Two years ago, when I started working on the Personal Democracy Forum with my partner-in-crime Andrew Rasiej, I wrote this short manifesto to summarize our vision:

Democracy in America is changing.

A new force, rooted in new tools and practices built on and around the Internet, is rising alongside the old system of capital-intensive broadcast politics.

Today, for almost no money, anyone can be a reporter, a community organizer, an ad-maker, a publisher, a money-raiser, or a leader.

If what they have to say is compelling, it will spread.

The cost of finding like-minded souls, banding together, and speaking to the powerful has dropped to almost zero.

Networked voices are reviving the civic conversation.

More people, everyday, are discovering this new power. After years of being treated like passive subjects of marketing and manipulation, they want to be heard.

Members expect a say in the decision-making process of the organizations they join. Readers want to talk back to the news-makers. Citizens are insisting on more openness and transparency from government.

All the old institutions and players-big money, top-down parties, big-foot journalism, cloistered organizations-must adapt or face losing status and power.

Now, I still believe in this vision and analysis. But having watched and participated in the explosive growth of citizen-created media and net-roots driven politics, I wonder if this manifesto is off the mark, overly optimistic, or maybe just premature.

Yes, there are now 40 million blogs worldwide, whereas two years ago there were maybe a million. Yes, it's become possible to post a funny or pointed video on YouTube or GoogleVideo, sites that barely existed six months ago, and reach millions of viewers in days.

But are we truly closer to effective collective action? Even as we "think like a network," as my friend Marty Kearns counsels, is something greater than the sums of the parts emerging?

Or, are we starting to suffer from information overload, from trying to read too many blogs and respond to too many emails?

And, are those of us who are in the middle of this transformation letting our heads move faster than our legs? That is, are we getting caught up by the notion that "everyone" must be getting this shift, when perhaps we're still pretty far out ahead of the pack?

Personally, I still think the trend is moving in the right direction. That is, as more people discover their power to talk back and talk to each other, centralized and unaccountable institutions--Big Government, Big Business, Big Media--are all being forced to open up and change in subtle but valuable ways.

Their ability to talk at us, rather than with us, is faltering. It's harder for them to pull the blinds over our eyes, when we can factcheck their asses. Something deep in the culture seems to be shifting towards greater interactivity, transparency and maybe accountability.

Or so I think at 10pm on this warm Thursday night in Washington, DC, where I happen to be...What do you think?