Web 2.0

Update: At the Washington Indpendent, Ari Melber confirms that a proposed interactive forum hosted by Google down in New Orleans is likely scrapped.

Micah at Tech President beat me to it, but I just want to echo that the proposed partnership between MySpace and the Commission on Presidential Debates, announced this morning, represents a step back from the innovation that we saw during the primary process.

This morning, MySpace and the Commission on Presidential Debates announced a partnership designed (theoretically) to bring Web 2.0 to the normally stodgy and uninformative Presidential debates:

MySpace and the CPD will jointly launch ‘MyDebates.org’ – a new website which will house online tools to promote deeper levels of political engagement with viewers at home. Visitors to the site will have the option of downloading a personalized application which, during the debates, will stream the television event live from the embed location (e.g. within a blog, social network, or website). The application will also provide users with an on-demand playback functionality as well as issue-based tracking, allowing users to track a candidate’s stance on issues they care about throughout the live stream. The full functionality will be available in the days leading up to the first Presidential debate on Friday, September 26.

Additionally, ‘MyDebates.org’ will feature high-quality video streaming and as the candidates are speaking, “issue icons” will light up as candidates discuss specific main topics. Users will be polled periodically throughout the debates with short questions with multiple choice answers (or iconic responses, e.g. thumbs-up/ down). This format will reduce distraction while eliciting specific and valuable feedback.

In short, here's what debate 2.0 means to the CPD:

• Debates streaming on the web.
• A rewind button.
• Embeddable widgets of said live stream
• (Potentially condescending) issue icons popping up all over the screen
• Occasional and simplistic polling that may or may not be used to determine the direction of questions.
• Tagged, searchable and embeddable clips of the debate available the next day.
• 1 debate where the candidates may face pre-screened audience questions.

Notice anything missing? How about greater, unfiltered interaction between the candidates and the audience. Web 2.0 is about social media. Meaning we talk to each other, not at each other. That's what MTV and MySpace had during the candidate dialogues last year, and that's what is missing from this proposal.

During the previous dialogues, questions from the live audience were always unscreened and never dumbed down. The polling was continuous, nuanced (the audience had six potential choices, not simply "yes or no") and was viewable at all times by the live audience, the moderators, AND the candidates. These polls were often used as a guide for follow-up questions, many of which came in over IM from the live-stream audience. It was that feedback loop, coming in over multiple channels, that forced the candidates out of their talking points and into a real conversation sans sound byte or spin. That unfiltered interaction between the candidates and the public is what made the MTV candidate dialogues interesting and informative. That kind of interaction is largely missing from this proposal.

Here's another question. Why do I want to watch these debates on a live stream of crappy quality when I could just watch them on the TV? I didn't watch the MTV Dialogues on line because I wanted to. I did it because I had to (and complained bitterly about how often the whole system crashed, necessitating a reboot of my browser). They were streamed live, but they were not aired live, and there was no other way to participate. I would be more than happy to watch the debate live on TV while participating in polling and other social features using my laptop. Or, wouldn't an SMS-based polling system work much better for a live national audience? The success of American Idol would lead me to believe so.

I will say that tagging and creating a searchable database of clips by issue and by candidate is a useful feature - especially for people to discuss the coverage on their blogs and social networks in the following days - but the rest of the proposal is pure web 1.0.

Two Friday's ago I did a blog about the potential for Congress 2.0 and better ways to utilize new technologies and connect our public servants to their constituents, as well as giving constituents a better more meaningful way of contributing to government and getting involved.

An all too perfect example came to the forefront yesterday when Rep. John Culberson, Rep. Tim Ryan, and eventually Sen. Roy Blunt fought it out over the Energy Bill. Instead of doing it in real live on the floor they instead did it on Twitter.

A report Wednesday done by Micah Sifry detailed the twitter users over at TechPresidents

...a pioneer on the House floor who may just be showing the way, Rep. John Culberson of Texas who has, shockingly, been Twittering openly from floor proceedings and is even considering doing some live video-blogging to open up public awareness of what he calls "the darkest and deepest hole in Congress," the House floor.

Ellen Miller [from the Sunlight Foundation] just posted about their exchanges.

As Ellen says, "It’s refreshing to see a member of Congress who personally tweets updates about his work as a legislator, often from the House Floor. We love that he talks specifically about bills being considered in real time so we know how he is going to vote on a pending bill and why.

Culberson is also experimenting with live video-blogging, using a Nokia N95 and Qik.com. He's mulling taking us to the House floor with him, and showing us just how the sausage is made."

The biggest criticism a member has when faced with fierce opposition is the claim that he or she is "out of touch" with the district. What better way to keep in touch with one's district than by using the tubes to bring the Reps into our lives - or in the case of twitter - in the sidebar of my FireFox browser. All the while contributing to the greatest opportunity to create transparency since Andrew Jackson had a big block of cheese in the White House.

In a recent piece about Obama's technological hotness in the Atlantic it goes further to detail how a Web 2.0 Campaign can turn into Web 2.0 Government.

"Obama clearly intends to use the Web, if he is elected president, to transform governance just as he has transformed campaigning. Notably, he has spoken of conducting “online fireside chats” as president. And when one imagines how Obama’s political army, presumably intact, might be mobilized to lobby for major legislation with just a few keystrokes, it becomes possible, for a moment at least, to imagine that he might change the political culture of Washington simply by overwhelming it.

What Obama seems to promise is, at its outer limits, a participatory democracy in which the opportunities for participation have been radically expanded. He proposes creating a public, Google-like database of every federal dollar spent. He aims to post every piece of non-emergency legislation online for five days before he signs it so that Americans can comment. A White House blog—also with comments—would be a near certainty. Overseeing this new apparatus would be a chief technology officer."

Like my props to Downing Street, the Atlantic talks about citizen access to submitting petitions in the UK and continues to agree that the increased participation, communication, and transparency are virtues to a point. The insane mob it might create however they acknowledge might weigh down the efficiency - the first drawback I've really given any credibility to. But I think that the benefits outweigh the problems. Imagine the intern mass who would delight to work in the Department of Technology and sit and play on MySpace all day.... Sign me up!

The finally to the last piece is "The lesson here seems obvious enough: technology has concentrated a fair amount of political power in hubs outside Washington. But Washington has not harnessed that power successfully." To which I respond a resounding - well no shit... And I think that is what makes up the difference between the Clinton vs. Obama machine and what will become the Obama vs. McCain machines.

Campaigns that are more paranoid about losing control or more paranoid about letting people in are the top down models that we see with HRC. To be truly bottom up and truly grassroots or netroots allowing power share is key. I've been asking the same question to some of very netrootsy candidates we've had on here and they've remarked the same. When asked how they knew to do the netroots and what would they say to the techphobic they said

Darcy Bruner

"One of the biggest challenges any campaign faces is how to reach the people who support you - or who might support you, if they knew who you were. And most campaigns use some combination of mail, calling people, canvassing, radio, outreach through local newspapers, and television ads to reach people. But more and more people can be reached online, where they are emailing and reading websites. So it's silly not to try to reach people where they are. . .

Other candidates should figure out where the supporters they need are, and how to reach them, and then should act accordingly. Sometimes that will involve a lot of blog outreach. Sometimes it means using Facebook. Sometimes it may mean developing a really good email list. And nobody knows what new technologies will emerge in the next couple of years. But it's foolish not to try to reach voters where they are - because eventually the other side will."

Jim Slattery

"Kansas is a red state and for a Democrat to win I think we have to employ innovative technology and reach out to new, young voters who haven't previously been involved in the process.

I've been inspired by my two sons, both who are in their twenties, and know a lot about new technology. In addition, I enjoy talking with young people and listening to their ideas. They often have a fresh perspective to an old problem.

I think blogs/blogging/bloggers are a great way to disseminate a message quickly and develop a kind of grassroots following. Yes, it is possible to lose control of the message but often times the opposite happens and a new message develops organically. "

And step 2 for MySpace in the Presidential Primary Social Networking Extravaganza is to bank on the fundraising apparatus and all the great bugaboos that go along with it namely tracking names, commitments, and all other personal information for a given donor that is identifying him or herself with a given candidate.

I have to admit when ActBlue first started, as a campaign person I was terrified about the idea of going through a 3rd party with our fundraising. Someone other than us would have copies of our lists, our donors, their personal information, and anyone who worked there or interned might have access to mountains of personal data about our contributors.

Over time with more use of ActBlue I became a little more relaxed mostly because it was a clearly partisan organization. Opposition was not a threat. Last cycle I read their Privacy Policy over and over and over again before I finally started to learn how I could use it to my own benefit.
“Other than as described above, we will not use your personal information nor release it to any other party without your permission, unless we believe it is necessary to share information in order to investigate, prevent, or take action regarding illegal activities, violations of our terms of use, or as otherwise required by law.”

Where MySpace differs is that they are playing both sides of the fence, they are owned by a confessed conservative, and they aren’t in it to help candidates fundraise from the grassroots like ActBlue but rather

“to track and monitor online donations made to presidential candidates through its MySpace subsidiary, giving the media group an increasingly prominent role in the 2008 presidential election.” Financial Times

Sorry for the lack of posts this week. I've been finishing up an article for WireTap and haven't had time for much else. We're now returning to regularly scheduled programming.

• Micah Sifry is asking if web 2.0 applies to local races. I would answer a resounding yes.
  
  FM regular Fred Gooltz used MySpace to organize young volunteers in a Yonkers, NY mayoral race. IPDI has a case study, but you've got to pay for the full publication (pdf). Check out my case study on CT Young Dems to see what YouTube can do in local politics. And as I write this, David All has also weighed in with more reasons why Web 2.0 matters at all levels of politics.
• I love NY, but I miss a lot of good stuff that happens in DC. If you're down there, you might want to check out these two events in the next week:
  
  June 5th
  Winning Young Voters
  Young Voter Strategies will host a panel of experts to release our new publication, Young Voter Mobilization Tactics Volume II, which profiles the youth outreach strategies of seven high-profile 2006 campaigns. Panelists will also discuss the possible impacts of the 2008 youth vote.

  RSVP to info@youngvoterstrategies.org.

  June 7th
  The Future of Political Communications Conference - Connecting with Young Voters.

• Finally, as a sign that I've lived in the non profit world too long, I'm ashamed to say that I found this funny.

Matt Stoller at MyDD has an excellent essay posted about disruptive field tools like Social Networks and rising youth turnout. Here's the highlight, but you should go read the whole thing.

Rock the Vote, in 2004, registered 1.2 million voters with a simple online voter registration download tool. That's more than twice as much as they had ever registered in any other cycle, including the youth-spike year of 1992. And the online voter registration tool wasn't particularly flexible. What's happening this cycle could be ground-breaking, in that Rock the Vote is building a voter registration engine with an API anyone can innovate on top of. Groups and individuals will be able to capture the number of people they register, the data of the people they register, and the contact information of those they register. This means that, unlike with a standard voter registration download form, the person who asked you to register, presumably someone you trust, will be reminding you to vote. That's a big deal. They will also be able to get credit for registering you to vote, since the voter engine will let people see how many people have registered through a page. It'll be kind of like Actblue, for voter registration.

I've been combing around voter registration statistics, and the number of 18-29 year old voters who voted in 2004 versus 2000 jumped from 15.8 million to 20.1 million, an increase of 4.3 million. With Facebook, MySpace, and Youtube turning intensely political, it's pretty clear that voter registration, and specifically, being able to count voter registration and compete over it, will be a killer ap. Finally, field will be at least in some part measurable and put online. Facebook alone has 22-24 million members, and is growing at 150,000 members a day. MySpace is over 100 million. And though it's unclear how many of these user accounts are citizens and how seriously they take participation in these public spaces, the fact that there are these public spaces, and that they are gargantuan, is a game-changer. My guess is that the opinion leaders in these communities are traditional pundits and stars, but it doesn't have to be this way, and bands and bloggers are in the mix as well.

If Rock the Vote experiences the type of growth of regular Web 2.0 startups like Flickr, Facebook, MySpace, Youtube, etc, there's no reason that 18-29 year old voting block can't expand its share of the electorate by 3 or 4 points. This would swing Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Florida, Iowa, and Ohio. And it would put North Carolina, Virginia, Missouri, and Arkansas into the swing category, while pulling New Hampshire, Oregon, Washington, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, and Pennsylvania out of swing state territory.

I've heard similar things about Rock the Vote's voter registration tool, but I heard that it would be built into the FaceBook API - presumably as part of the new F8 applications. Regardless, I think the rest of the post is absolutely on point w/r/t what such a registration tool might mean for turnout. The youth vote is going to blow up huge this year, and self-organizing tools like FaceBook, MySpace, YouTube, blogs, and yes - new ways of doing voter registration and GOTV online - are going to be some of the primary drivers of that surge. The barriers to entry have been massively lowered.

Over at ePolitics, Colin Delaney smacks the candidates for their failure to use widgets.

Note to campaign staffers: got 60,000 friends on MySpace and wonder how you're gonna get them to be volunteers/donors? Widgets are what you are looking for. The potential for ChipIn alone is amazing If those 60,000 friends each used ChipIn to raise you $50 bucks via their MySpace page, and you got a 10% return, that's $300,000 - more than enough to pay the salary of your social networking director and your whole national youth staff for the duration of the primary and general election.

From Delaney:

Obviously, campaign widget use is still in its infancy. What would a comprehensive political widget strategy look like? Let’s divide the little critters into two basic categories: those that spread a message and those that actively solicit support. Message-spreading widgets could display just about any content that you can either fit into or reference in an RSS feed, including:

• News headlines
• Recent blog posts
• Campaign photos, via a photo-sharing site or from a dedicated photo gallery
• Campaign video clips (either embedded or as a link to a clip displayed on the main campaign site)
• Upcoming events, geo-targeted by the blog/site owner during the widget setup or generic across all supporter sites
• The supporter/volunteer of the day, with photo

Widgets that actively solicit support or user input could:

• Raise money
• Gather email addresses
• Highlight volunteer opportunities
• Gather opinions, polling-style

If I were technophobic MySpace would be aboard a pale horse.

By golly they’ve done it again. Myspace is now hosting its own TownMeatings for the Presidential campaigns. Across the country MySpace will hold these townhall meetings where users can submit questions via MSIM and you can watch live as the old school consultants scramble to figure out how it all works. I smell another underwear question coming on. And so help me if I hear thong from anyone (including Edwards) they’ll lose my vote. I mean - there are some things about Brownie that I just don’t want to know.