There are two types of netroots-affiliated think tanks whose idea I would like to explore.

The first is a think tank whose goal is to provide data that shows why the netroots are important.  Things that it could do include sponsoring academic conferences on blogging or doing detailed demographic studies of netroots.

The second is a think tank that produces information in collaboration with the netroots.  This is something a bit harder to do, especially since a good portion of netroots (and of the American public in general) are unqualified for this sort of intellectual gruntwork.  Not everyone is a scholar.

There's a difference between the netroots trying to push our elected representatives in the correct direction and working to craft the details of an agenda that can't be properly described without 100-page papers.

Take the net neutrality debate as an example.  It's fairly easy to say that we want X, Y, and Z taken care of, but has anyone with netroots connections actually put together data and written papers that would be useful in drafting net neutrality legislation, even writing sample legislation?  I think that is wrong to say that that is solely the job of politicians and that we need to elect the right kinds of politicians.

One idea that I had was using the many politically activated university students to do a lot of the legwork, reading political science journals and books, and writing article/book summaries and reviews that pass along information that might be of use to netroots and activists.  For example, I just read a book that included a claim that blacks are low-information voters relative to whites on national issues, but can be high-information voters relative to whites on local issues.  That strikes me as potentially useful information that could cause me to reevaluate some of the things posted by Chris Bowers about local Philadelphia elections.  There are more numbers to crunch than the stuff put out by the various polling outfits like Gallup and Rasmussen.  By putting this info into one place for some of the netroots to peruse, some of us may connect the dots and come up with new ideas about how to persuade people on progressive politics.

Does this at all sound useful?  Can anyone come up with another imagining of what a netroots think tank might look like?