I'm interested in how people's voices can come to matter in our society. I ran across an article called "The People’s Lobby: A Model for Online Activist Deliberation" written by Jeffrey C. Swift and published in the Journal of Public Deliberation. Great, let's take a look. At the top there's an abstract, a stocky paragraph of summary. I'll dive in there and get a glimpse of the heart of the piece:

• This article presents a model for a “People’s Lobby,” a digital process of deliberation and activism that allows citizens to have their voices heard on important political issues. The model described in this proposal attempts to achieve deliberation for its own sake, but also for the sake of an activist intervention geared toward immediate response—a process commonly called lobbying. In other words, this is a model that combines the fairness and inclusivity of deliberation with the prodding tension of organized activist lobbying. The People’s Lobby might not completely counteract the effects of more conventional corporate lobbying and other mass-organizational pressures, but if it increases the impact of citizens’ reflective and deliberative voices even marginally, it will be well worth the effort.

Okay, I respect Mr. Swift's professional obligation to speak as one academic to another, rather than to an educated general audience--been there, done and still doing that myself when I have to. But let's see if we can grab the essence of the abstract--I'll try a translation here:

• To help citizens to reflect and deliberate on public issues, to work successfully as activists, and to counter the too-powerful voices of corporate and other lobbyists, I propose an online technique that I call a people's lobby.

I think that's what the summary promises, but happily his blog gets more specific. If the blog didn't exist, I'd be kind of grumpy yet again about the way we academics train ourselves to keep readers and the world at arm's length with our writing style. Hurray for academics who get down to not just their own but also the people's business, who insist on writing for a smart general audience a good part of the time, as @swiftj does.