Rojo

The Web on the Candidates

• Now that the MyBarackObama.com group created to protest Barack Obama's support for surveillance legislation containing telecom immunity has become the single largest group on the site, TechPresident's Micah Sifry has an insightful look at how the many limitations of the social-networking site's tools are shaping the protest. Is MyBO in any way transformative, or is it simply super-fueling the same, yawn, top-down politics of the past? Or perhaps "change from the inside the tent" is not even the point, given that the group's explosive growth has drawn a good amount of media attention to Obama's FISA position; MyBO might be helping to turn protestors from passive recipients of the news into co-creators of it, in a way that as late as the last presidential cycle might have required a street protest. But let's take a pause for a moment and consider whether this is a case of 'meet the new boss, same as the old boss.' Raw Story's Nick Juliano interviews blogger and activist Mike Stark, who has helped to grow the group and seems to have admin rights to it. Here's Mike: "Once the FISA issue is dead, all I have to do is rename the group and I've still got 15,000 people." Mike might find that being told what to do is not what those many thousands of passionate protestors signed up for.

• Behold the power of a t-shirt: Washington State Democrat congressional candidate Darcy Burner, locked in a tight race against Rep. Dave Reichert, ran out of her burning house on Tuesday morning wearing a shirt reading </war> -- computer code translating into "end war." Responding to the photo by calling the former Microsoftie and anti-war candidate "a geek at heart" and "family" Daily Kos's Markos Moulitsas called for the online left to bump up fundraising for Darcy, and in about 24 hours more than $80k came in for the candidate through ActBlue -- which Markos translated into more than two weeks she can focus on putting her life back together instead of raising campaign cash.

TechCongress and Beyond

• Blog readers tend to cluster around ideological poles and are about as polarized as U.S. senators, finds a new study by a trio of political scientists at George Washington that includes Crooked Timber blogger Henry Farrell. The study which, we should note, used a data set compiled waaaaay back in 2006, finds that blog readers aren't reading much outside their own core ideological milieu. One other interesting takeaway: "Cross-cutting blog readers [i.e. conservatives who read progressive blogs and vice versa] are about as likely as left wing blog readers to participate in politics, and that both are significantly more likely than right wing blog readers to participate" -- which the authors attribute to social organizing among the online left.

• Didja know that you can drive clear across the United States without ever laying tire tracks in a Democratic-held congressional district? Me neither. But the College Republicans say that is indeed the case, are a new project called Where is the Red is tracking the coast-to-coast travels of a handful of CRs to demonstrate enthusiasm for John McCain and a Republican Congress among youthful conservatives. They'll be interviewing candidates and voters and giving the whole trip the Flickr/YouTube/blog treatment. You can follow along with Where is the Read via Twitter at @whereisthered. Like we saw with the recently launched Real World Republicans blog, web-savvy Republicans are not quite ready to cede a demographic advantage among millennial voters to Democrats.

• The progressive PAC Blue America has just launched Whip Count Call Tool to press Senators to support the Dodd-Feingold-Leahy Amendment to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, now scheduled to come up for vote in the Senate just after the July 4th break. Here's how it works: you enter you telephone number and zip code and the call tool (built off of Advomatic's Click-to-Call app) pulls up the name of your senators. Then, through a combination of black magic and fairy dust, the tool establishes a connection to your phone, plays you a short introductory message, and rings up your senator's office -- all at no cost to you. Once your lobbying call is complete, it pops up a form that allows it to track your feedback. All in all, a pretty snazzy demonstration of how to use gadgets and gizmos to facilitate -- not replace -- human-to-human political interaction.

In Case You Missed It...

Michael Tate says that the McCain campaign is on the right track by posting campaign video exclusives on YouTube, but that they should start tapping the star in their midst -- John McCain himself.

The Washington Examiner's Mark Tapscott reflects upon PdF '08 and offers this provocative thought: "Most of the people at an event celebrating a 21st century technology with profound implications for public pollcy [sic] came bearing a distinctly 19th century political outlook."

We're off tomorrow. A happy, safe, and celebratory independence day to you and yours!

A few weeks ago Senator McCain's campaign did on YouTube what it needs to start doing -- posting video exclusives to the medium.

Senator McCain's YouTube gem was the "McCain Cribs Exclusive: The Straight Talk Express" video. It was viewed tenfold the amount of times than most the other "Behind the Scenes" clips.

One problem still exists: Senator McCain isn't featured in this YouTube video. The campaign should produce more exclusives, but put Senator McCain in the video and have him tell us something on his mind -- that we haven't heard before. This video was well researched and well edited. The McCain campaign clearly has untapped YouTube talent. So start using it.

This isn't something that should be tried in the final 48 hours.

The online mini-rising to protest Barack Obama's support for the Congressional compromise to renew the FISA legislation has been getting a lot of attention, with much being made (by us and plenty of others, including Ari Melber in the Nation, The New York Times, et al) that activists are using Obama's own social networking platform, my.BarackObama.com, to organize and channel their efforts to get him to alter his stand. Indeed, as of today the Senator Obama - Please Vote NO on Telecom Immunity - Get FISA Right group has swelled to more than 14,000 members, which makes it the single largest self-organized group on the whole platform, which reportedly has close to a million registered members.

This is certainly a good example of what thinkers like Clay Shirky and Mark Pesce have been talking about, when it comes to "ridiculously easy group formation" (qua Shirky) and how "Hyperconnectivity begets hypermimesis begets hyperempowerment" (qua Pesce). But right now the main reason this development is important is NOT because the group itself is that powerful; it's because attention-amplifiers in the blogosphere and the MSM are covering the story and thus threatening some of Obama's hard-won image as a change agent, which could conceivably weaken his vaunted fundraising and organizing machine. So while the Obama campaign is keeping a poker face about the importance of some of its members using the master's tools to challenge his position, it is no doubt paying attention, too.

The fact is, we're all entering completely new territory here. There have always been efforts to influence political candidates to take or change positions during a campaign (or afterward), but we've never before had a national campaign create an open platform for mobilizing supporters AND THEN seen a salient chunk of those supporters openly use that platform to challenge the candidate on a policy position. Indeed, while the net is inherently a two-way, many-to-many medium, no politician has yet used it to listen to his supporters as a group. Yes, the Obama campaign has asked its supporters to share their stories about their health care woes, and some of those anecdotes have made it into the campaign's blog or policy papers. But we have no norms for a collective, public discussion--even though we now have the capacity for one.

Zephyr Teachout has made the point here at techPresident that none of the campaigns have used the web, yet, to share power with their supporters--the most they've been willing to do is share tasks (like phonebanking or door-knocking). This FISA protest raises the question of power head-on: What were the arguments inside Senator Obama's policy circle over accepting or rejecting the congressional compromise bill? Who gets the candidate's ear? How did they get that access? The FISA fight also should force net-activists to ponder some questions too. How would you like to have input on the policy-making process? If you want a candidate to listen to you, what measure of standing should make your voice(s) relevant? Sheer numbers? Total donations? Your ability to make a lot of noise?

The hubbub over the FISA protest also raises another issue worth discussing as we ponder the future. Is myBO really such an amazing organizing platform? Yes, anyone can join and instantly get the ability to create their own blog, start or join groups, start or sign up for events, create your own fundraising effort, and connect with friends. The site also awards users points for all kinds of activities, creating a bit of a virtuous competition to do more with it. The "My Neighborhood" button is a nifty way to see people and events in your immediate vicinity. And the Obama campaign clearly has its eye on the most important things it needs to win in November: getting supporters to focus their energies on things like raising money, bringing in more supporters, phone-banking, door-knocking, and getting out the vote--as its "grassroots action guide" makes crystal clear.

But while myBO does make it easy to start a group online, it doesn't make it easy to grow it. You can't launch a group by inputting a bunch of email addresses into it, the way you can with a Google group, for example, which will automatically treat those people as members whether they like it or not. (One reason the campaign may have chosen this restriction is to insure that its email list, which includes everyone who joins myBO, is fully opt-in and thus doesn't get blacklisted by spam-blockers.) You can reach out and try to "friend" other people on the site, but you can't message someone directly unless you already have their email address. First they have to accept you as a friend.

Unlike Facebook, when you join a group or post something to your blog, on myBO your friends don't get an update unless they decide to visit your home page, another drag on the spread of messages internally. In reverse, this means that if you're the organizer of a group on myBO, you don't get a notification every time someone new joins. You can join a group and message everyone on the group's list-serve, but we all know how clunky list-serves can be for managing large group conversations. (Indeed, I just got on the FISA protest group two days ago and this morning I received a digest from it containing 464 messages, all from the last 24 hours!)

Limitations like these have led Obama activists to go elsewhere to do some of their organizing, or to build hybrid efforts that live partially on myBO and partially elsewhere online. For example, the FISA protest group on myBO has also created a Facebook group, in part because the newsfeed feature on Facebook is very good at spreading information across the social graph quickly. Or, as they say in their FAQ on their outside wiki site: "Facebook groups can grow very quickly, and it can be a great 'feeder' to the group on myBO.") Likewise, several hundred Obama supporters who are fans of Al Giordano's blog The Field have set up shop on the meta-social-network site Ning, rather than nesting on myBO.

I asked a couple of people for their opinion of myBO's tool set and got some interesting responses back. Mike Stark, one of the two administrators of the FISA group all in the news at the moment, said:

"My personal opinion is that the MYBO tools are pretty archaic. So far as I know, as moderator of the group, I've got no way of setting messaging defaults for new members, the blog is bare-bones, there's no IM capability, most people don't complete profiles (which is a debatable benefit - by not requiring a lengthy registration process, more people sign up for the site), and networking does seem to be 'a process'."

Another person who is a web developer and organizer said: "The lateral tools on myBO stink." In particular, this person added, the friend-finder tool is "definitely a generation or two behind compared to what LinkedIn or Facebook are offering." Also, this person noted, "Since the system doesn't handle multiple friend requests very elegantly, people may have had issues getting swamped with requests. And it doesn't seem to have any concept of a friend-activity aggregating feed, which maybe isn't so surprising since that's a decent chunk of engineering and really Facebook's key innovation."

Why dwell in such detail on the structure and functionalities of myBO? Well, as Lawrence Lessig wrote, "code is law." The structure of the conversation and organizing enabled on myBO could well be the prototype for whatever successor platform a President Obama uses to help him govern. By default, myBO is the place where millions of Obama supporters are most likely to cross paths online (you can go elsewhere online, of course, but this is the place with the most self-selected Obama supporters, by definition). There's a lot of power to be tapped here. How it is used, who gets to do what, and who listens to whom, are questions that will matter a great deal going forward.

At just about 11 EST tonight, a group launched last Wednesday on MyBarackObama.com in protest of Barack Obama's support for legislation that includes retroactive immunity for U.S. telecom companies attracted its 13,453rd member and became the single largest group on the site, surpassing Action Wire, a group dedicated to keeping supporters up to date on rumors and smears. It took the group seven days to move to the head of the pack on the campaign's 17-month old social-networking site.

Mike Stark, a blogger who has helped to stimulate the growth of the group, had sent out a note to its members reporting that the Obama campaign was going to have some sort of response to the group late this evening. The third-party wiki set up to support the group later amended that notice to say that the campaign will respond tomorrow morning.

The group has had at least one success -- generating continued attention to Obama's support for an immunity-including Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in some high-profile places, like the New York Times.

In its response tomorrow, if it comes, will the Obama campaign thank the group for pointing out the error of the senator's ways? Will they reiterate his stand in favor of FISA as written? Will they revoke the MyBO logins of anyway who had anything to do with this whole thing? Stay tuned.

And with that, g'night.

The first videos of plenary sessions from "Personal Democracy Forum 2008: Rebooting the System" are now available on our Blip.tv channel at pdf.blip.tv.

* A Conversation with Elizabeth (and John) Edwards, led by Andrew Rasiej.
* Lawrence Lessig on The Declaration for Independence.
* Jonathan Zittrain on The Future of the Internet: Towards Civic Technologies.
* Mark Pesce on What Happens When We're All Connected: Hyperpolitics (American Style).

Relive your favorite moments; catch a session you may have missed; share them with your friends! We'll have more for you soon...

Our cousins across the pond continue to show that "government 2.0" isn't just something that we have to do "to" government, but it's something government can do "with" us. The Power of Information Task Force has just launched a contest called "Show Us a Better Way" that is calling for "ideas for new products that could improve the way public information is communicated." They've put up 20,000 pounds for the winning idea, which is something like a gazillion dollars (these days). This is really kewl.

To make the contest really productive, the taskforce has brought together a wealth of government data-sets and useful APIs, including several previously unavailable treasure-troves, including neighborhood statistics (covering such things as access to services, community wellbeing/social environment, crime and safety, economic deprivation, education, skills and training), health care information, a list of all UK schools and the official notices of the London Gazette.

The kinds of things the organizers are looking for are detailed here. They include obvious mashups like crime mapping, and services like mySociety's "FixMyStreet." But then there's "RateMyPrison" (that's for visitors, not inmates, I think), the "Army Rumour Service," and a host of other fantastic civic software projects collected on a wiki that is worth its weight in gold.

I'm not surprised to see Tom Loosemore's name showing up helping manage the site's blog--he's long been a leader in this space from his days around mySociety to his work at the BBC. Kudos to all!

The Web on the Candidates

• "Don't ask me. I just work here." That's the jokey response of Jon Pincus, a strategist and sometimes Open Left blogger who is helping to organize the loosely-coordinated effort to grow the "Senator Obama - Please Vote NO on Telecom Immunity" group on MyBarackObama.com, when I asked him via email this morning what's next for the flourishing group. Launched last Wednesday, the group -- a protest against Barack Obama's support for legislation that that protects U.S.-based telecom companies who participated in warrantless surveillance -- has attracted more than 10,000 members, making it in a week the biggest member-created group on the 17 month-old site. More seriously, Pincus says the next steps are to "keep growing, phoning, [and] influencing the media narrative." An off-site wiki being used to organize the group suggests holding back contributions in protest. [See clarification on this point below.] The Nation's Ari Melber has more. The New York Times has a (non)response from Obama spokesperson Bill Burton: "The fact that there is an open forum on BarackObama.com where supporters can say whether they agree or disagree speaks to a strength of our campaign."

The Candidates on the Web

• Opening an email from the Obama campaign last week, blog pioneer and Obama supporter Dave Winer expected a targeted strategy briefing and instead getting a fundraising pitch. Remarked Dave in response, "the voter as ATM thing is wearing pretty thin." (Via the Minnesota Independent) But Dave should know that his email was, in fact, customized -- the ask in his note was $100, while the one, say, sent to non-contributors and posted on social-networking sites like Eons, BlackPlanet, and FaithBase was just $25.

TechCongress and Beyond

• Here's something to keep an eye on on the tech policy front: the conservative battle over broadband. Now, universal high-speed Internet access is like sailboats or skinny dipping or owning your own pony -- in theory, what's not to like? But, alas, the devil is in the details, and when the Internet for Everyone (IFE) coalition launched at PdF '08, some conservatives weren't so quick to jump on board. The question is: how, exactly, do you go about extending the Internet in America? Stick with me, because the story has some twists and turns but it's an important look at tech's partisan implications. Republican consultant David All was a founding member of the coalition and praised its aims and explained his participation, in part, by pointing to fellow IFE-er and "father of the Internet" Vint Cerf as a fellow Republican. But TechPres contributor and cable industry insider Mike Turk derided All's vision of a "socialist utopia," and former Fred Thompson staffer and National Journal writer William Beutler questioned the coalition's bipartisan bona fides. Cerf, whose remarks at PdF on the government's proper role in building out the Internet raised some eyebrows, has taken to the Technology Liberation Front blog to say he doesn't want to nationalize the Internet, just make it more like the public road system. Finally, there's the take from Red State's Erick Erickson, who, while deriding most of the founders of the coalition, gives warning of their nefarious motives -- and describes the Personal Democracy Forum as "a gathering of internet junkies bent on changing the world." Nice ring to it, no? Might work in next year's marketing materials.

• Under the banner of "political rhetoric examined," a new site called Speechology has just launched, and it's an admirably smooth and spare interface for viewing and reviewing political video -- specifically debates, speeches, campaign ads. (Disclosure: Speechology is funded by a mini-grant from the Sunlight Foundation, where PdF's Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry are tech advisors. But the project earns its mention here because it's really neat.) Take a look.

In Case You Missed It...

An update on our "Does a Connected World Need a Connected POTUS Poll?" -- with voting just underway, the responses are tracking 60% for a president of the United States needing first-hand knowledge of the Internet, 34% for a POTUS having just a firm understanding of the Internet's impact, and 4% saying that the POTUS has more important things to do than go online. The poll is still open, so vote away -- but more importantly, share your take in the comments.

Micah Sifry takes a look a network theorist Valdis Krebs's analysis of the political book buying patterns of Americans. Krebs, who might be best known for his analysis of the "social" ties connecting 9/11 conspirators, wonders whether the U.S. is moving from slightly right-of-center to slightly left-of-center, but Micah suggests that our decisions about the tomes we're picking up are being driven by the Iraq war.

Micah also highlights Show Us a Better Way, a project in the U.K. where the government has released huge stashes of data and a bunch of APIs, and offered a good-sized prize for the citizen who makes the most from it. Hold your tomatoes because there's just no other way to say it: this is governing 2.0.

The Financial Times's Joshua Chaffin looks at PdF '08 as a gathering of former "outsiders". Chaffin comes up with this little anthropological nugget: even PdF attendees sometimes consume news via ink and newsprint. Shhh...

Speaking of PdF '08, videos from some of the conference keynotes are now up on Blip.tv. Catch up with a conversation with Elizabeth (and John) Edwards, Larry Lessig on declaring American political independence, Jonathan Zittrain on the future of the Internet, and Mark Pesce on American-style "hyperpolitics." Keep an eye on the PdF Blip channel at pdf.blip.tv for more videos in the days to come.

***

UPDATE: Jon Pincus writes to clarify a detail I muddled somewhat: the wiki set up to organize around the "Senator Obama - Please Vote NO on Telecom Immunity" group on MyBarackObama.com does not call for protestors to withhold donations from the campaign. Rather, it suggests that if they decide to withhold contributions over FISA they let the campaign know exactly why they are doing so. Apologies for the lack of clarity on that point.

[If you haven't yet, be sure to take the TechPres poll Does a Connected World Need a Connected POTUS? and join the discussion in the comments.]

The Web on the Candidates

• The Center for Community Change's Sally Kohn has a provocative piece calling for millennials -- those born between 1980 and 1995 -- to make their political activism more up close and personal. These younger Americans, writes Kohn, are masters of connective tools (think email, blogs, Facebook, Twitter) but were reared in an age shaped by Ronald Reagan's "lone cowboy" vision of the world and have developed some measure of hyperindividualism. But, she says, from the desegregation fight of the '60s to the anti-apartheid struggle, social change has been rooted in collective action. It's a short, great read. Highly recommended.

• Focusing on activism of the more virtual sort for a moment, the group on MyBarackObama.com that has been calling on Barack Obama to vote against a surveillance bill that includes retroactive immunity for the telecom companies, has accrued about 3,000 members since this time yesterday, putting it on pace to be the single largest group on the campaign's social-networking site by Thursday. With 7,200 members right now, it's currently in 4th place and trailing the ambitiously named "1,000,000 Americans for Obama" by about two thousand members. Wired's Ryan Singel has more. At what point, if any, does the Obama campaign take public notice of the group? At what point does the "group" not care, as long as its success draws attention to the anti-FISA fight?

The Candidates on the Web

• As Obama quickly distanced himself from Wesley Clark's questioning of whether whether John McCain's Vietnam service gives him national security chops, Clark found a succinct way to stand his ground: via his Facebook status line: "Wes Clark knows that John McCain is largely untested and untried when it comes to national security matters." (Also worth keeping an eye on: in a recent speech on the subject of patriotism, Obama made special mention of the online-based activist giant MoveOn, though the reference was veiled. MoveOn, which took considerable heat for an ad in the New York Times that used the phrase "General Betray Us" in the context of the congressional testimony of General David Petraeus, was the target of Obama's disapproval: [T]those who opposed administration policy were tagged by some as unpatriotic, and a general providing his best counsel on how to move forward in Iraq was accused of betrayal." No response yet from MoveOn on Obama's criticism.)

• Speaking of MoveOn, is Newt Gingrich's rather successful Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less petition drive, with its 1.2 million signers, poised to blossom into its conservative equal? On the yes side: offshore oil drilling is proving to be an argument that unifies the disparate parts of the political right. Arguments against: beyond maybe reviving the nuclear debate, where does a group named "Drill Now" go from here?

TechCongress and Beyond

• Two cautionary tales about the dangers of trusting automated tools. The first is the simmering question over whether pro-Obamaites improperly used the Google Blogger service's one-click Flag Blog tool to shut down a raft of anti-Obama blogs. (This is going to sound incredibly dorky, but Google's description of how the flagging tool is meant to improve the community experience is well worth a read.) Google has defended itself, saying that the shut down was linked to the fact that the "Just Say No Deal" network -- slogan: "NObama" -- that the sites are part of was mentioned in spam emails. But anti-Obama blogger Blue Lyon, at least, has decided to abandon the Blogger community for the relative Wild West that is WordPress.

• And the second comes from Steve Benen, who reports that the American Family Association's auto-conversion of words found in Associated Press stories that they find intolerable -- like "Democratic" and "gay" -- resulted in the tagging of world-class U.S. sprinter Tyson Gay as "Tyson Homosexual." I'm sorry, but that's just funny. (Well, maybe not to Tyson Gay, but congrats on the 100 meter win!)

• Reflecting upon PdF '08, USA Today's Chuck Raasch concludes that all politics is local and getting localer. On that front, check out the newly launched EveryBlock Philadelphia and EveryBlock Charlotte launched, which join sister EveryBlock sites in New York, San Francisco, and Chicago. While not explicitly political, EveryBlock's hyperlocality reawakens the connection between human and community, and if that's not political, what is?

In Case You Missed It...

[A note from Micah Sifry] Congrats to Adam Mordecai on the birth of Dean Barack Mordecai, or is it Megatron Fantastico Mordecai? Actually, the name isn't decided yet, but Mordecai, whose firm Advomatic runs the back end of techPresident and PersonalDemocracy.com and many other sites, seems to be crowdsourcing the process of deciding. We lean towards Andrew Micah Mordecai, Adam! Mazel tov!