Per User
Cancer Research	3,005,750	$58,520	$0.02
Stop Global Warming	1,681,907	$20,908	$0.01
Animal Rights	1,232,162	$19,423	$0.02
Against Child Abuse	927,120	$7,685	$0.01
Save Darfur	800,674	$12,528	$0.02

Clearly, these are important issues that a lot of people care about, but the application isn't doing much to inspire people to donate money to the causes. An average of 1 to 2 cents per user isn't really anything to write home about.

Recently, the Causes app held a contest in which it gave out a $50,000 top prize to the organization that collected the most donations over a six week span. That's a great idea because even organizations that don't land the $50,000 prize theoretically see an increase in donations. The Giving Challenge began on December 14th and ended on February 1st, and though the official results won't be announced until later in the month, unofficial results predict the "Love Without Boundaries Foundation" as the winner of the top prize with 4,564 donors. The participants in the Giving Challenge, who were mostly smaller charities, have much higher per user giving rates than the larger causes -- "Love Without Boundaries," for example, has a per user average over $15.

But even while the challenge made the Causes app a successful fundraising tool for a handful of small charities, it also exposed the same sort of apathy (at least when it comes to giving) that the top causes seem to deal with. As part of the competition, Causes gave out a daily $1,000 prize to the charity that had the most donors each day. Except for the final week, when a couple of charities were making a big push for the top prize, the daily winner generally had under 100 donors. That may seem like a lot, but with over 30 million people in the US and Canada over the age of 16, it still feels somewhat underwhelming.

However, even if Causes isn't doing much to raise money, it is potentially doing a lot to raise awareness. When just the top 5 causes reach about 7.5 million people, that's pretty powerful stuff. Further, each cause is given a group page that has familiar Facebook tools like a wall -- the Cancer Research cause, for example, has nearly 8,000 wall posts. Giving 3 million people a platform to discuss something they're passionate about and raise awareness -- whether or not it leads to money donated -- points to Facebook's potential as a powerful social tool.

The bad news for Causes is that like other applications on Facebook, it has recently appeared susceptible to app fatigue. It still has a huge installed based, but its active user base has been sliced to about 1/4th of what it was just a few months ago.

Conclusion

So is Facebook really a viable platform for social change? I think it can be. But like any new platform, we're still learning how to use it most successfully. There have been some major successes -- like the FARC protest and the participants in the Causes Giving Challenge -- but also some less than stellar performances.

Facebook still has some growing up to do. But as the user base gets older and more comfortable with the site, and as developers and organizers figure out the best ways to exploit Facebook to precipitate social change, it certainly could become a very important tool in any organizer's arsenal.

What do you think? Can Facebook be a serious platform for eliciting social change? Or will it never be more than a place to play Scrabulous and poke friends? Can it ever work for real fundraising? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

The Mrs. and Me are starting to really dig taking photos again she with a Rebel XT and me with a 30D. We currently share joint custody of 1) the XT's standard 18-55mm zoom (blech) and 2) the glorious and much-loved 50mm f1.4 (yay!).

So, let's say, hypothetically, a fella wanted to pick up a new Canon lens to add to these two cameras' modest arsenal. If we wanted a fast, flexible lens (that would mostly get used for baby picture-taking), what would you guys recommend? Possibly a higher-end, faster zoom?