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.)

Blogging the Democratic National Convention This Week

Thanks to the MOMocrats for initiating this great project... I'm going to Denver today, covering the Democratic National Convention for several online publications (mostly blogs) including:

Sairy
BlogHer
MOMocrats
Obama HQ Blog
WomenCount Blog
FutureCampaigns Blog
Silicon Valley Moms Blog
Huffington Post - Off the Bus
The Political Voices of Women

I'll be spending time pretty much everywhere - at the convention itself, in the Big Tent, at the Unconventional Women event, the EMILY's List events, Youth delegation events, California events, New Democrats Network events, getting together with Emerge alumni, meeting people and of course partying. I'm particularly looking forward to the Rocky Mountain Blogger Bash which looks to be a great way to kick back, and the Big Tent will be hopping I'm sure.

Follow the action via Twitter - sairy - and momocrats!

Please Pretty Please Vote for My Proposed SXSW Panel!

I have proposed the following panel for the South by Southwest Interactive conference in March...

Title:
Whitehouse.gov 2.0: Upgrading to Open Source Government

Summary:
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. Panel presentation followed by brainstorming session.

If you like the idea, please VOTE for it by Friday!

I really hope we can take the brainstorming session and turn it into a report to submit to the next presidential administration.

Please see also TechMama's recommendations for panels, including Joanne's on building political influence online and Beth's on moms using tech, where hopefully I'll have a chance to participate as well.

PDF & New York

Last time I was in New York was for a totally different purpose during totally different weather, so it's nice to come in the summer with a mission and lots of people to see. I'm having a great time so far at PDF - too good a time, in fact. I've gotten barely any sleep this week what with preparing for the trip, a sick tot at home, and then just wanting to follow-up on so much while I'm here.

The first day panels were really interesting and I got a lot out of them that I'm blogging about in other places (The Huffington Post, MOMocrats/the Silicon Valley Moms Blog), so I don't need to go into that here, but what I've gained outside the conference hall itself is building relationships and seeing people I know feel the same way I do about technology and its role in politics, policy and governance. These people don't downplay how it can and can't be used and they're all brilliant.

So on to day two, and hopefully a little bit of sleep...

Soft Launching FutureCampaigns Blog

Yeah, I'm a glutton for punishment. I'm launching another blog. Actually, it's already up. I started it last week on my futurecampaigns.com site, where I've been hosting information about the work I do as an adviser to nonprofits, political organizations, and as a writer/editor about related topics.

One might wonder why on Earth I'd put myself in line to work on what I believe is probably a seventh semi-regular blog, not to mention the places where I'm a guest contributing editor. Sigh. Well, it goes like this: I'm really passionate about technology and its impact on the world. That translates to its use in government and politics as well as the policies about technology. And I've been studying this stuff since I was in high school (to the point that I created my own major: "Technology & Society" in college), so clearly the interest isn't going away. But somehow I haven't been focusing on writing about just that in any one place until recently. It was an accident, actually.

Originally, I planned this blog to stick closer to those topics, but then I realized it was really a place to cover everything I'm interested in, and I played around with it a lot. Eventually I settled on more techie, political and cultural topics for this blog, and that took me away from everything I wanted to say about tech and the world. I'd covered related topics here on this blog (some posts which I republished at the FutureCampaigns blog), I had alluded to my experiences in tech and politics on the Silicon Valley Moms Blog, particularly in light of our interactions with Elizabeth Edwards, but I was saving all of my ideas for a big project (in the works for a while now). Finally I realized I own all of what I write in the places I've been writing and it's all stuff I want to get out to people, so why save it when the whole purpose behind what I wanted to do was to get it out there?

So with PDF '08 on the horizon and a renewed energy for focusing on the topic that probably has a lot to do with how proud I am of what the Obama campaign has been doing (i.e. everything right in terms of tech!), here I am with a new blog. I look forward to friends and colleagues visiting it. The other thing I've done with the blog that most other blogs in the space haven't is create an extensive blogroll full of related resources. It's still a work in progress - I have a lot more to add - but due to time constraints, I went ahead and put it up as I build that part.

As to the content - I plan for it to be a mix of stuff that appeals to techies and politicos/activists. Some of it will be written at a more basic level because I want nonprofit directors, for example, to get a better picture of why certain technologies can help them, and the only way to do that is to explain it in general terms that aren't too overly technical - for the most part. Most nonprofits and most political campaigns are still in the dark ages when it comes to tech, so I want to help educate them. Meanwhile, I also plan to tackle some of the geek meat, i.e. the cool gadgets and what they do. Like MAPLight.org - it's an awesome mashup and they have a bunch of apps coming out for different states soon. Not everyone in the world knows what a 'mashup' or an 'app' is, and that's OK, but I plan to blend the content as much as possible. The reality is that the blog will take on its own flavor after a while, but this is where I'm starting.

I'm really looking forward to meeting more people working in this area next week in New York because I hope to write about every single one of them and their projects on the FutureCampaigns blog. It's so important that we all work together, and I find it absolutely fascinating the achievements that have been made in technology, government, politics and policy over the past few years alone.

Countdown to Personal Democracy Forum '08

In eleven days, I'll be traversing Central Park on my way to Lincoln Center for the Personal Democracy Forum 2008 conference June 23-24 in New York City. PDF, as it's called, is the major annual conference for everyone involved in the technology behind politics and advocacy (databases, action centers, blogs) and the tools that teach us about government (like mashups and online polls). PDF is run by the same people
who publish the techPresident site and they always have fabulous speakers.

Conference info can be found here, and they just posted the agendas for day 1 and day 2.

This will be my first year to attend. I've known about it for a few years, but there was always a major reason I couldn't make it, so I'm really looking forward to seeing a lot of people in person who I've worked or conversed with remotely but never met.

...
Cross posted from the FutureCampaigns blog.

PC Magazine on Top Tech Issues for Next President

For a comprehensive look at the major technology issues on the plate for the next presidential administration, PC Magazine has a great article out that covers 5 biggies and what the positions are on those issues of the candidates (McCain, Obama and Clinton since it was compiled before Obama had enough delegates and since she could potentially be a VP nominee). This stems from discussion that happened at the Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference in May.

I first attended CFP in 1994 in Chicago. Every year, they have an incredible group organizing the conference. This year, they honed in on what we would like to see in a next presidential administration in terms of information and communications (ICT) technology policy recommendations. This wasn't the first time, of course. CPSR and other organizations have done this in the past - analyzing policies of current and potential future administrations. I'm glad it's elicited some results in terms of recommendations and positive media attention.

Internet Archive Wins Settlement with FBI

From the Chronicle, the Internet Archive recently won a settlement with the FBI about a "national security letter" i.e. government request for private information that was sent to them demanding they turn over data that they probably don't even have. The Archive, legally considered an online library, for those who don't know, was founded by Brewster Kahle who is also on the Board of the EFF. They keep books online as well as web sites, and they run the Wayback machine, a great tool for finding older versions of sites online. (Want to restore from an older backup of your site that's gone? Try the Wayback machine.) Anyway, Brewster's a good guy who just wants to share information with people, so it looks like after 4 months and $10,000 in donated legal services, the FBI got off his back. It's a good article. I haven't spoken with my EFF buddies about this particular case, but I'm guessing they're happy a precedent's been set to show others that the Patriot Act induced loophole can be fought.

Net Neutrality Panel in DC Monday

The Washington DC ACM Chapter has organized a great panel on the current net neutrality debate for this Monday, Nov. 12th from 7:30-9:30pm at 108 Funger Hall, 2201 G Street NW. Panelists include Harold Feld of the Media Access Project, David Robinson of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton, and Hal Singer of Criterion Economics. Check the event listing for more information.

Election Day Tomorrow - Make a Difference!

Just a reminder, particularly to Californians and San Franciscans who read this blog - tomorrow is election day. You can vote for Mayor of San Francisco or Palo Alto City Council and School Board or Menlo Park Fire District or whatever fits your locale, but don't think this election doesn't matter - local politics are important and your vote will make a much greater difference in this smaller, local election where only several thousand people submit ballots. So find your polling place and even if you haven't remembered to change an address or whatever, submit a provisional ballot and get it done.

Bloggers and Writers - Use Creative Commons Licenses - Here's Why

I had the pleasure of getting to know Cory Doctorow while I was volunteering for theEFF one summer. He is an extraordinary writer and networker, and his work is brilliant. So rather than trying to paraphrase his writing, I'll just quote it directly. It is, after all, under Creative Commons license:

"My writing career and Creative Commons are inextricably bound together. My first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, was published by Tor, the largest science fiction publisher in the world, on January 9, 2003, just a few days after CC launched its first licenses. I was the first author to use the licenses, applying them to my book and releasing it for free online on the same day it appeared in stores. Today, the book has been through more printings than I can keep track of, been translated into more languages than I know, and has been downloaded more than 750,000 times from my site alone (I don’t know the total number of downloads, because, of course, anyone is free to redistribute it)."

More...

"CC turns my books from nouns into verbs. My books *do stuff*, get passed around and recut and remade to suit the needs of each reader, turned to their hand the way that humans always have adapted their tools and stories to fit their circumstances. As Tim O’Reilly says, my problem is not piracy, it’s obscurity, and CC licenses turn my books into dandelion seeds, able to blow in the wind and find every crack in every sidewalk, sprouting up in unexpected places. Each seed is a possibility, an opportunity for someone out there to buy a physical copy of the book, to commission work from me, to bring me in for a speech. I once sold a reprint of an article of mine to an editor who saw it in a spam message — the spammer had pasted it into the “word salad” at the bottom of his boner-pill pitch to get past the filters. The editor read the piece, liked it, googled me, and sent me a check."

"CC lets me be financially successful, but it also lets me attain artistic and ethical success. Ethical in the sense that CC licenses give my readers a legal framework to do what readers have always done in meatspace: pass the works they love back and forth, telling each other stories the way humans do. Artistic because we live in the era of copying, the era when restricting copying is a fool’s errand, and by CC gives me an artistic framework to embrace copying rather than damning it."

"Writers all over the world are adopting CC licenses, creating an artistic movement that treats copying as a feature, not a bug. As a science fiction writer, this is enormously satisfying: here we have artists who are acting as though they live in the future, not the past. CC is changing the world, making it safe for copying, and just in time, too."

Make it so. See Cory's post and select your license here.

Obama on Net Neutrality

Anne Broache of CNET has a good article up about Obama indicating during the Mtv and MySpace forum that he's in favor of Net neutrality. This is nothing earth-shattering, of course, as all of the Democrats are in favor of an equal opportunity Internet, but it sounds like Obama has a good grasp of the concept, citing that companies like Google might not exist if it weren't for Net neutrality.

Broache also noted that, while Net neutrality is not a "make-or-break issue akin to healthcare, immigration or the Iraq War," it still holds some heat. As the question was posed by MoveOn, I would venture to second that assertion since they wouldn't waste their bandwidth on a question of little importance. As someone who works from a remote office and who has used everything from 300 baud to a T3, I say speed does matter and anyone who says otherwise is just selling something.