Fem 2.0

The question of where to go in terms of the feminist movement in the future with new media and the new millennium is a big one, and several people got together to plan a conference and brainstorming session around this concept. Feminism encompasses a broad range of ideals including gender equity, equal rights, pay equity, reproductive choice, and much more. The challenge of the original feminist organizations as well as some of the newer ones is: where do we go now? The Fem 2.0 conference and online dialogue will hopefully provide some direction in this area.

Sarah Granger of FutureCampaigns will be speaking on one of the panels about feminism in the media and how to help women's organizations expand their outreach online. The conference is being held Monday, February 2nd at George Washington University in Washington, D.C..

The DNCC & Netroots: They're Beginning to Get It

The Democratic National Convention was full of phenomenal events geared toward delegates, staffers, activists, volunteers, supporters, traditional media and bloggers. Seeing everyone in one place together, moving from venue to venue, and sitting in on a wide range of panels that referenced the role of technology and new media in campaigns, it became apparent that people are getting on board. Perhaps it's slower progress than we would like, but it is probably the most realistic pace we can expect.

Bloggers still came across as a novelty to TV media. As Mary Rickles of Netroots Nation put it, the mainstream media is still "in awe" of the blogosphere. and some convention goers and The Big Tent gained a lot of attention. One person pointed-out to Raven Brooks that as Dan Rather was upstairs on the DIGG stage speaking about how traditional media isn't covering as much real news, Katie Couric was downstairs doing a story about the Google smoothies (which were, by the way, quite excellent and a great idea after all of the running around we were doing). It seemed that getting into The Big Tent had become almost as big a deal as snagging coveted Hall passes at the convention center. The Big Tent was a great respite for technology, nonprofit and new media crowd and we loved it.

Inside the Pepsi Center and the Invesco Center, bloggers had special access and were provided the same resources as other reporters. Everyone was on laptops with cameras - it was difficult to tell who was writing for what. Still, it's understandable why some bloggers were upset they couldn't get in - national blogs had an easier time with the credential process, but statewide blogs had a smaller chance of being accepted. In terms of total media representation, bloggers still represent a larger piece of the pie than they received. Regarding the DNCC approving more bloggers in the future, Brooks said, "they have a long way to go, but that's why things like The Big Tent exist."

Outside the official DNCC events, both The Big Tent and the New Democrats Network put on some great panels. Not everyone in the audience was part of the usual netroots and tech politics crowd, which was good - it means more people are there to learn. However, some of the questions showed that they still have a learning curve to travel.

Youth-oriented organizations, Rock the Vote and Mtv Street Team, clearly get it - they have been employing a blend of technology, music and media to reach out to voters aged 18 to 35 in GOTV (Get Out The Vote) efforts. Rock the Vote is partnering with a mobile program to engage younger voters more actively in politics via cell phones. WomenCount.org launched this week, using the adage that they are "the Moveon.Org for women" in order to drive home that they are pushing platform issues as well as candidates strongly based on online tactics.

More candidates seem to understand the power of the Internet as well. Scott Kleeb's campaign for Senate looks to be doing a good job translating online to field efforts, as more national candidates are doing each election. Talking with people at various events or in line to events, the average person understood blogging technology and how blogs work; however, most people still aren't on board with social networking software like Facebook or Twitter - at least not to a level that might provide a competitive advantage and most people don't yet even grasp how powerful email can be as a campaign tool.

Given generational issues, the digital divide and traditional technology learning curves, it could easily take another ten to twenty years before the maverick strategies employed by the Obama campaign online become standard fare in local and statewide elections, but on the national level, the movement that caught fire with Dean for America now has some serious traction. The next four years will show us how much.

Interesting Take on Twitter

TechCrunch has a great article up about "Why Twitter Hasn't Failed," exploring why Twitter is different in terms of distribution in feeds than facebook, FriendFeed, and other sources that produce feeds to specific audiences (vs. blogs where we don't often know where they're going.)

In the political context, we can see that Twitter does have a very targeted marketing capability in this respect. Campaigns - like Obama for America - can track exactly who receives their tweets from the candidate and use it to help hone message.

Latest Online Campaigning Tactic - Attack Websites

Here's the latest in my column for The Huffington Post - "Smear 2.0: Attack Ad Culture Goes Online." It goes into detail about the latest campaign sites launched on specific issues targeting the media and the public. The sites are mostly being used as a campaigning tool by Democrats, but Republicans have launched a few as well.

Campaign Internet Directors Turned Up the Heat in Person

Here's a post just published at The Huffington Post "Off The Bus" that I wrote (mostly - they do have editorial prerogative!) about what transpired on Monday, including a video. It's from a panel called "What Worked, What Didn't" for the campaigns online during the primaries. The panel included six tech strategists for six campaigns: Obama, McCain, Clinton, Paul, Romney & Edwards and was moderated by Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry of the Personal Democracy Forum.

Having been in their shoes, it was difficult to write about the panel without interjecting my own experiences on the topics, but Tracy Russo did a fabulous job defending the points she made online in the offline forum which is now traveling around the web so I knew that was what readers would want to hear the most about. The rest of the article is an attempt to cover some more of the important issues touched on during the panel discussion that I (and Mayhill Fowler made this point as well) wish would have been a bit longer.

Here's Mayhill's post about her experience at the conference and her remarks about what it was like as a presenter and why she was there as well as what it means to her and all she's learning about journalism.

What Do the Techie Politicos Do At PDF?

So while participating in the Personal Democracy Forum conference (that it sounds like will be rebranded to the "Participatory Democracy Forum", it was hard not to also notice in passing what everyone else was doing at the event since I was often plugged in at the back of the room... so I thought it would be fun to write about it.

During the conference sessions, people were...
- watching/participating, mild but not much Q&A
- on laptops (80-90% had) - usually in the middle of the sessions (closed up/saving energy @ the end)
- on pdas/checking (majority - blackberries)
- occasionally stepping out to take calls (but frankly not as often as I'd expected)

Those on phones/pdas were...
- returning voicemail
- checking email
- stopping phones from ringing

Those on laptop were...
- blogging
- checking email
- viewing yelp for restaurants nearby (just saw that once)
- reading news online
- occasionally messing with social networking sites (mostly facebook & twitter)
- watching the occasional youtube video, esp between panels so could have volume

In between and outside conference sessions, people were...
- networking, meeting each other
- chatting about issues/ideas and panels
- making jokes about Twitter (there was a lot of that)

So it was in a sense just like any other conference except more wired and definitely on the power user side of things. I will note that most people had multiple windows open on their laptops and were juggling a lot of different tasks.

Twitter Debate Online Leading Up to PDF Conference

Beginning a little bit ago, two reps from each campaign are debating issues related to technology on Twitter. Given 1-2 questions/day through the end of Tuesday's PDF '08 conference, the campaign reps will be responding to each other and commenting on issues, 140 characters at a time.

Easiest to follow at summize.com, check out the hashtag #pdfdebate. The participants, @ anamariecox, MikeNelson, and LizMair, are a Time magazine blogger, outside advisor for Obama, and RNC Online Communications Director, respectively.

So far Mike Nelson is dominating the conversation with a lot of great information. We'll see how the rest of the weekend transpires...

See also: the piece I wrote about the Twitter debate for The Huffington Post "Off the Bus".

What the Latest Pew Numbers Mean

According to Pew Internet and American Life Project, an initiative launched to "explore the impact of the Internet" on civic and political participation, the number of Americans of voting age who watched political videos online during the primaries (by May 11) nearly tripled from 2004 (35% in '08 vs. 13% in '04). And more people are using social networking sites for participating in campaigns (10%) than are contributing money to them (6%). Translating that to real numbers, in 2004, roughly 21 Million people were obtaining news and campaign information online (the most prominent online activity related to campaigns). According to Pew, that number has probably doubled for 2008.

As I mentioned Monday, Pew released their latest survey results Sunday, having interviewed 2,251 Americans of voting age. 1,553 of those surveyed are online in some form - email, web, text messaging, etc.. That's nearly three out of every four American adults, up from two out of every four in 2000. The results produced some interesting stats, but the big number gaining attention is that almost half of Americans (46%) have used online technologies (via the Internet or cell phone) to participate in political activity during the 2008 campaign to date.

Ben Adler from Politico.com asks the question of the hour: "Can McCain compete with Obama online?" It's no secret. As ABC News noted, "the survey finds Sen. Barack Obama is winning the online political war in 2008." This data just confirms what we already know. Democrats are winning online. That doesn't necessarily translate to votes, but times are a-changin.

We still have a long way to go in terms of convincing the American public of the Internet's legitimacy in the process, however. Approximately 60% of Americans believe that "the Internet is full of misinformation and propaganda that too many voters believe is accurate." With new media and citizen journalism abounding next door to unsubstantiated rumor sites, it's no wonder the public is skeptical. But it's just a matter of time...

Meanwhile, if we extrapolate the numbers Pew just released, the majority of Americans of voting age will be turning to the Internet and online technologies in their process of determining who to cast their ballots for in 2012 - if not by 2010. It's even possible we could achieve a majority before this November, and we know what that means.

New Data Reported on Internet Use in Political Campaigns

The Pew Internet and American Life Project released their latest report yesterday. It's chock full of stat nuggets in terms of percentages of adult Americans who are online, politicking online, watching videos online, and using social networking online all for the purposes of finding and choosing candidates to vote for in the election.

Most of the numbers aren't surprising. That 46% of Americans of voting age are doing something online related to politics is, however, a big deal in terms of providing data supporting that candidates in future elections need to take advantage of online technologies more and more in order to increase their chances of winning. It's also important in terms of people working on tech related to politics: it means we're here to stay.

Convincing candidates and potential candidates to use online technologies for their campaigns when money is tight is always a challenge and is sometimes a gamble. In more rural areas where the majority of voters are not necessarily online, tried and true field and direct mail methods still work best. But these numbers show a shift in terms of who's online and they show that nearly 75% of Americans have access to campaign communications via the Internet or cell phones. Even for those campaigns, not having an Internet presence at all could be dangerous.

So for everyone out there working on campaigns, here's the story: incorporate online methodology within your campaign, and for Democrats seeking a younger voter base in particular, integrating technology-based strategies within the entire framework of the campaign organization, as Obama has, will make your field organization stronger. Build the best web site you can, get people working on smart email communications, put up a blog, and find ways to make the campaign have two-way traffic, receiving information back from potential voters, not just sending out the usual sound bytes to them. Create a dialogue with potential constituents. Learn about their needs. Utilize social networks. Make the campaign engaging and interesting.

There are a lot of lessons within the data, but I encourage anyone interested to look at the reports yourselves and take what you will from them. The campaigns of the future will only build on what we have now, so learning about what worked in '08 will only improve chances your candidate will win in '10 or '12.

A Two-Way Street

This blog is not just about sharing news in terms of what's going on in campaigning technology. It's also about educating people and organizations about why it's important. Social networking tools, for example, work because they connect people in a way that makes the world seem smaller which is incredibly important in politics and activism. We all want to know how this affects us.

So when you take a political campaign, you have voters wanting to hear from candidates, but the candidates really do want to hear from the voters. It's supposed to be a two-way street. When you're talking about a massive state or a national campaign, that's more difficult to achieve. Candidates of recent years found that the best way it worked was to reach out to people in events and via radio or television. But that was largely one-way communication. They only get a few questions here and there from individuals or media commentators, vetted through committees often wanting to target the questioning, so people get a limited view of the candidates.

Throughout the primary season, you hear presidential candidates talk about how much they like going to Iowa and particularly New Hampshire, because given the way the process works, they are forced into more two-way settings where they really get to talk back-and-forth with voters, get a sense of their concerns, and hone their policy proposals as a result. And the voters can talk in small communities with each other.

This is where the Internet and online technologies come into play. Now with bloggers having the opportunity to ask their questions of candidates and receive answers back, as MOMocrats did, for example, we can continue the discussion on a local (in virtual space) level. And with tools like online polling, candidate blogs, social networking tools like MySpace and Twitter, we can interact more with the campaigns.

In Obama's case, it seems to be working. People really feel he's out there listening to them. The other day, I met a woman who said she twittered with Barack Obama and she really believed it was the senator himself doing the twittering. And even when pressed that it was probably a staffer, she didn't care - she was just excited that they cared to keep her in the loop. You can't buy enough TV advertising to get that kind of effect.

So these are examples of why using these tools can help your campaigns. It brings voters closer to where we really should be in participating in the political process. So next time you feel guilty for wandering around facebook, remember this: it works.

Last Week's San Mateo County Democratic Tech & Politics Event Recap

Normally, I'd do a better job of writing about these events from last week, but it was a pretty crazy week. Anyway, my apologies for lateness to those who couldn't attend the event and wanted to read the synopses here. The Technology, Politics & Innovation Panel set up by San Mateo County Democratic Party leaders Andrew Byrnes and Daniel Yost, was well organized. It was nice to see more local people who work in this area.

Tuesday's event in Menlo Park featured six panelists: Peter Leyden, Michelle Kraus, Perla Ni, David Chiu, Josh Becker and Dave Pine. Peter gave a nice presentation about how he and the New Politics Institute are working in Congress to get more people up to speed on technology. He spoke about how ad revenue is gradually shifting over and how campaigns are benefitting from placing Google ads, for example.

Michelle formerly ran Digital Campaigns, she has participated in The Huffington Post and she has an organization called Technology and Politics in Menlo Park. She gave an interesting example of producing a low cost video ad opposing Prop. 90 in the last CA statewide election and how they were able to reach over 300,000 page views a day and capture 2 points during the election from that campaign.

Perla Ni spoke about how Voterwatch makes Congressional videos searchable and how difficult it is to make change on the Hill in terms of opening up these videos to the public, how long it takes to get access to the video transcripts and how cumbersome it is to find real information about what is discussed. She spoke about reaching out to blogs to draw attention to this issue. David Chiu co-founded Grassroots.org along with Perla, who recently founded Voterwatch.org. David addressed how often this field changes in terms of technology being used in campaigns. He talked about how important data and message are in campaigns.

Josh Becker formerly worked as a press secretary in Washington. His focus is on how we get people to use tech tools locally in campaigns, and he spoke about getting the "smart, entrepreneurial people" in Silicon Valley together to make substantive change. Then Dave Pine spoke as "Mr. Local." A former General Counsel for Handspring, he's now running for local office. He spoke about how technology is changing things for local elections in terms of managing contacts and voter data, YouTube videos, eVites, and Cafe Press. He mentioned the Burliingame Voice as an example of a local blog that gets some good discussion.

After their presentations, we had a lengthy Q&A discussion and then we discussed more local political engagement issues. There was some talk about whether positive or negative campaigning will make more of an impact in this election. I concur with what David Chiu said which is essentially that both will happen, but I'll take it further and say I think the media will still focus on the negative things like the YouTube videos making fun of candidates, but that the positive things like the social networking will even it out. (I'll admit it - I thought the sites like MySpace and Facebook were just representative of meaningless stats at first, but I'm beginning to believe that they may actually affect how some people learn about candidates and how they vote.)

There was some exciting talk about how young people ("Gen X") are voting more now and the correlation between that data and use of the Internet in politics. Then we discussed getting a San Mateo County blog going. I typed furiously and got most of the meeting into notes, so if anyone wants the full transcript, I'd be happy to send it out by email.

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

BlogHer Second Life Politics Panel - Audio/Video Online

The panel I was on in online at the BlogHer Second Life conference on Saturday was recorded on TV in Second Life so it is now available for viewing on the SLCN.TV web site. I called-in from the Chicago Navy Pier conference center so that's my real voice in the recording. My avatar is the extremely pale, red-headed cybergoth. Watching the avatars doesn't show much except the avatars sitting on stage, but listening to the audio you can hear me and my co-panelist, padlurowncanoe dibou (Kathy Walker), to my right, discussing the topics. Queen Tureaud (Erin Vest), organizer of BlogHer in Second Life, also moderated. There is a slight lag in the conference call-in system so expect more pauses between speakers and occasionally there's some audio feedback but otherwise the recording is very clear. (Note: If you use a Mac, don't run the Quicktime video in Safari - try Firefox instead.)

The panel discussion begins with some information about candidates in Second Life and how that's working, what people do at the candidate headquarters in Second Life, and how the official campaigns have responded so far. Then we discuss political blogs and candidate blogging, along with topics related to social networks and other online tactics for campaigns. We responded to questions IM'd to our avatars by other Second Life residents, and carried on discussion about where we think online campaigns will go in the future.

Some background on candidates and campaigns in Second Life: Second Life is this virtual world with "8 million residents" around the world. They say about 100,000 people log on each week. Four of the current leading presidential candidates have campaign headquarters there - Clinton, Edwards, Giuliani, and Obama - but it seems that only Edwards and Clinton are doing much. The person who started the Clinton headquarters is my co-panelist, although her headquarters in Second Life has not been officially connected to the people in real life. When I visited the virtual Clinton HQ, for example, the most developed of the group, it was very different from a real life campaign headquarters - it has a piano lounge, a lecturn for speeches, an area for swimming, and a nice comfy couch area for conversations. My co-panelist made the interesting point that if someone in Second Life wants to visit a campaign HQ, they want their activities to be different and more recreational than in real life. So I think they have done a good job of creating that environment there as a way to gain interest for the candidates.

I think the conclusions we reached in the panel were that Second Life is still a very experimental place in terms of politics - most of the campaigns are not in-tune with what's happening there and haven't spent much time or resources on it - but that it's likely if Second Life continues to grow as it has, that they will take notice and put more efforts in later in this campaign and definitely down the road in future years. That echos other thoughts from our panel and other BlogHer political panels about how use of the Internet in campaigns is growing in genearal (blogs, social networking sites like MySpace, YouTube videos, etc.).

I enjoyed participating in the panel in Second Life. There was a slight learning curve involved in getting my bearings in the Second Life world and visiting the candidate headquarters there before the panel presentation, but the panel itself was just like being on a conference call while controlling a game character and instant messaging simultaneously. I stayed online for a few minutes after the panel to meet a couple of the questioners in the Second Life audience as I would have in an in-person conference, and then returned to the real life politics panel at BlogHer.

You can see all of the Second Life BlogHer panels here.

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

Ch-Ch-Ch-Change.org

I just checked out change.org, thanks to a tip from e.politics. So far, I'm fairly impressed - they are a social networking site for people interested in nonprofit issues and recently they added a section for political candidates because they want to help level the playing field there. The site's fresh and clean, and the nonprofit listing pages remind me a little of Orkut's groups.

It groups nonprofits by the changes they aim to affect, labeling them most often with action verbs like "stop global warming", "save darfur", "separate church and state", and "protect wildlife". You can search by category, like 'animals' and in there, search by specific change like "stop puppy mills" and there you'll find recommended nonprofits that are related. You can also search by nonprofit or by politician like many other social networking sites. What's really cool is you can provide recommendations for politicians on certain issues, and you can write reviews about nonprofits.

Each organization has an 'About' section, reviews, supporters, photos, videos, news, volunteering/action and fundraising areas. Discussions take place within the nonprofit pages - some are calls to action; others contain event information. They partner with JustGive - a 501c3 that passes along the contributions to the nonprofits as allocated. So far they've raised over $36,000. It will be interesting to see how they take off with their political area and how the site is primarily utilized in the long term. I plan to play around with it a little more and see if it sticks for me. I had a few problems using it and I have yet to determine whether it was my browser or their code causing the problems, but in general I like the site and the concept.

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