Politcal Gastronomica

Spent Tuesday and Wednesday at the IPDI conference catching up with various friends and vendors. Excellent panel on mobile solutions (see Mozes and POLItxt) and a discussion on VoIP and softPBXes (think Apache for the phone services) and how it will revolutionize the political industry. A sunning summary of what I learned:

“The Changing Media Landscape” – with Chris Nolan, David Weinberger, Dan Gilmore and Alex Jones.

Personal technology are forcing a conversation to occur whether through blogs with individuals discussing amoungst themselves or social network spaces forming (e.g. myspace, facebook) that are becoming the new “town halls” or “third spaces” in this medium. And even though 100 years ago, the explosion of publishing that occurred with the advent of an inexpensive printing press eventually lead to a consolidation of media channels as seen today – this explosion will have to be handled in a much different issues because of ease of publishing, ease of distribution and ease of access. (paraphrasing Dan here). Services like Digg and other collaborative news sites (like NewsVine) will begin to create and dominate the community awareness of news content in a collaborative sense, instead of relying on large media brands to select the appropraite content to a wide audience.

One question I still have – will access to capital for marketing or government agreement with carrier restrictions (e.g. net neutrality) be the friction that causes tthe slow-down and consolidation. As with every ecosystem, there tends to be an explosion of growth and then a winnowing down of the growth to the strong few. A recent article spoke on this – tho I do not remember where it was. (Special note: Chris Nolan – exceptional moderator with her focus on the audience level of understanding).

One more thought: as these sites begin to proliferate – I would wonder why Digg or NewsVines do not create versions of their services (like syndication/white labels) for different communities. One lesson from eGroups that I thought was particularly well-suited to eGroups was the creating of ccgroups.com – essentially a Christian Community eGroups that solely supported the Christian Community mailing lists (Disclosure: I was the Director of Marketing for eGroups and built this deal). Interestingly, during the time I tracked it – ccgroups was either the third or fourth most prolific “grouping” on eGroups at the time before acquisition with Yahoo! (below the main site, eGroups Japan and adult content).

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One of the questions I get asked freqently is “what do you do for campaigns?” The concept of using the Internet for campaigns has had the same hype that the Internet has back in the late 90’s (“it’ll change the process of democracy”). But the truth of the matter is – the Internet and the associated technologies will do to politics what it did for commerce – reduce the friction/obstacles from the path to action. Consider what happened in 2004 – and what might happen in 2006 and onward:

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Spending today in Maine at popTech (Thanks to Te Smith for her help) and spent the days listening to how technology and visionaries are working to “make a difference”. And one of the conference speakers, Professor Yochai Benkler (see Dina’s post and Buzz’s post), spent fifteen minutes explaining the “future of open source’ – and how the centralized model has been spun on it’s head.

Intriguingly, this is what I heard at the start of the Dean phenomenon – that the conversation is occuring on the edge, and not in the center. Trippi was masterful in leveraging this energy (“You Have the Power”), but the challenge is – the process for electing people into public office is a much more complex than most people think. The engagement of the masses is not necessarily easy – but the lesson that I took away is supporting the community can derive benefit, but how do you generate deterministic performance (e.g. the meme you want discussed becomes the dominant one) in the timeframe you need?

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Recently, I was speaking with a campaign manager of an “Internet savvy” campaign – they had a strong web presence, a campaign blog, an online fundraising campaign – and a network of web savvy volunteers working the campaign. The CM had a number of lessons learned from the campaign (and other ones served on) and talked about the future of campaigning – if the databases were really to the level they needed to be.

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