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!

(Cross posted from the FutureCampaigns blog.)

Latest writing...

For those who want to keep up on what I'm doing, I'm still keeping busy, although taking a brief breather now that the election is done.

I'm excited about a small project I took on earlier in the year that just launched - the California Legacy Trails, part of the California Museum of History, Women and the Arts. I wrote the intro script for the Remarkable Women's Trail as well as for the Legacy Trails, both read as an introduction to the trails, by Dana Eastwood (wife of Clint, former news anchor, board member of the museum). It was an exciting project and it's fun to see my words in action.

I'm now writing regularly for the Personal Democracy Forum and techPresident, focused on emerging information technology in government and campaigns, respectively. PdF features articles about uses of social media and new online tools around the globe in communities and governments. techPres keeps up with the campaign beat - the latest and greatest of "how the candidates are using the web". Both sites contain fascinating stories and information every day, and I'm excited to be a part of their team. Check out my blog there.

I continue to write about figure skating for BlogHer, keeping me engaged in the sport I know and love. I recently covered Skate America and Skate Canada and I'm looking forward to writing about the U.S. Nationals January 18-25.

I have a couple of other new projects I'm excited about as well, that I look forward to writing about soon...