About Political Gastronomica
Political Gastronomica is a discourse on technology and online activism - how the marketplace of governing and ideas is improving with the efficiencies of the Internet.
Author Sanford Dickert, former CTO of John Kerry for President Campaign, works with political campaigns, non-profits and private companies from the Fortune 500 to startups.
Dickert leverages online community engagement techniques and technical vision for brand and message management through effective application of social media and organizational processes.
Category Archives: Political Tech
Freedom of Information leads to better engagement?
For example, imaging if Obama was offering a feed of donations to their campaign as an RSS feed and some person took that data, stripped out nothing but the dollars donated and plotted the information on a graphing solution like Trendrr. Now, imagine people are able to generate their own data and make their own assessments with the information, free from the opinions of the pundits and the “opinionmakers”. Continue reading
Posted in Campaign 2008, Political Tech
Tagged flightaware, John Edwards, political mashups, Ron Paul
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Wha? Lieberman site wasn’t hacked?
I was reading TPM today and found myself chuckling with the Federal probe completed today commenting on the fact that Lieberman’s website was not hacked, rather that the takedown of the site during the day before the primary election was due to “misconfiguration”. Continue reading
Posted in Campaign 2006, Political Tech
Tagged Lieberman 2006, political technology, Tim Tagaris
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Millennial Makeover: Is there a Lincoln or FDR in the 2008 race?
This evening, as I finished my work at Cooper, I took a walk over to the Great Hall to
listen to Dr. Fred Shapiro introduce Morley Winograd and Michael Hais discuss their
new book, “Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube and the Future of American Politics”
with a talk asking the question, “Is there a Lincoln or FDR in the 2008 Presidential Race?”
Interestingly, the talk seems to have been a combination of the premise of the book
creation, as well as an attempt to answer the question posed at the start of the talk.
[Suffice it to say, I think they would say Obama is the next Lincoln/FDR – more on
this later] But what was most interesting to me was the discussion of the impact of
technology and generational demographics and their impact on American history – which goes to
the heart of two of my posts ([1],
[2]),
“Would social networks impact the 2008 election?”. At the time, I answered in the negative.
After this book, I might have a different point of view… Continue reading
Posted in Campaign 2008, eCampaigning, Political Tech
Tagged impact of technology, Millennial generational impact, Millennial Makeover, social networks, social networks in politics, speed of memes
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Blast from the Past – Kerry’s 2004 Online Fundraising Performance
We were seriously worried about the software doing on contributions since it was relatively cheap and had not been tested under serious load conditions, but when New Hampshire went to JK, I was there all night long watching the server load, making sure we were okay. And, we made it quite nicely. It wasn’t until SuperTuesday that we discovered the fallacy of low-cost solutions in an enterprise world. Continue reading