Archive: Category: TechPresident

Al Giordano, blogging at The Field, puts his finger on the two most interesting elements of the Obama campaign's September fundraising success. First, buried in campaign manager David Plouffe's video announcement of a record-breaking $150 million haul is this significant bit of math: With an average contribution of $86 that means that more than 1.7 million people donated last month. Plouffe reports that September brought 632,000 new donors. The interesting number to me is the remainder: more than one million people out of almost 2.5 million that had given earlier in the year gave again in September. I agree with Al: the more than one million people re-upping on their support for Obama is a mighty affirmation of the campaign's small donor...

A few days ago, I started looking at the ground game of both presidential campaigns, sifting through the available data about all the events in the field that volunteers were creating using the campaigns' online tools. The differences between Obama and McCain were stark. Now comes more evidence of a lopsided battle in their voter contact operations. Right now, both the Obama and McCain campaigns are hard at work mobilizing their supporters to get out and talk to voters, either by knocking on doors or making phone calls. And both campaigns have built online tools designed to make it easy for volunteers to generate call lists or walk lists. Obama's is called "Neighbor to Neighbor"; McCain's is called "Voter to...

Here's a big Friday afternoon trans-Atlantic cheer for my partner Andrew Rasiej, founder of Personal Democracy Forum and co-founder and publisher of this blog. He just won an "eDemocracy 2008" award from the World eDemocracy Forum at its ninth annual meeting in Paris. The forum's organizers cited his work founding MOUSE in New York City, which trains thousands of students to be school system administrators; his service on a city task force addressing the broadband needs and the digital divide (humorously translated as the "numeric gap!"); his longstanding efforts to advise US politicians on tech issues; and his founding of PdF and techPresident. Kudos, Andrew!...

With the election 20 days away, both major presidential campaigns are focusing more of their energies on the "ground game" of galvanizing their volunteer base and getting out the vote. Both campaigns' websites make it easy for supporters to search for upcoming events near them (Obama's Events page is here; McCain's is both on his home page and here), but the other night while playing around with both sites' tools, I discovered that Obama's campaign will also allow you to export the resulting list as a structured data file, which for the geeks in the audience is like manna from heaven. In particular, you can get a KML file, which is short for "Keyhole Markup Language"--which means you can easily...

You can look up the hard numbers of "friends" each campaign has on Facebook or MySpace here on techPresident, and you can track the ups and downs of the candidates on the blogs, or see how their web traffic is doing. But here are some of the more esoteric and intriguing nuggets of meta-data I've found lying around the web in the last few days: -# of upcoming McCain events happening within a 25 mile radius of Orlando, Florida: 8 -# of upcoming Obama events happening within a 25-mile radius of Orlando: 84 -# of upcoming McCain events within a 25-mile radius of Dayton, Ohio: 8 -# of upcoming Obama events within a 25-mile radius of Dayton: 57 -# of photos posted to Flickr...

Is it possible to build a successful web portal and community hub around issues and activism? So far, no one has succeeded in this quest, though there a lot of people trying and one could argue that sites as diverse as DailyKos.com, Townhall.com, and Idealist.org each play this kind of role for tens of thousands of reader/members, and projects like the Facebook Causes platform built by Project Agape, Razoo, Changing the Present, Donors Choose and Kiva.org each have somewhat similar aspirations. One of the longer-distance runners in this search for the holy grail of social change organizing online is Ben Rattray of Change.org, who Josh Levy and I wrote up back in December 2007. Back then, Change.org was going through its...

It's late and it's Yom Kippur, so I'm going to be brief: Go read all of Zack Exley's detailed field report on "The New Organizers, Part 1: Obama's neighborhood teams and the power of inclusion and respect." Exley, one of the country's consummate NEW political organizers, who started out as a labor organizer and then got in early on internet-powered organizing first with his satirical GWBush.com, followed by stints with MoveOn.org, the Dean campaign and the Kerry campaigns, has written a powerful and convincing depiction of the people-powered, hyper-networked engine purring away under Obama's hood. Here's the key nut grafs (which he buries deep in the piece): We saw glimpses of the potential for this kind of organizing campaign in MoveOn's...

Did anyone use MySpace's MyDebates page, the "official online companion to the Presidential Debates"? Alas, not too many. And it looks like only four questions of the millions submitted online were asked by Tom Brokaw, the event's moderator. That, plus the pre-agreed rules that prevented the studio audience from asking follow-up questions or even showing emotion, made the "townhall" style presidential debate more like a wax museum animatronic replica of a townhall. What a shame. For some reason, this screenshot from MySpace's homepage captures the disconnect for me....

Are we going down the tubes, or can we use the tubes to save us from ourselves? When I'm not distracted by the latest news, that's what I'm trying to think about these days. Here are some unfinished thoughts on the topic...

This is an absolute first and frankly it's f---ing brilliant. The California Democratic Party has a giant electronic billboard up somewhere near a Los Angeles-area rally that Republican VP candidate Sarah Palin is doing today that is displaying live text-message questions people are sending in. On top of that, the whole thing is streaming live back onto the web using UStream.tv. Check it out: The CA Dems website says: "To submit a question for our electronic billboard, text the keyword ASK then the question to the number 69866. For example, send to 69866: ASK You said you'd run a respectful campaign on the issues, what happened? Keep your questions under 160 characters including spaces and remember to keep them family friendly since we're showing...