Political Tech Archive

Sorry, but after posting my video - friends pointed out lots of articles on how “antiquated” the White House tech was when moving in.

• Washington Post - Staff Finds White House in the Technological Dark Ages
• Gawker - Technology’s White House of Horrors
• ZDNet - Obama staff: White House in tech ‘dark ages’
• MacWorld - Obama administration frustrated by old White House PCs
• LA Times - Obama staff has low-tech move-in day at White House

Sorry folks - but if you think the Obama Administration had no clue about the tech/software issues before they walked in - you must not be one of those “tech-savvy” people Owen Thomas talks about who live within “the Manhattan media bubble and Silicon Valley’s startup cube farms”.

Whenever I walk into an office - one of the first things I notice are the computers and the software that is on the screens. It is very easy to notice if someone is on a Mac or a PC - and you can see whether or not the bullpen is running LCDs versus CRTs.

Sorry - but the tempest is not worthy of the sniggering - the truth is, the Obama Admin is going to renovate the technology and the solutions within. Third day started today - it takes corporates (and startups) a little time to allocate budget and get systems/solutions installed.

Give the White House a break. If I walked into a company with tools designed for the 20th Century and was trying to connect to people within the 21st networked Century, I might need a little time to rearchitect the solutions.

[EDITOR NOTE: I have both PCs (IBM and Dell) and Macs (Powerbook G4 and a new MacBook Pro) and bang on in Linux (Red Hat and Ubuntu)]

Image via Futurenow/Robert Gorell

On the 13th of January, I was asked to speak with CNN International about how could the Obama Administration effectively use technology to increase transparency. The video is from CNNi: World News Europe with Becky Anderson.

Great quote sent to me from Yan Ivnitskiy:

“Starting today,” Mr. Obama said, “every agency and department should know that this administration stands on the side not of those who seek to withhold information, but those who seek to make it known.”

As I am banging away at another project, I overheard some people saying one of those phrases you always here when people are talking about “new” technologies (at the Social Media Monday Meetup):

You know, all of us here are twittering - but my Mom is not twittering, and mainstream are not twittering. We can not assume that everyone will be twittering any time soon, but it will happen.

What I love about this statement is at the end of the 2004 Election, when I was taking some downtime - I remember listening to everyone in the media industry discussing the new technologies of “podcasting” and “RSS feeds” - something that had been practiced in the 2004 Election.

Four years later, the “podcasting” meme has been subsumed with YouTube (has anyone looked/listened to any audio podcasts in a while?) and RSS feeds are still a technical term for adding blogs and other websites to your feed reader, personalized Yahoo! or google page (or Netvibes/PageFlakes). But, who would have discussed twitter and “tweeting” - even though the idea of texting was still a small phenomena done by the Europeans and Japanese.

Today, the threads of what may happen are being discussed in various arenas - check out these concepts:

• Mix and Mashable Services - with Open APIs Facebook Connect, Google Friend Connect, OpenID and such - along with the Data Portability Project and the effort of groups like the Sunlight Foundation - along with simple development platforms like Ruby on Rails and/or django - coupled with cloud computing - what apps will be available?
• Making Voice/Video Easier - I thought the VoIP apps would be a bigger part of this years Presidential Election, but I am betting that with the increasing commodization of minutes and bits (think of all of the VoIP and packetized services), a platform in the frame of ROR/django - then things might blow up (see RecordMyCalls and Jaxtr).
• Community Organizing 3.0 - no one ever discusses the original online communities any more (e.g. prodigy, Compuserve or dial-up BBSes) which showed people how to handle chat and conversing online as a common-interest community. Even with forums, USENet, email lists, chat services (like AOL) - the most we learned was free-for-all or heavily moderated (one gatekeeper). With the expansion of the “social networks” into the greater population (I can not claim friendster or Orkut was effective in 2004 since the population was quite small in comparison to today), and with the population who has grown up with MySpace and Facebook - Community has jumped to 2.0 with the reduction of a “small” virtual space (like a forum) and has become the grand square with gossip, news, and other micro-events that are available for people to filter and deep-dive if they desire. Community 3.0 - this is a challenging concept, where technology and the crowd’s energy is captured and used for additional social benefits - meeting some need that we do not have already solved. I beleive the gradient to Community 3.0 be a combination of Data Portability, APIs and our natural curiosity of others - combined with the large, cheap computing and storage resources.

This will be another interesting ride - seeing how society and circumstances around us will impact the engagement of people to create the next chapter of Politics.

Tonight, I spent the evening listening to a number of people discussing the future of the Obama Administration and how technology may enable it. I live-blogged the event and provide my transcript below:

NYSIA January Monthly Meeting: Government By the People 2.0

Is technology changing democracy? With our panel, we’ll explore that issue, look back at the presidential campaign, and ahead to the new administration and look at the many ways that the Internet and technology is reconfiguring the way citizens connect with politics and policy.

Panelists:

• Josh Levy, Managing Editor, Change.org
• Micah Sifry, Co-founder and Editor, Personal Democracy Forum
• Rachel Sterne, CEO, GroundReport.com
• Tom Watson, Managing Partner, CauseWired

Moderator: Howard Greenstein, President, The Harbrooke Group

Bruce Bernstein (founder of NYSIA) makes intros and explains to the audience how NYSIA helps grow small tech businesses in NY. Bruce thanks Chase for sponsoring, and then intros Howard Greenstein, who has been running the panels and special events.

Howard opens the event with a discussion on participatory democracy: there is a potential for significant changes - how much is real, how much is perception.

The question is: what can we (the entrepreneurs) do to make it “work” for us. How can we use the tools the Obama Campaign has used and use it to our advantage (small and medium companies)?

Introductions

• Tom Watson: new book “CauseWired” (third printing) - came out in November - online social activism. Politics to non-for-profit causes. New firm - CauseWired Communications - turn them into Causes.
• Josh Levy: 19 different online social movements at Change.org
• Rachel Sterne: GroundReport.com citizen journalism platform and make money off the platform. 3500 reporters on the ground. Rachel was a Business Developer at LimeWire and a reporter on the Security Council at the U.N.
• Micah Sifry: Personal Democracy Forum curator, techpresident.com blog, consulting with Advocacy Organizations on the Web. Primary client is the Sunlight Foundation - grabbing ahold of the massive amounts of the government data and shine the light on what goes on with Congress.

Q: Did social media tech affect the election?
MS: Should the question be about “new media” vs “old media”? If we focus on YouTube, where candidates were sharing own content, initiating own events - yes. I believe that Obama would not have won the Democratic primary without the astute use of Internet technologies. The Obama team believed they needed to ride the new wave. Normally, the tactic for winning the Democratic Primary is about tapping big donor networks, then big media cheerleading for you, then elected officials / union officials.

Hillary had all of those things, and Obama won. Obama was able to continue to tap this unknown area. Hillary was supposed to win the Super Tuesday race. But it was about the caucus states was about having the most delegates. Obama organized technology to organize the massive base of potential support into pyramids across the states. 2 out of 5 in the major swing states. Obama Campaign used their own tools to mobilize and activate.

JL: that is the most specific you are going to get. At techpresident, they were charting YouTube usage by the campaigns. What it did was showed was the fact that the campaign could rout around the mainstream media. Continue the platforms LONG after the media cycle.

TW: “bottom-up stuff” - Obama benefited from the bottom up. The core of supporters did their own thing - and ignored the centralized control. The social network “influenced” the MSM. Self-perpetuating cycle.

RS: parallels are occurring in the larger, MSM media - everyone can participate, everyone can contribute. NowPublic, NewsVine, GroundReport - MSM orgs are recognizing the benefit of access to the community (e.g. iReport for CNN).
Read the rest of this entry »

One of the projects I have been working with is twittervotereport.com and the following video is a reasonably fun way to learn about what is happening right before your eyes:

Cameos by Nancy Scola, Billy Gray, Beka Economopoulos, Matt Cooperrider and Noel Hidalgo.
Read the rest of this entry »

Wow. Just got an email from a friend that showed me what the Chicago Office of the Obama Campaign has been working on. Talk about transparency - they launched “Under the Radar” where people can see and submit robocalls and scan of negative mailers to the campaign - and allow for the rest of the country to see and hear them.

This is BIG. This is incredible.

For the first time, we can connect on what is happening in different battleground states and SEE and HEAR what dreck is being distributed. This is something that can change the way campaigns are run.

When I saw it - I was incredibly excited since remembering when I was working for a candidate in Florida and found, during the canvassing, the various lies and hate mailers that people were pulling out of their mailboxes.

Way to go Team Obama. Terrific work with Under the Radar.

During my trip, I visited the Hudson Street Studios and filmed an episode of Political Lunch with Rob Millis to talk about the Broward mail-in ballot, the joys of the “bubbie patrol” and the exciting efforts of the Twitter Vote Report team (#votereport).

To see the Twitter Vote Report efforts, go to http://www.twittervotereport.com.

For more information on how to get involved with the Twitter Vote Report, go to http://votereport.pbwiki.com - we are looking for developers to get involved in delivering this incredible solution for the protection of our Democracy.

Voting Problems in Kendall (Dade County, FL) for 2008

Already - in Florida, reports of issues are already happening. Granted, this is a complaint on a delay in West Kendall in Dade County - but come on, this is 2008.

An ambitious team of developers and technical people are trying now to get a project launched in time for the election to allow members of the voting public to communicate on what the status is of the polling places around the country such that issues are not swept under the floor and people can act/react to the issues - and contribute to the success of the our political process.

Twitter Vote Report (http://www.twitter.com/votereport)

The concept is simple - when you see an issue, see he status of what is happening at your polling station, send a message to #votereport via twitter or a number of other mechanisms.  The tweet, message, call, whatever will be collected into a single database and can be used for visualization (on a google map for example) or with a SMS message to the Voting Right Attorneys in Florida.  

The goal, stated by the team (which includes Allison Fine and Matthew Cooperrider) as well as a slew of volunteers who have joined the cause, is to create a non-partisan service which allows for the freedom to vote to be protected by all Americans, not just the ones hired by the states.  

Are you interested in doing some programming?  Some marketing?

The team needs your help.  They are looking for people to get involved in the coding, the spreading the word about the process and the engagement of others into the fold to make this happen - through partnerships with any number of anti-suppression groups.

If you’d like to jon - go to http://groups.google.com/group/twittervotereport and ask to become a member.  You can do your part.

While this may sound silly, after a couple of conversations today with friends in the tech community who are relatively close to the Obama Campaign, let me say that from the reports and whispers I hear - the team has done a lot more than simply put together a DeanSpace 2.0.

I can not speak directly on what I have learned - let me say simply: with a team like Obama’s and the vision that they are executing on - I am extremely excited to see what happens 40+ days from now. But, it all rests on our getting out the vote.

Have you registered to vote?

Hey there - was reading my mail and found a couple of requests for two positions the Obama Campaign is looking to fill. More than likely, you are already aware - but if you are not, check these out. Truthfully, they are perfect for making a difference this election - the campaign can use any and all help they can receive.

Role: Deputy CTO/Chief Data Architect

• 2+ years in professional technology management
• Expert understanding of enterprise database architecture including large-scale data integration across multiple systems, API development, automation and matching optimization
• Familiarity with political data a strong plus including voter files, scoring, and political modeling
• Deep familiarity with web development including project management, feature development, and specification
• Willingness and ability to work in fast-paced, multi-project environment
• An abiding desire to be part of a movement to change American politics.

Role: Software Developers for Web Applications

The Obama campaign earned a reputation for smart use of online technology during the primary, but needs to go to the next level in the general election. To make this happen, we need some smart people to join our team.

The Obama Campaign is looking for creative, smart people who are willing to work long hours to be part of an effort that will not just win an election, but change the way campaigns are run. If you find someone who doesn’t have the requisite years of experience, but believes they can fill the spot, please encourage them to apply anyway.

Send an email to jg@rock-creek-ventures.com and please reference Political Gastronomica.

I would not suggest that money will be good, but the experience is incredible.