Archive: Year: 2008

[With the federal government in transition, and high expectations for the Obama Administration to revolutionize how government uses the web and other technology to make its processes more open, interactive and effective, we thought it would be interesting to repost this white paper, which was recently posted online by the Federal Web Managers Council. The council is an interagency group of almost 30 senior web managers from the federal government, that includes web directors from every cabinet-level agency, several independent agencies, and representatives from the judicial and legislative branches. It serves as the steering committee for the Web Content Managers Forum, a group of nearly 1,500 government web managers across the country. These folks are on the front-line of how...

More than two-thirds of the 500,000 Obama volunteers who responded to an online survey asking about their interest in future activities in the wake of their involvement with the campaign responded that they "would like to continue to volunteer in the communities as part of an Obama for America 2.0 organization." And the number one thing these volunteers said they want to do next is work to support the next President's legislative agenda. So reported Paulette Aniskoff, the Obama Pennsylvania field director, who shared those numbers this past weekend during the Rootscamp gathering at Trinity College in Washington, DC. Saturday afternoon's talk by Aniskoff attracted at least 100 out of the approximately 500 people attending the "unconference." But while her presentation...

It's worth taking a moment to applaud the work of Macon Phillips and the other members of the Obama transition new media team, for how they have hit the ground running and built a dynamic, responsive and refreshingly open and creative government website. Every day, it seems, some new element appears on Change.gov: -Discussion forums on health care, the economy, and just today, community service; -Community rating of posted comments using IntenseDebate.com, a third-party service; -Responses from transition staffers on YouTube; -A quick and friendly shift from copyrighting everything to using the most open Creative Commons license and formats for sharing content; -Posting the names of the outside groups lobbying the transition as well as the text of their position papers, asking for comments on...

News continues to dribble out of Chicago on the future of Obama for America. First, Obama blogger Christopher Hass says there are now some 4,000 house parties occurring this weekend across the country to foster discussion of the movement's future--a healthy jump from a week ago. Second, attendees at last weekend's summit meeting in Chicago have received the following memo by email, which they've been urged to share widely. A copy made its way to my in-box and I reprint it below: Dear Volunteer/Team Leader: I wanted to be the first to share some of the exciting things that I've learned about how this movement of change will look going forward. The vision for this organization comes directly from President-Elect Obama: "We won because...

Andrew Rasiej and I are in Cambridge, MA today and tomorrow at the Berkman Center's "Internet Politics 2008" conference. Several techPresident contributors are here, including Gene K., Ari M., Garrett G., Chris R, and David A. and tons of friends and colleagues. The conference is semi-open in the sense that we are allowed to blog about it under the "Chatham House rule," which means that we're not supposed to name people (hence my semi-cryptic references), but that we're free to use the information shared, unless someone says something is completely off the record. Some of the conversations are being recorded and will be eventually posted to the Berkman website, however. So, consider yourself forewarned, I'm somewhat handcuffed here...

Some information is starting to filter out of this past weekend's "summit" in Chicago of about 300 key organizers from Barack Obama's 2008 campaign (evenly divided between regional field directors, field organizers, and team leaders). Tony Loyd, an organizer from Racine, Wisconsin, reports on the YesWeCanRacine website back to the members of his local group: Here are the outcomes of the meeting. 1. There is a process that is still forming, based on your input. Let’s be honest: we’re making this up as we go along. We want to take the time to get this right. 2. The process has been and will continue to be open and transparent. We’re trying to make sure you hear about...

While most of the country's attention is focused on the transition underway in Washington, another vitally important transition is taking place right now in Chicago. I'm referring, of course, to the future of the Obama movement and network, or what some organizers refer to as "OFA2" (as in, Obama for America II). Thanks to reporting by Peter Wallsten in the Los Angeles Times, we know that "This weekend, hundreds of field staffers and some key volunteers are planning a marathon closed-door summit at a Chicago hotel to begin negotiating details of what the network might look like when Obama takes office in January. A group of field organizers from battleground states has been enlisted to draw up a plan." What exactly...

"Today we're trying out a new feature on our website that will allow us get instant feedback from you about our top priorities. We also hope it will allow you to form communities around these issues -- with the best ideas and most interesting discussions floating to the top." Ordinarily, you wouldn't get too excited about reading those words on a website. But when they are on the official blog of the President-elect, things are a little different. In fact, this is a big deal. When you consider that for the last eight years, the occupant of the White House has essentially told the public "you get input once every four years, after that I'm the decider," this is huge. A...

Jose Vargas rightly got a lot of attention last week for the stunning numbers he was given by the Obama internet team about their online success. As he reported: "3 million donors made a total of 6.5 million donations online adding up to more than $500 million. Of those 6.5 million donations, 6 million were in increments of $100 or less. The average online donation was $80, and the average Obama donor gave more than once." This looks and sounds like a revolution in how presidential campaigns can be financed, but now comes a valuable reality check, from the Campaign Finance Institute, run by veteran campaign analyst Michael Malbin. At first glance, the foundation of Obama's fundraising juggernaut looks like...

The folks who gave us ObamaCTO.org, which has attracted thousands of participants in a conversation about the priorities for Obama's Chief Technology Officer, have branched out and added a new forum for debating options for the future of Obama's movement. It's early in the process, and as I reported yesterday, organizers are meeting in Chicago now to try to hammer out the answer to this question. On http://ideas.obamacto.org/pages/obama_movement you can add your own suggestions and vote on the ones already there. This could get interesting...