Archive: Year: 2009

Time for a quick update about next week's Personal Democracy Forum. First, we’ve added two lunchtime breakout sessions to stay on top of breaking events: *On Monday at 1:00pm, we’ll have a workshop on “Social Media and Iran” led by Katrin Verclas of MobileActive, Davar Iran Ardalan of NPR (and author of the memoir “My Name is Iran”), John Kelly of Morningside Analytics (see their report on mapping the Iranian blogosphere), and our own Nancy Scola, associate editor of techPresident, whose been doing a fantastic job condensing all the daily news around Iran. *On Tuesday at 1:00pm, we’ll have a conversation on “Accountability Journalism Online” with Jay Rosen of NYU and Pressthink interviewing Dan Froomkin of NiemanWatchdog.org (and until recently a blogger...

Our goal for this panel is to spur some cross-partisan discussion of what it's like to organize online and gain traction for your issues when your side is in power and when your side is not in power. With people like Mike Turk (former e-campaign director for the Bush-Cheney campaign of 2004 and then the RNC, more recently an adviser to Fred Thompson in 2008), Mindy Finn (deputy under Mike at the RNC and more recently Mitt Romney's e-campaign director), Natalie Foster (the new media director for Organizing for America, at the DNC now, previously with the Obama campaign), and Ilyse Hogue (the interim executive director Moveon.org's director of political advocacy and communications), I'm sure there will be plenty to...

Here's how Sujatha Jahagirdar, the moderator of this session, describes its focus: Time Magazine declared 2008 the year of the youth vote. Two million more young people turned out the polls than the last election cycle, and youth turnout has risen steadily over the past three election cycles. What is working to turn out young voters? What role did technology play in driving this turnout? How can new online strategies – like open source voting systems, online voter applications, get out the vote tools help sustain this trend? Join leaders of the youth vote movement to examine these questions and more. What's great about this panel is the diverse angles it's going to bring together. Maria-Teresa Kumar...

Here's how Heather Holdridge of Care2, the sponsor of this session, describes its focus: It's a mad mad Web 2.0 world and hot platforms such as Facebook and Twitter are fast becoming indispensable components of most online campaigns. The echo chamber of the blogosphere is a powerful voice for amplifying your message and the potential for mobile in the US grows daily. But even as we seek to reach the audiences and energy of these interactive online constituencies, is the decidedly "web 1.0" channel of email still getting results? At the end of the day, it's about finding and having the ability to connect with your supporters to have collective impact. This panel will explore the effectiveness of...

Most people are familiar with how the Obama campaign’s internal social network, My.BarackObama.com, helped win the election by raising money and getting out the vote. Some 2 million individual Obama supporters created personal accounts on myBO, and they used its tools to form 35,000 groups, generate 200 thousand volunteer-driven campaign events and raise at least $30 million by personally reaching out to their own networks. But did you know that since last summer, the Pickens Plan has enlisted 1.5 million people and built a dynamic online social network using the free Ning.com platform with 200,000 active local members? Or that last month, the MomsRising membership exploded from 160,000 to nearly 1.2 millon members thanks in large part to a viral...

From Twitter Vote Report and Huffington Post's Off the Bus project, to NPR's crowdsourced Inauguration '09 coverage and ProPublica's new distributed reporting network and its coverage of the stimulus spending, a new kind of hybrid "pro-am" collaborative journalism is taking shape, one that is powered by a mix of professional journalists, savvy technologists and engaged amateurs. This session will feature several leading practitioners of this new net-driven approach, and I'm expecting the panel to get into some detail on how complicated these projects can be, and offer some "lessons learned" about what works or how to approach organizing such efforts. As Ari Melber, the session moderator (and himself a pro-am pioneer with Ask the President), put it in a recent email...

Unlike most of the sessions at PdF this year, this one is about the changing demographic context for politics in America, and how a younger and more diverse population is interacting in new ways with the political process. Here's how Simon Rosenberg of NDN describes the session: "Among the most disruptive developments of the early 21st century is the way the American people themselves are changing. Driven by vast waves of recent immigration, and the rise of the millennial generation, the largest generation in American history, America is undergoing one of its most profound demographic transformations in its history. For those advocating the use of new tools it is essential that they also understand how different - and...

A number of people have asked about opportunities for collaboration during this year's Personal Democracy Forum, and in response to their suggestions, we're pleased to announce that Monday evening June 29, immediately after the first day's formal sessions end and during the conference cocktail party, we're inviting attendees to lead or join in informal BOF sessions at Jazz at Lincoln Center. BOF as in "birds-of-a-feather flock together," that is. Here are the details on three sessions that various folks have already been working on: Hacking the City, Demoing DemDash, and Open Questions/Citizen Media. We're also going to put up a conference wiki shortly, to enable attendees to sign up and start connecting around these session, post additional ideas, and also share...

At least one author of the "Best Congressional Tweets of the Week" (as picked last Sunday by The Washingtonian) isn't actually a real Member of Congress. So if you are one of the 645 people who have been following the account of @deanheller, thinking that you were communing with the Republican congressman from Nevada's second district, think again. In fact, until Monday, you've been following "Anon Guy," a Nevada blogger who decided earlier this week to come clean (sort of, since we don't yet know who s/he is), and admit that he or she had been successfully impersonating his representative, Congressman Dean Heller, on Twitter for the last five months. That's the story Anon Guy tells in a highly entertaining...

The quality of the dialogue on the Office of Science and Technology Policy's Open Government blog continues to improve, day by day. Clearly, the folks running the show are learning as they go, and trying to tweak how they blog about policy so that a useful conversation can flourish. But the process still leaves a lot to be desired, which may be more the fault of the topic at hand and the tools available, then the specific choices being made by the OSTP's team. Should we drawing big conclusions from this experiment? Or should we treat is a big experiment, but just one of many that need to happen before we can draw firm conclusions about the prospects for involving...