Reporter's Notebook

San Jose, Calif.

A national ad campaign to coax families onto the Internet, a corps of high-tech executives volunteering in government, and an increase in publicly funded research on the use of technology were among the proposals floated by an elite group of corporate and political leaders that met here in Silicon Valley this month.

The Aspen Institute, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, brought the leaders together to discuss how technology is changing society. Many of their conversations, held March 2-3, focused on ways to help more school children use the Internet.

Whether their ideas are ever carried out remains to be seen. But the members of the institute's Forum on Communications and Society, or FOCAS, are not just thinkers and talkers. They wield real power in both the...