How might the example of digital democracy in the US serve as a model for other countries?
- Guest Speaker: Sarah Schacht (BizNik profile), Knowledge As Power (beta)
- Discussion Leader: Katie Hall
- Election Night Blog (is your info captured here?)
- Reports: group and individual projects (Catalyst WebQ For Teams)
- Catalyst CollectIt Link for final project
- Closing Thoughts
Gavin Newsom (SF Mayor)
YouTube Channel
Posts of Note:
- Alvin, Who Watches The Watcher?
- Chris, On Howard and Data-Mining
- Jody, Intersection of News, Politics and Community
- Keichii, Blogosphere As Mediator
- Marc, On Trippi, The Revolution Is Combined
- Margery, Repackaging Political News Stories
- Rebekah, The Dark Days of Democracy
- Ziwen, Viral Video
Internet & Politics Timeline
- 1996 – Publicity, one-way communication (Web 1.0)
- 2000 – Organizing tool
- 2004 – Form of political communication (blogosphere)
- 2008 – User-generated-content (YouTube) and community (Facebook, Twitter)
:: Advocacy: ChangeCongress
:: Transition conversation? Sen. Daschle Responds Also – see WordCloud
:: Transparency: OMB Watch
:: Transition: Open-Government.us
Issues/Questions
On engagement – from epolitics.com:
Now let’s look at the Obama numbers and see how they break down. Thirteen million people on the email list, three million online donors. Five million “friends” on the public social networking sites, two million profiles on MyBarackObama.com. Three million individual donors, 70,000 people creating their own fundraising campaigns via MyBO. If we had more information, I bet we’d find similar trends throughout the Obama online army: of those 400,000 blog posts on the campaign site, how many were written by a small core of prolific contributors? The basic rule applies: as you move up the ladder, each rung requires more commitment, creates more value, and will tend to hold fewer people.
- Tension between $ and “public good”
- Datamining – cellphone numbers (Obama campaign – who acted consciously?) – BlueState Digital – See what Doc Searls wrote in August
- How close are we to citizens being able to know what they need to know?
- What is the role of privately owned public spaces like FB and YouTube?
- How true is this statement today?
- Do digital tools exacerbate or reduce the fear of a tyranny of the majority?
- Tools: UK – Fax Your MP (for free), PublicWhip (UK vote tracking)
- Publications: How the Internet Has Changed Citizen Engagement and E-mail Overload in Congress: Managing a Communications Crisis
- Other professional firms: Capitol Advantage, Convio, vShift
