Archive: Author: The Management

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...

Right now, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy's blog is in the middle of the second, "Discussion," phase of its unique effort to engage the public online in fleshing out the details of President Obama's Open Government Directive. After a bit of a rocky start, with a flood of semi-disruptive posts from "birthers," the conversation seems to be finding its footing. A new post by Robynn Sturm, titled "Transparency: Open Government Operations," raises some interesting questions and is generating equally stimulating answers. She writes: As the Obama Administration contemplates new approaches to making government more open, we want to hear from you. What do you – the non-profit fighting in the public interest, the company creating jobs for...

The folks at the National Academy of Public Administration who are managing the White House's Open Government Initiative brainstorm site have posted a call to participants for help. Specifically, help in voting down "postings you feel are counterproductive to maintaining a free-flowing exchange of ideas" and help in flagging content "that you feel is duplicative or inappropriate to the discussion." While the post speaks only in general terms, it's clear that it's a reaction to the flood of posts in recent days from people raising questions about President Obama's birth certificate and his eligibility to be president (whom I derisively referred to as the "birthers.") To NAPA's credit, they haven't simply deleted the many posts on this topic, which they could do...

It looks like people in the Middle East wonder whether President Barack Obama, who is visiting their country later this week to make what is being billed as a historic address to the world's Muslims, is himself a Muslim. A lot more than Americans do, at the moment. Check out what happens if you start searching on Google for "Obama" after telling the search engine that your "region" is Egypt: Looks like they want to know more about his middle name, too. (I found the same results for Syria, Saudi Arabia and Israel, which suggests that the Google search engine is aggregating results from the whole region rather than one country.) The same search, originated in the U.S., shows more...