BBC on Pols Podcasting

<p>So mainstream media is finally starting to pick up on this development that will ruin (or revolutionize) the way media covers politicians. There has been recent coverage of pol blogging (driven by SF councilman's blog and others that have been in the news lately). </p> <p>But I haven't seen much about podcasting until I saw an article on bbc.com which said this:<br /> <em>[l:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4441135.stm|Podcasts are the latest attempt by politicians and their parties to directly beam their message to their supporters without having to go through the traditional media.]<em></em></em></p> <p>The BBC nails it: podcasting lets pols get their message out unfiltered at a relatively low cost. I've been saying it since (well i couldn't find a post on my site where i said it, but i feel like i have been talking about it for 2 months).</p> <p>[gh:node/108|On the bus saturday, Chalu, Ethan and I talked about...

OC-Tech: Reflection on Hallway conversations and afternoon

<p>The best part of these conferences tends to be the ad-hoc conversation that takes place over lunch and between sessions. I often wonder if there is a way to institutionalize these types of hallway conversations and make them a more significant part of the conference.</p> <p>This is not to say that the sessions aren't helpful, i think that certainly are. They are the most helpful part of the conference for the majority of the attendees I would think. However, for the more technical folks at these types of conferences, the panel discussions don't generally get deep into the interesting stuff. That happens after the sessions, when the tech people follow up with additional questions and discussion.</p> <p>I had an interesting conversation with Bob Fertig from Democrats.com about data sharing and databases for progressives and dems. We are going to follow up with more discussion this coming week probably. </p> <p>Jo-Lee and Steve Perez from the State PIRGS listened to me talk at lunch about tagging and faceted searches a-la del.icio.us and fac.etio.us and all the others that are popping up. Right now tagging is being used to catalog links or bookmarks or pictures (on flickr). But what if we applied this kind of tagging and faceted searches to our membership databases? Instead of starting out with a rigid taxonomy of issue and activity codes? (I think i will blog on this issue more in the future). What if google started allowing people to tag and do faceted search on top of their normal searching? Why should i have to google search and then del.icio.us tag, why not do it...

OC-Tech: Reflection on the conference (morning)

<p>Hats off to Rich and Liat and all the other [lk:oc-tech.org|Organizers Collaborative] folks. This was a really good conference and super affordable (the key IMHO). WE have a hard enough time convincing organizations to spend money on tech, let alone hundreds of dollars on sending staff to tech conferences.</p> <p>[l:http://micah.sifry.com/|Micah Sifry]'s key note address was interesting. As i mentioned in my earlier entry on the subject, I am not sure that I learned anything new–I am an avid reader of [lk:personaldemocracy.com|PDF] and many of the issues he addressed have been addressed there–but it is always helpful to hear someone bring it all together in one presentation (by bring it all together I mean talk about the democratization of the media, the effect of blogs and the internet on mainstream media and politics etc…) For folks who found Micah's keynote to be really interesting and new and revelatory for them, I suggest subscribing to the RSS over at [lk:personaldemocracy.com|PDF].</p> <p>The first session I attended was the weakest one. The folks were very interesting, but there were too many on the panel and the discussion, or presentations rather, were not focused enough on the topic of "Grassroots Technology and the Emerging Progressive Movement". Bob Fertig of [l:http://www.democrats.com|Democrats.com] was the bright spot for me on this panel. I have heard and spoken with Jo Lee from [lk:citizenSpeak.org] so that was nothing new. But Bob talked not about any one specific technology, he talked about how the democrats need to get their act together in order to start winning some elections. And the number one thing that he listed was getting data systems...

OC-Tech: Unlocking the doors to Political Power

<p>I just got home from Boston via the Chinatown Bus and figured I would post up a short blog about the session that I moderated. </p> <p>The idea behind the session was to have a discussion about campaign data solutions. By campaign I am referring not only to political campaign, but legislative/advocacy campaigns that require outreach to citizens. With me on the panel were BobLelievre and Raj Singh. Bob and I have crossed paths in the past when I was at ACORN and he was providing tech support to ACORN in Boston and Project Vote. So Bob is now the CTO for [l:http://www.projectvote.org|ProjectVote] and is working on voterfile stuff.</p> <p>Raj is a gis and systems guy. He talked about GIS and mapping and provided a bunch of [l:http://web.mit.edu/rajsingh/www/projects/opensourcegis.html|resources] on the subject of GIS and mapping.</p> <p>I talked about [lk:advokit.net|AdvoKit] and tried to demonstrate it just a tiny bit (but that didn't go so well i have to admit, i hadn't logged in to that install in a while). Just to recap some facts that I mentioned:<br /> I worked with 4 campaigns that used Advokit. 3 of them won their elections, one lost by 18 votes.<br /> AdvoKit is Open Source. It will be ported over to the [lk:drupal.org|Drupal Framework] (and become a module) [lk:CivicSpacelabs.org|Civic Space] is a distro of Drupal. AdvoKit will work also with the CiviCRM project. This is all very exciting. </p> <p>I talked a bit about applications for mapping in the context of a campaign, like giving a vol a walking map, or mapping your supporters, or mapping your target, or mapping to assist targeting,...

OC-Tech: Doing More With Less (CMS, Donations, etc)

<p><i>I helped Rich come up with the concept for this panel.</i><br /> Emily Thorson from [lk:echoditto.com] is leading off this panel with a discussion of some basic website functionality, and cool bells and wistles that can be added to your website.</p> <p>Little sidetack here here are some links for folks Content Management Systems: [lk:wordpress.org], [lk:typepad.com], [lk:moveabletype.org], [lk:drupal.org], [lk:civicspacelabs.org|CivicSpace], [lk:mambo.org], [lk:plone.org], [l:http://www.listbox.com|listbox].</p> <p>Back to functionality: Signup, list subscription, tell a friend, </p> <p>If you are using civicspace it is yours to keep (Open Source) Echoditto builds lots of sites in CS and they are working on some tools for event planning and maps (module development).</p> <p>And for some civic space powered sites that i have been a part of configuringg: [lk:gregoryheller.com] and [lk:rosiemendez.com] and [lk:gothamrally.org] and [lk:oatsny.org/cs] all of these were up and running in about 2 to 10 hours (depending on content population and style sheet development) These sites were all developed by folks with no formal PHP or mySQL or CSS training (and sometimes that last point shows) but basically you can get a site up out of the box without much customization for not too much time/money</p> <p>[lk:ma2002.com]</p> <p>Sarah Bennett recommend that you do a little planning at the outset when you are thinking about accepting donations online. Figure out what the contributions are for, are you doing event management, are you offering premiums, how will you take the contrib data in house to your existing database.</p> <p>Costs of your online donation system are important to look at.</p> <p>[lk:ma2002.com/merchant.html]Building your own database processing site. You need an EIN to get a merchant account. Getting an EIN takes...