• Housekeeping
• Guest speaker: Jeff Shuey
• Discussion leader (reading discussion) : Dan
• WikiLeaks and the future of secrecy

Housekeeping

• Gradesheet
• Feedback on project (survey)
• Course evaluations (pick up during coffee break)
• Reading posts: Paolo, Thor, Shane

Guest Speaker

• Jeff Shuey (@jshuey)
• reCAPTCHA is the service that helps digitize books
• New Medicaid computer system plagued with glitches (WA)

Reading Discussion

• Dan : Your Data or Mine?
• Dan’s  BoingBoing Link – a less redacted version of Lamo/Manning logs
• Amazon – Playmobile Security Check Point Toy, “seriously disturbing toy,” reviews

WikiLeaks Discussion

• What arguments can be made to support and to refute the belief in government transparency, specifically that “All governments can benefit from increased scrutiny by the world community, as well as their own people”? Do you think that the public should have unfettered access to information about the government and diplomacy? Why or why not?

Project

• Update on responses from elected reps

What’s Next?

• Course reflection due next Monday at 6 pm to me via email – clear subject lines, please!
• Finals week celebration? Paolo’s last class – he’ll be back in town Wednesday

Agenda

• Guest speaker: Karine Barzilai-Nahon, iSchool, on link relationships in the political blogosphere
• Discussion leaders: Andrea and Thor
• Lecture: Perils of homophily (ppt)

Housekeeping

• Reading posts:
  • Andrea: Death of the Newspaper: Can It Be Revived?
  • Betsy: I Am A Journalistic Optimist and Digital Divide: Updated Numbers
• Gary: Mashing Up Mashups (CC licenses)
• Update: contacting elected reps
• Project site: what’s needed?
  • About 2010 (missing some bios)
  • Results needed: I-1107 and all three referenda

Given that I don’t think we’ll be together more than a couple of hours, I’m delaying the start to 7 pm. Fingers crossed that they will be home by then. Whether or not, we will start then.

In that intervening hour, why don’t you take the time to read one another’s recent posts and comment … practice a little asynchronous communication. :-)

http://com597.wordpress.com/students/

Agenda

• Lecture : Kathy (slideshare)
• Discussion leaders :  Betsy and Shane
• Reading posts: Dan, Gary
• Exercise : contact legislator/city councilman/governor (more than one – use different methods – let’s track response : faxzero.com)

Details

Per email: We’re using Join.Me: https://join.me/504-201-011

(1) Please click the “person” and edit your name. :-)

(2) Join the audio conference:
Call 415.400.0300
Access code 504 201 011#

You can use a phone or Skype for the audio. If you use Skype, you’ll
need to use your keyboard, not the Skype keypad, to input the access
numbers (at least if you’re on a Mac).

(3) Join.Me also has a text chat feature. It may be easier to ‘converse’
on chat if we find ourselves talking over one another.

• Betsy:
  101 Reasons For The Digital Divide
  https://join.me/744-643-590
  Kathy: What Do We Really Know About Iran’s Election?
• Shane:
  More than access, media literacy affects us all
• Gary:
  https://join.me/434-682-479

• Guest Speaker: Sarah Schacht, Founder, director of Knowledge As Power & Open Gov West, @sarahschacht
• Discussion leader:  Gary

Lecture/Discussion

• Sarah Schacht, guest speaker (KAP, @SarahSchacht, @openGovWest, Sarah’s OpenGovList)
• Gary : What Does Engagement Look Like?
  * seeclickfix.com
  * parkingmobility.com
  * civicstack
  * VanTrash
  * OneBusAway
  * Robert Steele - oss.net

Some sample sites:

• data.gov
• thomas.loc.gov
• oasis-open.org (not-for-profit consortium that drives the development, convergence and adoption of open standards for the global information society)
• akomantoso.org (XML : Akoma Ntoso is a set of simple, technology-neutral XML machine-readable descriptions of official documents such as legislation, debate record, minutes, etc. that enable addition of descriptive structure (markup) to the content of parliamentary and legislative documents.)
• govtrack.us (GovTrack.us is a tool by Civic Impulse, LLC to help the public research and track the activities in the U.S. Congress, promoting and innovating government transparency and civic education through novel uses of technology)
• it.USAspending.gov (tracks IT spending and effectiveness across projects and departments)
• track.dc.gov (“track the performance of individual agencies, learn more about agencies Key Performance Indicators, Budget, Spending and News, access agency Data and Connect to the agency”)
• federalregister.gov
• open.georgia.gov
• Open Gov at NASA
• @OpenGov
• OpenGov hackathon winners (Aug 2010)
• Open Gov and Next Generation Democracy (Tim O’Reilly – Nov 15 2010)
• Government As A Platform – Tim O’Reilly (2010) – example of feedback technology

Reading posts:

• Andrea: excellent perspective in being of an age where the Net has always been like air
• Shane: “For most people, government isn’t something to interact with (except around elections) but something to either get something from or give something to.”

Do folks look for political info online? Case study: Social Security Administration

This report shows search terms for the industry 'All Categories', ranked by largest increase for week ending 11/06/2010 compared with week ending 10/30/2010.

From The Myth of Digital Democracy:

[O]vertly political Web sites constitute a much smaller part of the online universe than do news Web sites — only 0.13 percent of nonadult Web traffic, or roughly 1 in 750 site visits… According to Hitwise, political Web sites as a category received 26.2 percent of their traffic directly from search engines in November 2005.

Hitwise Data For Search Engines : November 06, 2010

Post-mortem: Initiative campaign

• Andrea: I-1105
• Betsy – I-1107
• Dan – I-1100
• Gary – I-1082
• Paolo – I- 1098
• Shane – money recap
• Thor – I-1098

Discussion

• Why the difference in FB and Twitter use/followers?
• What does it mean to have no/limited YouTube presence?
• Why campaigns still spend $$$ on TV and direct mail?
• What was the impact of money?

To Do

• Short bios on about page per 2008 class
• Recap election results on top level page of each initiative
• What else would make the site useful to future analysts?

Looking At National Races

• Arkansas Senate : Blanche Lincoln (D) lost to John Boozman (R)
  Lincoln: FB likes, 11,024 ; Twitter followers, 1,674 ; YouTube channel views, 9,254, total upload views, 169,953; Flickr
  Boozman: FB likes, 12,691; Twitter followers, 1,132 ; YouTube channel views, 3,025, total upload views, 20,453; Flickr
• Wisconsin Senate: Russ Feingold (D) lost to Ron Johnson(R)
  Feingold: FB likes, 35,200; Twitter followers, 13,337; YouTube channel views, 11,345, total upload views, 343,117; Flickr
  Johnson: FB likes, 41,351; Twitter followers, 2,128; YouTube channel views, 19,731, total upload views, 198,952; Flickr

• Incumbents lost renomination in Alaska (write in), Pennsylvania, Utah

For Next Week

• Discussion Leaders: Betsy, Shane
• TheModerateVoice – seeking guest voices

• Leif Utne – guest speaker
• Break
• Discussion leader – Paolo
• Post-mortem: Initiative campaign

Lecture/Discussion

• Leif Utne
• Paolo
• Mobs in action: Cooks Source

Money in politics:

Sen. Evan Bayh is retiring this year. The Democrat didn’t lose his race, and he wasn’t down in the polls. He’s just, well, leaving. And one of the reasons is that he’s tired of the money. “It’s miserable,” he says. “It is not uncommon to have a fundraiser for breakfast, for lunch, and for dinner, and if you have spare time in between, you go to an office off Capitol Hill and you dial for dollars. Then the weekend rolls around, and you get on a plane and travel the countryside with a tin cup in your hand. And it gets worse each cycle.” – Ezra Klein

The next election will bring an explosion of political money — perhaps hundreds of millions more than ever before — without effective spending limits, a fundraising bar raised sky high by Barack Obama in his presidential campaign in 2008 and multimillion-dollar fuel added by Republican outside groups this year. The $5.3 billion spent in 2008 and $4 billion anticipated tab this year? A hint of things to come. – AP

Who’s Buying This Election? Close to Half the Money Fueling Outside Ads Comes From Undisclosed Donors … Overall, for every $1 a liberal group has spent on these expenditures, a conservative group has spent $2, the Center’s research shows. - OpenSecrets

Irony alert: USAID “Money In Politics” primer for emerging democracies (pdf)

• OpenSecrets.org
• FollowTheMoney.org (state politics)
• Money In Politics – Ohio Citizen Action
• MapLight.org

Maplight Results Currency Reform Act

Reading posts

• Betsy: Will the time come when change is real, and not just a slogan for an incredibly powerful presidential campaign?
• Dan: With a shrinking mass media presence (particularly print media) in most American communities, the ability of a bystander equipped with a smart phone with a digital camera has the power to document electoral irregularities in real time and report the raw images or video to mass media outlets immediately and from multiple perspectives.
• Paolo: If this is the promise of the Internet, it’s not Trippi’s promise. We’re not seeing revolution, we’re seeing more “dumbed down” debate and the Internet’s playing reruns of children playing, pollution and old people in church.
• Thor: Give me Howard Dean with some index cards over Barack Obama and a TelePrompTer any day.

Other posts

• Gary: poll watching with iPhone apps

Post-mortem: Initiative campaign

• Andrea: I-1105
• Betsy – I-1107
• Dan – I-1100
• Gary – I-1082
• Paolo – I- 1098
• Shane – money recap
• Thor – I-1098

Discussion

• Why the difference in FB and Twitter use/followers?
• What does it mean to have no/limited YouTube presence?
• Why campaigns still spend $$$ on TV and direct mail?
• What was the impact of money?

To Do

• Short bios on about page per 2008 class

Agenda

• Discussion
• TVW – 7 pm – 8 pm (live stream)
• Project Work

Discussion

• Reading posts this week: Andrea, Betsy, Dan, Thor
• Kathy : The Digital President / Twitter (Jan 2009)
• Obama Won The Election, Not Social Media (Nov 2008)
• Republicans Beating Dems With Social Media In MidTerms (Oct 25 2010)

Stats:

• Jan 2008: “18.4 million Facebook members self-identify as American adults, which represents about 8.2% of the approximate 225 million adults in the United States.”
• March 2008: 1 million Twitter users (maybe half in the US)

TVW

• Elway on the Initiatives (take notes!)

Project

• Goal tonight: at least two analytical posts by each person in class — we will schedule their publishing (to pace them)
  • Identify claims
  • Rank claims
  • Determine if anyone has done a fact check on the claim (see 1098 post)
• New: need to add a thumbnail to each post so that it shows on the overview page (Kathy demo)
• Format: how should we call out digital networks : should we create a stand-alone page?
• Names: First and Last? First and Initial? Capitalization? Let’s get consistent.
• Media: editorials have been pulled on to their own page. Excerpts would be good: see RB52.
• Pro/Con pages: let’s get all the YouTube clips and radio clips posted here. Media pro/con should be moved to media page (if I haven’t already done that).

Agenda:

• Overview/Housekeeping
• Lecture: From Print Political Culture To Electronic: How We Got Here
• General/Reading Discussion
• Roll Up Our Sleeves: Project Work

Overview

• Reading posts to date (consider this a buggy whip reminder!): Gary (week 2, week 3 – brief); Paolo ( week 3); Shane (week 2)
• Dan – which site are you using?

Lecture/Discussion and Resource Material

• Lecture: From Print Political Culture To Electronic: How We Got Here
• PPT and Slideshare

Radio/FDR

• First Inaugural Address
• How Americans Adopted Radio: Demographic Differences (pdf)

Upton Sinclair Gubernatorial Race

Kennedy-Nixon Debate

Archive.org has a 16 minute clip that contains excerpts from the debate.

Carter-Reagan

TV (Cable) Amplification

Dean Scream - filmed from the crowd

Dean Scream – full

Dean Scream – not full

Political Commercials

• Some Great Old Political Ads
• Daisy

The Modern-Day AstroTurf Campaign?
Q: If we can identify astroturf campaigns, why are they still effective (or are they)?

• Economists for Obama

Project Work

• FactCheckWa.org moved to MediaTemple – get student email addresses to add as editors – see if anyone wants to be a designer – get ideas for widgets/content
• Review collaboration document and develop plan of work
• Tonight before leaving! Develop overview page for each initiative and referenda – agree on components
  • Overview page : summary in English – link to Sec of State site, voters guide – Link to pro/con group websites – link to our supplemental pages
  • Endorsements – blog posts? or have all news organizations made their endorsements? Should be on the overview page
  • Organizations for and against – in addition to official sponsors – room on overview page or make a separate pro/con page for more detail, like I did with I-1100?
  • Facebook/Twitter/YouTube site links
  • Polling data – can we find any? blog posts might make sense for this since it’s news related and changing
  • YouTube clips – TV and radio – child pages, like I did with I-1100
  • Research: Money spent – can we find out how much was spent to collect signatures, for ads, etc?
  • Research: Historical recap – do voters tend to support or oppose initiatives or is there a pattern?
  • Research: a blog post on what would happen if the two liquor initiatives were to pass (we don’t know!) — can we find examples of when voters have been faced with competing initiatives and what they did?
  • Research: analysis of use of digital tools like FB, Twitter, YouTube
  • What else do voters need to know about initiatives?
  • ?
• Identify which initiatives we will “go deep” on and who does what (by task or by initiative, for example); set deadlines (we have to get a serious move on if the material is to be valuable)
• Share material found offline — flyers, mailers, photos of signs
• Talk about Storify.com and curated.by — think about election night coverage
• Possible Reference sites:
  • WA Voter
  • Seattle Times Truth Needle

For Next Week

Deliverables for site developed in class.

Odds & Ends

• Amplify (a new sharing platform)
• Truthy – Indiana research project
• The Hidden Cost of War
• How YouTube Is Affecting The 2008 Election
• Museum of Broadcast Communications
• Museum of the Moving Image

• Introductory Lecture/Discussion
• Break: ~ 7 pm
• Guest Speaker: Alex Howard (@digiphile) Gov 2.0 Correspondent for O’Reilly Media (7.30 pm via Skype)
• Going Forward: discussion leaders, project
  

Introductory Lecture/Discussion

• Lecture (ppt)
• Featured post this week: Shane
  

  On a larger scale however, this book [Howard] brings a question I have had since I started studying mass/new media years ago to politics. As we as a society have more and more of an ability to choose and shape the messaging we receive, what happens to the idea of popular/mass culture? Outside of a few major events that are shared nationally (the Super Bowl for example) what are the water cooler talks of the future going to be about? Where will our shared identity come from?

Multimedia

(1) Schoolhouse Rock

(2) The Long Tail

Guest Speaker : Alex Howard

Going Forward

• FactCheckWa.org
• Storify.com
• Curated.by
• See Seattle Times Truth Needle

For Next Week

Blue State Digital was, at the time, under contract with the Obama campaign for technical expertise, not creative expertise. As a Blue State Digital employee, De Vellis (reportedly a “strategist”) had worked on software for the Obama campaign website, according to an email exchange reported by the L.A. Times (Google cache). But de Vellis reportedly produced the video “on his own time.”

“I made the ‘Vote Different’ ad,” De Vellis said in The Huffington Post on 21 March, “because I wanted to express my feelings about the Democratic primary, and because I wanted to show that an individual citizen can affect the process. There are thousands of other people who could have made this ad, and I guarantee that more ads like it–by people of all political persuasions–will follow.”

RawStory reported a few days later (Google cache) that de Vellis had worked with Ben LaBolt, 25, then Sen. Obama’s press secretary. The two “worked and lived together in Ohio during the successful 2006 campaign to elect Rep. Sherrod Brown to the Senate;” de Vellis was director of Internet communications. An August 2007 profile of LaBolt positioned him as a campaign veteran: “he’s already worked on as many federal campaigns as his boss, the junior senator from Illinois, has run.” Today he is in the White House press office.

In a June 2007 interview with MotherJones, deVellis admitted that he knew he was “playing with fire” and attempted to minimize his connection with LaBolt (using an anecdote that, instead, links him to the campaign):

MJ: When you created “Hillary 1984,” did you think in advance that there would be this much fallout?

PD: I knew I was playing with fire, but I didn’t think it would reach this level. When I saw presidential candidates commenting on it on TV, it went to a whole new level of scrutiny that I have never witnessed. So, yes, I knew what I was doing. I didn’t realize I would be identified and I didn’t realize people would care as much as they did. I knew it was very provocative. The thing people don’t realize is that the Internet is a really hot medium. That is the kind of thing that breaks through-something that is really up in your face. Usually, you are shoving stuff out there that people could care less about. Did I realize it was going to be such a big deal? No, I didn’t really realize that, obviously.

[...]

MJ: I’m sure you are aware of the skepticism surrounding the situation-that people just don’t believe that there was no campaign involvement. You lived with an Obama PR flack.

PD: I’m friends with people on every campaign. Politics is a really small world-it’s really like junior high. The [Obama] campaign was not involved in it at all. As soon as they found out, I left the company. I think Obama’s a great guy, and I think he’s running a great campaign, but that doesn’t make me officially part of the campaign. But am I connected on one of these trees that connects all the great rock bands-like the drummer of Pink Floyd is also in Supertramp. Yeah, there’s some of that. But I have the capability to do that on my own and the ability to get it out there. I’m kind of a utility player. I can do it all. I can also just shut up and watch the fireworks go off and that’s what I did.

At least one Ohio blogger called foul, expressing skepticism that deVellis had either the creative or technical skills needed to create the ad, based upon the Brown Senate campaign. In an email exchange with Micah Sifry, parkridge47 (a moniker that deVellis subsequently claimed as his) admits that the idea for the ad came “from a friend”:

A friend suggested the idea after reading a New York Times article about the Clinton’s campaign bullying of donors and political operatives after the Geffen dustup.

What was the “Geffen dustup“? David Geffen is a billionaire producer, co-founder of DreamWorks and one of the party’s most prominent donors. From February 2007, via the Washington Post:

In an interview with New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, Geffen said that Clinton is “the easiest to beat” of the Democratic field and skewered her unwillingness to apologize for her 2002 vote to use force in Iraq. “It’s not a very big thing to say ‘I made a mistake’ on the war, and typical of Hillary Clinton that she can’t,” Geffen said.

Geffen, who was a co-host of an Obama fundraiser Tuesday night in Los Angeles, saved even sharper criticism for former president Bill Clinton, to whom he was close before a falling-out over the pardoning of financier Marc Rich at the end of Clinton’s second term. “I don’t think anybody believes that in the last six years, all of a sudden Bill Clinton has become a different person,” Geffen said in an oblique reference to questions surrounding the former president’s private life.

After seeing the comments yesterday morning, the Clinton campaign immediately issued a call for Obama to disavow Geffen’s remarks and return his $2,300 donation, arguing that they were contrary to Obama’s pledge to run a positive campaign.

[...]

New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson sided with Clinton and called on Obama to denounce Geffen’s comments. “I think these name-callings are not good,” he said. “I don’t know Mr. Geffen. I don’t know what was said. . . . But we don’t need that. We Democrats should sign a pledge that we all be positive. That’s what the American people want.”

Is it reasonable to deduce that “the friend” was associated with the Obama campaign? In February 2007, the only people following politics were die-hard politicos.

Silicon Valley Insider also expressed skepticism that the video could have been made by an amateur, quoting TechPresident:

But so far most of the discussion of the ad has put up a picture of an independent video person working at home on their Mac in their spare time. But that’s just not plausible. Such a character would be claiming his or her reward right now, boosting his or her career and having a great time doing the media rounds. And, also telling: the ad maker knew exactly what election law lines not to cross, stopping just short of express advocacy. Why didn’t the ad say, “Vote Obama”? So, when did independent YouTube video hackers get access to their own election law attorneys?

Videos on the de Villes website suggest that the Clinton 1984 ad was a one-hit wonder; there is nothing listed more current than 2007 and nothing with the creativity or technical expertise exhibited in that one ad. However, the ad does seem to have gotten him a spot on the Obama creative team; he was hired by Murphy Putnam, which produced radio and TV ads for the campaign.

Agenda

• Introductions
• Syllabus review
• Guest speaker: Deen Freelon, The Living Voters Guide
• Break
• Discuss:
  • Malcolm Gladwell on digital media and activism: Why the revolution will not be tweeted
  • Response: TheEconomist, Can you social network your way to revolution
  • Response: David Weinberger, Gladwell discovers it takes more than 140 characters to overturn a government
• Discuss: class project

Class Project

• FactCheck WA (inspired by FactCheck.org, WaPo FactChecker, PoliFact … commentary from MediaShift)
• Also, see The Economist Debate and Yahoo! Ask America
• Jon Stewart Rally

Tips: Recommended Settings for Blogs

• We use WordPress.com for ease in commenting and in providing tech support
• Recommended: Settings -> General:
  • Time: UTC -8
  • Enable: Users must be registered and logged in to comment. Note: if your WordPress blog is self-hosted, please don’t enable this feature!
• Recommended: Settings -> Discussion:
  • De-select: Comment author must have a previously approved comment. Note: if your WordPress blog is self-hosted, you may want to enable this feature. If so, please check regularly for held comments.
• Recommended: Design -> Extras
  • De-select “snap shots”

For Next Week

(1) Readings – Political Systems

• On Habermas and The Public Sphere
• Habermas, The Public Sphere (eReserve – Week2 may be at the bottom of the list)
• Howard, P. New Media Campaigns…. Introduction, Ch1, Ch2 (pp 1-100)

Optional

• Castells: Materials for an exploratory theory of the network society (eReserve – not in folder)
• Expanding Dialogue: The Internet, Public Sphere, and Transnational Democracy (eReserve – not in folder)
• Internet Politics: Some Conceptual Tools (eReserve)

Assignment: Students will reflect upon weekly readings at least three times during the quarter. These essays should be posted to the student blog before 6 pm the night of class. They should be substantive commentary that integrates readings and real life experience/observation/analysis. They should be distributed throughout the quarter — not three consecutive reflections at the beginning or three consecutive reflections at the end.

(2) Leading Discussion
Students will lead a discussion once during the quarter; students will select an article of their choice, linking the topic to personal experience or current business practices as well the general class reading, comparing and contrasting viewpoints. A list of articles and book chapters is provided for each week’s topic; however, students are welcome to find articles related to their individual interests. In other words, the list provided is not exhaustive.

These discussion leadership opportunities will occur Weeks 5, 7, 8, and 9.

Please send me an email by Wednesday with your top 3 choices, by week number. I will do my best to give everyone their first choice.