Clay Shirky:

Here's a 21st century question: What is Wikipedia made of?

We are living through a shock of inclusion, where the former audience is becoming increasingly intertwined with all aspects of news, as sources who can go public on their own, as groups that can both create and comb through data in ways the professionals can't, as disseminators and syndicators and users of the news.

This shock of inclusion is coming from the outside in, driven not by the professionals formerly in charge, but by the former audience. It is also being driven by new news entrepreneurs, the men and women who want to build new kinds of sites and services that assume, rather than ignore, the free time and talents of the public.

This a change so varied and robust that we need to consider retiring the word "consumer" altogether, and treat consumption as simply one behavior of many that citizens can now engage in. The kinds of changes that are coming will dwarf those we've already seen, as citizen involvement stops being a set of special cases, and becomes a core to our conception of how news can be, and should be, part of the fabric of society.

Evgeny Morozov:

If anything, Iran's Twitter Revolution revealed the intense Western longing for a world where information technology is the liberator rather than the oppressor, a world where technology could be harvested to spread democracy around the globe rather than entrench existing autocracies.

Julian Assange:

We must understand the key generative structure of bad government. We must develop a way of thinking about this structure that is strong enough to carry us through the mire of competing political moralities and into a position of clarity.

John B. Judis:

This election suggests to me that the United States may have finally lost its ability to adapt politically to the systemic crises that it has periodically faced.

When America finally recovers, it is likely to re-create the older economic structure that got the country in trouble in the first place.

America needs bold and consistent leadership to get us out of the impasse we are in, but if this election says anything, it's that we're not going to get it over the next two or maybe even ten years.

Steve Coll:

A democracy is strengthened when its citizens are confronted with the raw truths that follow from the choices of their elected leaders. Whether WikiLeaks will prove over time to be a credible publisher of such truths is another question. If WikiLeaks cannot learn to think efficiently about its publishing choices, it will risk failure, not only because of the governmental opponents it has induced but also because so far it lacks an ethical culture that is consonant with the ideals of free media.

Trevor Butterworth:

It is time to stop thinking about the Internet as a kind of liberation theology. The key issue facing everyone in the next decade is figuring out how to use the Internet and how to discern its societal benefits from its over-hyped Utopian promises.