Join Me at South By Southwest Interactive

March 13-17, Austin will be buzzing with web and new media professionals and enthusiasts for the South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive conference, part of the entire SXSW festival which includes music and film and spans over a week of events.

I found out a couple of days ago that I will be leading a Core Conversation that I proposed a few months ago. It's entitled "Whitehouse.gov 2.0: Upgrading to Open Source Government." What that means is I'll be primarily operating in the role of facilitator for a discussion about how the new national administration can provide more open dialogue through new media and use of the Internet.

Here's how I described the session in my proposal: "The 2004 and 2008 campaigns' use of collaborative tools, blogs and social networking have shown citizen activism and online communities can wield powerful influence. In 2009, our challenge becomes how to harness these tools in order to reopen the policy-making process."

I hope to produce a report of the recommendations that come out of the discussion to submit to the new administration and I'm looking forward to getting as many people involved with this as possible. Please join me at SXSW in Austin!

The Internet President

Since Howard Dean's unprecedented fundraising success online in 2003, a lot of speculation has gone into how the technology of the Internet might transform politics and when we might have our first "Internet President." Over the course of the 2008 election, we witnessed a phenomenon that could never have occurred in the past as a little known senator harnessed the tools of technology to reach out to the masses, engaging us and giving us shared ownership of his national campaign. The Obama campaign was the likes of which we've never seen before, and because of their decisive mastery of the Internet, he not only won the presidency, but he won by a substantial margin.

In this election it was very clear that the Internet was a major force in helping Barack Obama win. Without it, he likely would not have secured the nomination or the presidency. His inspiring message of change resonated perfectly with the openness of the Internet and instead of just talking to one person in a small town who then used word of mouth to transport his message on the ground, he presented his message online as well, letting word ripple out across the country, building a huge wave.

Obama was able to do this via social networking tools and the most interactive political website built to date, along with online outreach through e-mail and and the blogosphere. Most importantly, the campaign was able to bridge the gap between online and ground level activism, fundraising through small donations and leveraging that money for expensive TV ad buys required to reach across the country to win big. It may never be possible to win a campaign entirely online, but Obama utilized a combination of traditional grassroots organizing and netroots tactics for success.

To understand why this was possible, it helps to understand the numbers - according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project report released early in the summer, we have nearly reached a point where the majority of American adults are using the Internet to learn about candidates and participate in elections. Merging that with Democratic voter demographics including a majority of youth and urban voters, we had an ideal online environment for a Democratic campaign to take the lead.

The McCain campaign in comparison, took more advantage of advanced Internet tools later in their campaign, admitting they were not targeting voters as actively that way because e-mail was still more successful in reaching their base online. In the Democratic primary race, the Clinton campaign held tightly onto traditional organizing methods rather than allowing for increased online techniques, which contributed to the campaign's demise. They did some impressive things through the Internet and new media, but without an infrastructure that embraced it in the way Obama's did, they were unable to sustain the same level of fundraising success or volunteer mobilization.

In an earlier article, I addressed what all of this means to the future of modern democracy in terms of open government by Obama, noting that our level of participation should expand drastically. Expect whitehouse.gov to look more like mybarackobama.com than the static website we've seen in the past, including a public comment area where the new president will invite feedback online for five days on any non-emergency legislation before he signs it into law. It signals the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Congratulations, Internet President Obama.

Originally posted at The Huffington Post, Off the Bus, November 5, 2008.

The Internet is Helping Us in Natural Disasters, But Not Enough

I just published a new post on the Silicon Valley Moms Blog about what's now being called the "Summit Fire" in the Santa Cruz Mountains near Watsonville. As a kid who grew-up in tornado country, I was completely clueless about wildfires until yesterday. Now I've been studying everything available online to track the blaze because it's just a few miles from my sister's dream home, her animals, and one of the most beautiful pieces of property I've ever seen in my life. I don't know if I'm at liberty to describe it, but even if I did, still, it's one of those places where you have to see it to believe it.

In any case, what I learned over the past 24 hours is that although we have 2700 firefighters on the scene to battle these fires, we only get semi-accurate updates about once a day about where the fires really are. People are in their homes waiting for calls or knocks on the door to evacuate. The neighbors who may or may not have phones or power communicate to the best of their ability, but they're still not certain how far away it is. They see the smoke or possibly the flames, but it's difficult to discern the distance. I found one live blog site where there was some minimal conversation via locals about what was going on to help sift through the mystery, but that was it.

So what I want to know is where do we go from here? What is the future of emergency response online? It has to be better than a few news sites and links. I'm not saying what we have now isn't good. I'm happy we have the resources we do. But I know from my technology background that we can do better. We've put together phenomenal outreach programs and online activism to raise money and repair devastated areas. Why not create a place where communities can create ad-hoc emergency response sites as they arise? It's possible something like this already exists, but not enough of us know about it.

What I found was one site for firefighters that said how to listen on short range scanners, some articles on the local newspaper site, a few maps that are only updated daily, the state fire site with data updated periodically (like every day or half a day), one satellite image of the fire, brief TV and radio coverage, a state road closures page, one live blog on the local news station web site where people exchanged notes, and a totally overloaded fire detection map at noaa.gov that nobody can use because everybody's trying to get to it. And when watching the news and hearing from locals, it seems that the firefighters and police are keeping things barricaded for safety and not allowing any information transferral during the process.

Fires are dangerous, but if people can use personal weather stations and webcams like linked on the Weather Underground, why not have a system that applies locals as information centers online and includes what's coming across the waves from emergency support services? Anyone out there have an idea of how to do this?

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Originally posted at sairy.com, the personal blog of FutureCampaigns founder, Sarah Granger.

Bloggers First Today at UN for Leadership Meeting on Climate Change

The U.N. Foundation and the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences are now allowing "leading bloggers" into U.N. proceedings. Eleven bloggers were to be live blogging "The Future In Our Hands: Addressing the Leadership Challenge of Climate Change" today in NYC. The event included major figures Al Gore and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

According to the press release, "Together these bloggers reach an audience of more than 6 million people a month, all over the world. Participants in the “blog day” hosted by the UN Foundation at the UN are: Brian Beutler, Gristmill.grist.com; Jasmin Chua, Treehugger.com; Mark Goldberg, UN Dispatch.com; Blake Hounshell, ForeignPolicy.com; Joel Johnson, gadgets.boingboing.net; Ezra Klein, www.prospect.org/weblog; Sameer Lalwani, The Washington Note.com; Juliana Rotich, Global Voices Online.com; Kate Sheppard, stopglobalwarming.msn.com; Kay Steiger, Campus Progress.org; and Matthew Yglesias, matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com." Proceedings can be found on their blogs and at the UN Dispatch site.

All I can say is it's about time a) the UN is taking on this serious discussion in this manner and b) they invited bloggers to cover it.

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Originally posted at sairy.com, the personal blog of FutureCampaigns founder, Sarah Granger.

E-Mail Security Flap in Nevada Governor's Office

This is classic... according to Declan McCullagh of the Politech mailing list & CNET News, someone in the Nevada governor's office I'll only assume accidentally posted the password to the official Governor's email list and Outlook account password on the gubernatorial web site via a MS Word document that instructed aides on how to send out weekly email updates.

The current Governor, Jim Gibbons, a Republican, must not have much in terms of tech-savvy staff since (this is my favorite part) the password on the account was 'kennyc', the name of the former Republican governor, Kenny C. Guinn. (Note: the old password was weak, let alone the fact that it's how old?)

The full story details the instructional document and a few additional related facts. As Declan notes, it's possible that there's a firewall or some sort of security above and beyond the password "protection" in their system, so had someone attempted to use that password from the outside to hack in, it may not have worked... we can only assume they've changed it by now having heard about this post. Still, this is one of the most embarrassing political computer security stories I've ever heard.

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Originally posted at sairy.com, the personal blog of FutureCampaigns founder, Sarah Granger.