It's been one week since the greatest campaign the Internet has ever seen turned into the promise of the first Internet-era government. Both the traditional media and the blogosphere are overflowing with suggestions for how President-elect Barack Obama can translate his campaign's social media briliance into a model of government -- and particularly, a model of public engagement in government -- that is just as transformative.

Many of those suggestions come from friends and colleagues who have been working for at least a decade in the e-democracy trenches, uncovering opportunities to increase public participation and rebuild social capital online. In Barack Obama they (and I!) see a President with the experience, skills and inclination to realize the potential of online engagement with policy, politics and government.

In this post I round up a cross-section of the most intriguing ideas for how the President-elect can evolve his Internet-savvy campaign into Internet-savvy government. This is a mix of recommendations, musings, predictions and praise for the best of what's rolled out already. Most of these suggestions have appeared in the past week, though some anticipated Obama's election and made recommendations or predictions before the fact. Some come from colleagues who are articulating long-held visions; others come from bloggers who are just starting to imagine the possibilities of e-government, now that they've seen the power of e-campaigning. While there are some recurring themes, the range of suggestions reflect the extraordinary variety of ideas and energies that are available for the new President to harness.

As the length of this list suggests, it won't be hard for the President-elect to find opportunities for online innovation in government. The challenge will be to encompass or bridge between some very different ideas about how to innovate, which in turn reflect profoundly different frameworks. The folks who want My.BarackObama.com to metamorphosize into a Congressional lobby have embraced the model of interest-driven pressure politics; those who advocate for neutral online policy consultations want to insulate decision-making from those very pressures. And then there are those who want to set aside the political process altogether, and tackle government as a purely technical challenge of improving efficiency and enabling information flows.

None of these paradigms can fully do justice to Barack Obama's combination of social media savvy, and reported appetite for careful deliberation and contemplation before making a decision. He'll need to pioneer a model that combines the grassroots energy of (online) community organizing with the information-rich deliberation advocated by many public engagement practitioners. In devising that model he can draw inspiration from the many suggestions that are already pouring forth.

Here they are:

Use blogging and rich media to talk directly to citizens frequently and in real time.

1. What if President Obama took another visionary step and decided to update this communication technique? The weekly address could be taped and posted on YouTube. It could include prepared remarks by the President or produced infomercial-type stories like we've seen throughout the campaign. President Obama could then use his network on MyBO, Facebook, and other social media outlets to push people to watch these videos—and respond to them. Staffers could review the comments, and the President could address some of them during the next address. -- Raven Brooks, Fireside Chats in the Digital Age -- techPresident
2. "I wouldn't be surprised if Barack Obama starts doing a weekly YouTube video and also fireside chats for the 21st century by allowing people to filter up questions to him that he might answer." - Andrew Raseij, quoted Obama launches Web site to reach public -- CNN.com
3. Obama put his election photos on Flickr under Creative Commons license. - David Kamerer, Obama takes change online -- PR Needed Here
4. A president could blog, speaking in his or own voice. But, have you seen the list of what President Obama has to deal with? If he has time to blog, he’s not paying attention. But maybe the White House could blog. ..It’d take courage … and some grade-A metadata to remind people that bloggers speak more loosely than the press secretary does. But by having, say, a dozen in-house people blogging to start, the administration would have a unique way to keep citizens informed, would continue to build trust and intimacy with the American people, and would be able to try out and improve ideas in the cauldron of public conversation…for comments would definitely have to be turned on. - Dave Weinberger, Can the White House blog ? -- Joho the Blog
5. All of the Obama supporters who traded their personal information for a ticket to a rally or an e-mail alert about the vice presidential choice, or opted in on Facebook or MyBarackObama can now be mass e-mailed at a cost of close to zero. And instead of the constant polling that has been a motor of presidential governance, an Obama White House can use the Web to measure voter attitudes. - David Carr, The Media Equation - How Obama Tapped Into Social Networks’ Power - NYTimes.com

Win congressional support for your agenda by using social networks to mobilize grassroots support and apply pressure on Congress.

6. By creating an official White House social network that invites all voters in and opens the doors to the governing process, Obama has the opportunity to reinvigorate Edmund Burke's delegate model of representative government. Instead of guessing from Washington what the people want, such a platform can more accurately reveal the public will and make it easier for government to reflect that will. -- Alan Rosenblatt, Emergent Governance: Who Needs Bees When the Grassroots Swarm the White House -- techPresident
7. Obama can leverage social media to make people much more involved in the process of bills becoming laws, and encourage his supporters to pressure their representatives into supporting his policies. . -- Adam Ostrow, How Will President Obama Use His Massive Social Media Influence? -- Mashable
8. The White House could "geo-target" ads so they appear online in congressional districts where members remain undecided. Obama could use Internet ads to solicit signatures for petitions, or he could place display and video ads contextually -- so they would appear on the screen next to news coverage of his proposals. -- Shallagh Murray and Matthew Mosk, Under Obama, Web Would Be the Way, Washington Post
   
9. "Congress will be put between a rock and a hard place, if millions of citizens sign up to help the president pass his agenda," Trippi said. "If the president says, 'Here are the members of Congress who stand in the way of us passing health care reform,' I would not want to be one of those people. You'll have 10 or 15 million networked Americans barging in on the members of Congress telling them to get in line with the program and pass the health care reform bill. That will be a power that no American president has had before. Congress' power will be taken over by the American people." -- quoted by Mitch Wagner in Obama Election Ushering In First Internet Presidency -- InformationWeek
10. I thought he might try to use the contacts from my.barackobama.com , his campaign site, to rally his supporters to call their members of Congress on key legislation or challenge them to funnel the energy that they used in campaigning to volunteer or apply for positions in his administration. Change.gov definitely looks to be headed in that direction. - Kevin Anderson, Change.gov is gonna come -- The Guardian

Use My.BarackObama.com to engage grassroots support and service...if you're not limited by election laws.

11. MyBo, or some Open Source knockoff, should be opened up to anyone who wants to round up friends and neighbors to make a difference, as well as to anyone who wants to tinker with new features. No software can, of course, convey the "spirit" of grassroots organizing. But well-designed systems can scaffold the basic activities of a competent organizer, enough to give such efforts a fighting chance, especially if coupled with training or mentorship....MyBo had experimented with offering points for taking on different activities; it scaled poorly and was eventually replaced with an activity level system. A game-like interface, scaled down to the local level, could use a scoring rubric to help convey to citizens which activities were most urgently needed, especially if Obama himself is pushing and motivating service at the macro level. -- Gene Koo, From campaigning to governance 1: civic engagement -- techPresident

Twitterers want to know: 10 questions

1. How Will President Obama Use His Massive Social Media Influence? -- mlh0919
2. In an Obama administration what kind of job goes to Chris Hughes? The co-founder of Facebook who created mybarackobama.com -- jayrosen_nyu
3. So is Obama the first president born after the internet was invented? Looks like it. -- kevindente
4. Can President- Elect Obama blog? -- kevinokeefe
5. It's swell that Barack Obama used Web 2.0 to get elected, but doing it with a site known as "MyBO?" -- CJBarker
6. Will Obama's public engagement via internet carry into his presidency? Do the people stop having a voice after Jan 20? -- dmancan
7. Does anyone know if David Plouffe (Obama's campaign manager), or anyone else will write a book about their Internet marketing tactics? -- DavidTaboada
8. Can we admit that barack obama's success was due to the fact that he was an inspiring personality and not just b/c he used the internet? -- scottyiseri
9. How will President Obama deploy his Internet army? -- AZ_BirdLady
   
10. Hey, did you guys here Obama is actually a hologram? -- bloomtoday
12. [K]eep MyBO alive as a political community outside of government...For Obama, this means he could mobilize millions to write Congress, send letters to editors around the country, comment on blogs, and a host of other grassroots activism activities -- Alan Rosenblatt, Emergent Governance: Who Needs Bees When the Grassroots Swarm the White House -- techPresident
13. Personally, I expect myBO to get folded into the DNC, most likely by merging it into Partybuilder, the DNC's social network. The same company, Blue State Digital, built both platforms and, in fact, myBO is basically a souped-up Partybuilder. Obama legally can't take myBO with him into the White House, since the Hatch Act precludes using government resources for political operations. -- Micah Sifry, What Next for My.BarackObama.com? -- Personal Democracy Forum
14. And the site isn't going anywhere. The online tools in My.BarackObama will live on. Barack Obama supporters will continue to use the tools to collaborate and interact. Our victory on Tuesday night has opened the door to change, but it's up to all of us to seize this opportunity to bring it about. In the coming days and weeks, there will be a great deal more information about where this community will head. -- Chris Hughes, Moving Forward on My.BarackObama -- My.BarackObama.com

Be prepared for citizens -- especially young ones -- to use your own organizing toolkit as a platform for holding you accountable.

15. It's not really Obama's responsibility to keep us involved. It really is ours. We should not be asking what Obama can do for us. We should be asking what we can do for him and the country. .... 5. Blog and comment online. Many of us blogged about Obama during the past few years, and it was fun and enlightening to read comments and make comments of our own. I myself started blogging for the first time because of Obama. I complained about the media's shallow interviewing of Palin; and I tried to point out the radical nature of McCain's health plan proposal. In addition, I registered on various state-level blogs and wrote diaries and blogs there whenever I could. There will continue to be a need for ordinary people to blog about their experiences during the campaign and their opinion about what Obama does once he is President. Linda Bergthold Ask Not What Obama Can Do for You -- Ask What You Can do for Obama -- Huffington Post
16. He texted. He Twittered. He had custom social media designed to connect supporters to his message, to donate spare cash and spare time, to meet up. The pundits are already asking, “Will he govern this way?” Perhaps. We’ll see. For me the real question is whether we will govern this way. He will disappoint, as I’ve already pointed out....To give President Obama the chance to become another FDR, we’ll have to take a lesson from candidate Obama — and organize him into being. -- Marc Bousquet, Boots on the Ground, Eyeballs on the Screen -- How The University Works
17. And they won't settle for politics as usual. Having grown up digital, they will want to be involved in the act of governing -- by contributing ideas before decisions are made. What's more, they'll insist on integrity from politicians; if politicians say one thing and do another, young Americans will use their digital tools to find out, and spread the news. -- Don Tapscott, Obama's Ace in the Hole -- Huffington Post

Inspire a new era in community service by using the web to match volunteeers and community needs.

18. Why not allow users of MyBarackObama to utilize the platform to organize community service projects? Use Twitter and SMS to alert people to opportunities to give back in their own communities or when national tragedy strikes. Utilize Facebook to get the word out about charitable events. The tools and the users are already in place. -- Adam Ostrow How Will President Obama Use His Massive Social Media Influence? -- Mashable
19. Gore envisions a sense of purpose and promise in what he called “World 2.0:” Web 2.0 used for social betterment. “Just as Barack Obama’s election would’ve been impossible without the new dialogue and new ways of interacting, the only way climate change is going to be solved is by addressing the democracy crisis, and the country hit a great blow for victory this week, but we have to take this issue and raise it in the awareness of everyone,” Gore said. Gore continued later during his interview with conference organizers Tim O’Reilly and John Batelle, “I think that it is very much in its infancy, barely beginning, and I think that we are not many years away from television sort of sinking into the digital world and becoming a part of it.” His continued “purpose” is to advance the democratization of media, where people are in control of not only what they consume, but are also empowered to create, distribute, and influence through media. -- Brian Solis, Al Gore on World 2.0 at Web 2.0 Summit -- bub.blicio.us
20. I envisioned something similar to what our grandparents did 75 years ago to get through the worst economic crisis in the nation’s history — but in the Digital Age. Gradon Tripp And so I gave it a name: the Digital New Deal. Think about it: what if — like FDR controlling road and bridge construction projects from the White House — President Obama could guide a volunteer work force. An army of helping hands. Using the connections that he’s already established, (I honestly get more text messages from him than I do from some of my friends) he could mobilize a disaster-recovery team, a clean-up-the-parks team, a let’s-make-this-a-better-country team… all as quickly as he can send a text or an email or a tweet. Gradon Tripp, Digital New Deal: Now the Real Work Begins -- GradonTripp.com
21. I propose creating an online platform that can generate ways for anyone to serve their local and national community. In your plan for creating new ways for us, the citizens of this nation to serve, I feel that you must take advantage of the internet. By simply providing a directory of tasks and ways for people to serve we can make it possible for anyone to contribute to their local and national community. The important element is letting each person sort through the tasks and opportunities based on the time they have, their skills, interests, and location. Even if you have just thirty minutes to give, they can provide change. -- Ethan Bodnar, Letter to the President-Elect on Technology -- Ethan Bodnar / The Blog

Solicit citizen input into policy using online hearings, peer-moderated content and an effective online community manager.

22. Set up a series of citizen councils, organized around key policy themes, and equip users with an Ideastorm. At first these communities might look and feel a lot like Digg.com, the popular technology news aggregator. Users post policy suggestions and the community votes so that the most popular ideas rise to the top. Ideas are harvested from a broader spectrum of the population and the user-driven idea filtering process eases the burden on staff resources by harnessing “the crowd” to sift through mountains of feedback. - Anthony Williams, Obama’s web 2.0 strategy: from campaigning to governing, part 1 -- Wikinomics
23. As in-person public meetings begin to incorporate live online features, envision more deliberate online exchanges to improve the outcomes of the decision-making process. If your government agency hosts three public hearings across the country or your state, host the fourth hearing online over a week or two and improve the format in the process. In 10 years, the legislatures, commissions and city councils not holding hearings online will be in the minority. - Steve Clift, Ten Online Ideas for Obama in Government -- MyBarackObama.com O riginally published as "Ten practical online steps for government support of democracy", in the GSA Intergovernmental Solutions newsletter, Fall 2007 (PDF) There's lots more great material for the new administration to draw on in this article and the newsletter.
24. Widespread collaborative interaction with new tools and resources for information and deliberation can spread throughout both the public and private sectors, as people's expectations expand for what they can accomplish both for themselves and their fellow citizens. A new culture of democratic action holds forth the prospect of not only engaging people in activities with concrete, tangible payoffs for personal success and community empowerment, but also proliferating values of tolerance, respect, and mutual engagement that have been the themes not only of the Obama campaign, but of Barack Obama's entire public life. -- Peter M. Shane, The Obama Vision of Open Government and Public Engagement -- Huffington Post
25. I call on president-elect Obama to create a community of committed Americans to discuss the solutions to the problems that face us. I call on him to designate a US Community Manager, with a small staff, to moderate and harvest those discussions to solve the country's problems. -- Josh Bernoff, Can Obama harvest better ideas from the people, online? - The Boston Globe
26. Another question worth asking is whether Obama will embrace technology to give citizens a larger voice in important decisions. I think there is a tremendous opportunity for him to do so. If he is smart, he will establish nationwide user names and passwords which link to driver's license or social security numbers, allowing citizens to voice their opinions on anything, everything. He can then communicate with us as needed to answer our concerns and make us feel like we are part of the process. - Rich Tehrani, President Obama And The Coming Tech Revolution -- Communicatins and Technology Blog
27. Imagine that what the president’s staff sends isn’t spam but thoughtful explanations of policy initiatives. Imagine that there are real online processes for citizens to upload ideas and feedback. That could be a real change in the connection between the governed and governors. -- Richard Koman, The Connected President -- ZDNet.com
28. Law is code and so one would hope that social tools will help accelerate the iteration process - just like with great software. What will keep this audience engaged? Meaningful social nets that aren't echo chambers but organizational catalysts to real change - I would hope that savvy entrepreneurs are helping to build platforms that help mesh social problems with willing participants in the process who are willing to construct change. -- Jennifer Fader of eMedia at Rogers & Cowan, quoted by Ellen McGirt, Government 2.0: Can President-Elect Obama Take What He's Learned On The Road to The Beltway? -- Fast Company

Immediately invite public input on Change.gov -- and make that invitation as transparent as possible.

29. Change.gov features a blog, a form where visitors can share their stories about the election, video, a full listing of Obama’s staff, as well as links to other government sites with details about the transition...the launch of this site proves that Obama already had a plan in place to think about how his digital outreach would transition once he won the election, showing that his team was thinking ahead. More than just having a plan in place, his plan has a purpose. Obama is trying to mobilize the citizens of America with a call to action which Boston-based social media, technology and design blogger Gradon Tripp calls the Digital New Deal. -- Rob Longert, Obama’s Community of Millions -- PepperDigital
30. President-Elect Barack Obama has launched a web site at change.gov. The purpose of the site is to make the transition operation more transparent to the public, and to solicit opinions and ideas from the American people. Under "American Moment" you can either "Share your Vision" or "Share your Story." I asked him for unequivocal clarification about homeschooling. I asked him for transparency in government. I asked him for involvement, for a team effort, for more to do. I stopped short of asking for a pony. What will you ask for? -- Lydia M. Netzer, aka lostcheerio, Open Source Government -- Little Blue School
31. The president-elect's http://www.change.gov transition Web site features a blog and a suggestion form, signaling the kinds of direct and instantaneous interaction that the Obama administration will encourage, perhaps with an eye toward turning its following into the biggest special-interest group in Washington. -- Shallagh Murray and Matthew Mosk, Under Obama, Web Would Be the Way -- Washington Post
    
32. The problem, in my view, is not that the content of the site is still somewhat in flux. That can be expected (keep in mind it's been only a few days since Obama won the election). Nor is the problem that a site like change.gov should never change (on the contrary, I'd argue for constant change to make corrections where needed, evolve the concepts, document progress etc.). What's missing is the transparent, wiki-like exposure of recent changes: which web edits were made, when, by whom and -- by way of short change summaries -- why. I'm sure that's an RSS feed many would happily subscribe to. Tim Bonnemann, commenting on Change.gov Pulls Its Agenda -- techPresident

Place an effective CTO in charge of implementing the technology changes that are crucial to your vision for transparency and accountability in government.

33. The CTO could lead the drive to create a “Google for government” that would allow new levels of transparency and access to government agencies - something Obama stressed repeatedly. -- Jaime L. Hartman, Campaign promises, political reality: Will CTO be one he delivers on? -- OhMyGov
34. The CTO job is a political job, a bureaucratic job. The person who succeeds in that job will be someone who can bring an entrepreneurial spirit into a government setting. They will have to familiar with the CTO positions at the whole range of federal agencies; they will have to know their way around Washington to some extent; they will know how to work with large, combative constituencies; and they will expect to be held accountable. -- Richard Koman, Who will be the nation’s CTO? -- ZDNet.com
35. So, while it would be good to have someone who at least understood the politics, I'd like to see the person selected have a solid knowledge of technology and a history of solving the kinds of problems that the country is likely to face on technology. I ended up with four potential candidates: Al Gore, Lawrence Lessig, Vin Cerf, and Shane Robison. The one you like the best depends on the job that needs to be done. - Rob Enderle, Anticipating the First US CTO - Mashget
36. Generally take a businesslike approach to government IT. Obama's focus on making government "transparent" and searchable would be just one byproduct of that effort. -- Curt Monash, 7 (non-network-centric) IT priorities for the Obama Administration -- NetworkWorld.com Community
37. Expect to see large pushes for automation of backend IT processes. Although federal IT budgets will be under significant downward pressure, good ideas regarding virtualization, automation and other high payoff disruptive technologies will be welcome and there will still be IT modernization efforts underway throughout the government. -- Bob Gourley, The Technology Implications of the Obama Win -- ExecutiveBiz Blog

Support open source tools -- after all, they are intimately connected to your bottom-up philosophy.

38. But the open-source movement in computer engineering is people get together from all over the world and build computer software bottom-up. Is Barack Obama going to be the old top-down industrial-age cathedral leader, or is he going to be the fellow we heard tonight, this new generation of leadership that is very bottom-up for the communications age? - Alex Castellanos on CNN, quoted by Matt Asay, Republican pundit pushes Obama as open source -- CNET News
39. Expect to see much much more use of open source software and hardware in the federal enterprise, which will continue to drive more adoption by open source software in commercial sectors. Expect to see a more widespread adoption of Open Office, Linux, Solaris, ZFS, and MySQL. This will be done for agility, flexibility, security and expense. -- Bob Gourley, The Technology Implications of the Obama Win -- ExecutiveBiz Blog

Post all disclosures online to maximize transparency and accountability.

40. The Obama administration should direct the Office of Government Ethics to post all the financial disclosure forms filed by its appointees online. - Bill Allison, Open Letter to the Obama Administration on How to Shine Sunlight -- Sunlight Foundation
41. President-elect Barack Obama is signaling that he's likely to follow through with his proposal to appoint a chief technology officer to the White House. The person in this new position--and possibly a new White House technology office staff--could be given the directive to create new levels of transparency and access to government agencies, or to guide policies that spur innovation and growth. -- Stephanie Condon, Obama's search for a CTO | Latest News in Politics and Law - CNET News
42. We should have online disclosure, about who is lobbying whom for what at whose behest, as well as who is seeking to buy influence with their contributions to campaigns and related charities. -- Mike Klein, Open Letter to the Obama Administration on How to Shine Sunlight -- Sunlight Foundation

Keep showing the rest of us how to use social media for public engagement -- and why engagement matters.

43. Getting the message out. Keeping the message fresh. Sticking to the story. Tracking and staying in touch with the interested visitor. Developing a worthwhile engaging relationship with those who can support you and your concerns. These are just a few of the (many) lessons illustrated with this successful campaign. To all those that have taken the time to visit and comment as we moved with this case study - Thank You. We have learned much from this experience. -- David Bullock, Successful Social CRM and Superior Marketing in Practice -- Barack 2.0
44. It's clear that over the past year, Obama's campaign has developed a profound understanding of how its community finds and consumes information across a number of platforms. And Obama has embraced them all, and adapted his message to fit the way people use those platforms. That's an important lesson that every newsroom should learn. -- Chris O'Brien, What newsrooms can learn from Obama campaign -- IdeaLab
45. World Wide Creative uses Barack Obama’s internet strategy as a case study in almost all our presentations, so it would have been pretty crappy if the non-internet-savvy old white guy had won! - Fred Roed, The Obama Internet Show rolls on -- The Heavy Chef Project /World Wide Creative
46. One issue we spend a lot of time working on when building online communities at FreshNetworks is how to ensure and encourage participation. How do you design and build a community site which will make your target audience want to take part and then take the step to actually take part, contributing something or adding to the community in some way. The best and simplest solution is just to make it really easy for the community members to do things and to make it very clear to them what the benefits are. Obama’s site is a textbook example of how to do this and, I believe, this good online strategy and design has led to the impressive online community and support that is being spoken of. -- Matt Rhodes, Things we learn from Obama: calls to action reap rewards in online communities -- FreshNetworks Blog

Remember that your ability to use the Internet effectively has reshaped how people see their own political effectiveness.

47. I registered at http://my.barackobama.com earlier this year to help. I made several donations online starting sometime in February when they had the “Match a donation”...I began documenting and researching information I found on the internet -- Adria Richards, How I Helped Elect Barack Obama Using the Internet -- But You're A Girl.com
48. Talk about democracy in action! The Obama Administration is actively seeking input directly from concerned citizens: no Senatorial filters or Congressional messengers. And it’s seeking it in a way that is most likely to appeal to the change-agents of the future: our students. In 8 years, students who are currently in Grade 6 will be given the right to vote. But they no longer have to wait for their voices to be heard. Long before they are granted the power of the ballot, our students have been given the power of the Internet. Of course, it remains to be seen how this information will be acted upon. I, for one, am grateful for the opportunity to participate. - Clint Hamada, The Internet President -- Pockets of Change
49. Hope is infectious and I’m glad. I’ll carry that hope into my own personal action and support for my country’s’ leaders and citizens of the world to make the world better. I feel that infection rolling across my networks. I’m also aware that my networks are more politically homogeneous than the world, and that there are others today who may feel a loss of hope. They deserve hope too, so I appreciated Obama’s inclusiveness and seriousness about that in his acceptance speech. -- Nancy White, “I don’t normally write about…" -- F ull Circle Associates

Can you integrate all this advice into a model of government? Yes, you can.

50. If you're going to transform the Internet's potential for government the way you transformed its role in campaigning, you need to create a vision that can be replicated, extended and innovated -- both inside government and beyond. Mandate a culture of pervasive online engagement; then empower governments and grassroots, public servants and community organizers to find their own mechanisms for cultivating participation in agenda-setting, deliberation and decision-making. As this blog post shows, there is a wealth of knowledge and ideas available online to the new administration: simply listening to what is already being said can provide an abundance of inspiration on just about any policy issue.
    
    One man -- even the President -- can't create a conversational government. But he can mobilize a conversational culture with the potential to transform how decisions are made and resources are dedicated, whether it's inside government or beyond. Most importantly, he can help us rediscover the value of conversation in building knowledge, relationships and understanding -- whether those conversations happen over a white picket fence or inside the White House.

Yippee! Today Corante launched its new Civic Minded blog on Internet politics, e-democracy and online engagement. This is a little project I cooked up with co-conspirators Steve Clift, Marnie Webb and Stephen Coleman.

I’m thrilled to be working with such a great team, and really looking forward to what we cook up. Come on over and join the conversation!

I’ve spent the past two days at a Ohio State for a conference on Building Democracy Through Online Citizen Deliberation, which has been a terrifically productive gathering. One session consisted of an interesting conversation about how to structure online deliberation in a way that promotes civil dialogue. We agreed that one key challenge was simply keeping online conversation on topic, and got most of the way towards a list of 10 ways to keep online dialogue on topic.

I thought others might find this list useful, so I’ve written it up and finished it off.

1. Keep your goal visible. Write a clear statement of the goal of your discussion, and place it on your discussion board or chat window so that it will remain visible to all participants for the duration of your dialogue.
2. Keep your rules visible. Write a succinct list of rules (”no flaming”, “maximum 2 mins per comment”, etc.) and keep them visible on your discussion board or chat window.
3. Use moderation effectively — and sparingly. An effective moderator can help keep conversation on track by limiting off-topic conversation, but will be most effective if she is sparing in her interventions.
4. Open a parking lot. Face-to-face facilitators sometimes create a “parking lot” — a space to write down comments or ideas that are off-topic, but still need to be acknowledged or documented. A virtual parking lot (perhaps a separate web page or discussion thread) can play an analogous role in housing comments that don’t quite fit the main disscussion.
5. Create an alternative channel for free-form input. If your discussion is the only opportunity for participants to have their say, they will be highly motivated to bring a wide range of ideas, interests and views to the table — even if some of these comments are outside the scope of your discussion. By providing an alternative channel (like a suggestion box or feedback form) for input, you give participants a way of voicing comments that don’t fit into your dialogue process, and increase the odds that your discussion will stay on track.
6. Offer outside spaces for outside discussion. Your participants are likely to want an opportunity to discuss the issues that they are dropping into your suggestion box or parking lot. Creating an “off topic” forum or e-mail list — a place to discuss all the odds and ends that don’t fit into your main discussion — can help keep your dialogue focussed.
7. Try and try again. An iterative approach to dialogue — that is, multiple phases of conversation, each with a clear goal, start, and and end point — is more likely to maintain focus. Each phase of the dialogue can have its own distinct focus, and you can either narrow or broaden the scope of each phase in response to what you learned in the previous phase. So while the discussion will narrow or widen over time, each phase of the conversation will have clear goals and a clear and sustainable focus.
8. Be a role model. If you’re moderating a discussion, you have to be more restrained about injecting off-topic comments or anecdotes than any of the other participants. That doesn’t mean suppressing your personality — the occasional joke can be a great ice-breaker — but pick your digressions wisely, and keep them short. The more focused you can be, the more focused your discussion will be.
9. Reframe off-topic comments. Rather than pointing your finger and dismissing a comment as off-topic, try to reframe it so that it leads the group back into your main discussion. Even if you have to get creative: “Well it’s interesting you mention Madonna’s new single, because of course THE Madonna is a huge figure in the Catholic church, and the Catholic church has been a big influence on anti-poverty policy. Does anyone else have thoughts about how community groups can help address poverty?”
10. Redefine “on topic”. The most innovative solutions to a policy problem or dialogue dilemma often fall outside the pre-defined alternatives on the table, or the pre-defined scope of the conversation itself. When keeping conversation “on topic” it’s helpful to take the broadest possible perspective on what your topic really is, so you don’t lose any of these “outside the box” gems. And don’t discount the value of the occasional joke or personal anecdote, either — by building social relationships and trust among participants, these off-topic conversations can make your on-topic conversation that much more effective.

Boyd Neil of Hill & Knowlton has written a very kind and thought-provoking post in response to the launch of Social Signal. Boyd’s observation is that corporate communicators have a lot to learn from social movements and community activists about how to use the Internet as a tool for bottom-up community engagement and marketing campaigns.

It’s an interesting twist because I’m used to coporate communications being held up as a model and example for nonprofit people — particularly online, since corporate web sites often seem to be a few steps ahead of their nonprofit counterparts (at least aesthetically). While I’ve grown increasingly convinced of the potential of decentralized online collaboration as an engine of social change, it hadn’t occurred to me that part of its impact lies in shifting the balance of power between the private and nonprofit worlds.

For all sorts of historical, cultural, and perhaps even structural reasons, civil society organizations may be just that much ahead of private (and I suspect also government) organizations in their ability to adopt, adapt and exploit participatory, collaborative models. If that’s the model that is most effective — and most available — in the era of online communications, then the shift towards online community may actually put community organizations in a newly powerful position.

Of course the other possible — and equally hopeful — scenario is that private sector organizations will learn to adopt and adapt participatory models for their own benefit. I say, bring it on! All my experience and observation of community collaboration suggests that the structures and processes of collaborative work and decision-making have a transformative impact on organizational culture and mission. Democratizing corporations — by giving employees, customers and the broader community a greater role and stake in their decisions — could have an even larger social impact than democratizing government and civil society groups.

And there are more opportunities than ever for corporations to immerse themselves in the experiences and innovations of web-savvy, collaboration-driven community organizations. Dare I suggest that participating in Net² could be a great place to start?

I’m delighted to announce the launch of Social Signal. Social Signal’s goal is to support online communities and distributed collaboration networks — networks of communities that share content and relationships by using the latest generation of web tools. This practice builds on my consulting, research and writing in the fields of online community, public participation, and social software, but extends its value and capacity with the strengths of a new partner: Rob Cottingham, a communications consultant with long experience in online advocacy and web development.

Appropriately enough, the Social Signal web site launched on the same day as our latest project, TechSoup’s Net². Net² is an online community and conference that will celebate the achievements of the nonprofit web, while asking the ever-fascinating “what’s next?”

What’s next is a crop of technologies that work the way healthy communities work: decentralized, bottom-up, and participatory. Tech memes like blogging, tagging and RSS — sometimes described as “Web 2.0″ technologies — allow individual non-profits, community organizations and campaigns to work together effectively, while still maintaining their individual identities. Each organization has its own web site and/or blog, but shares content with other like-minded organizations by using RSS to move news, stories and information from one site to the other; tagging provides a way of structuring this information into particular topics.

This kind of decentralized collaboration parallels the best practices that have emerged out of research and experience in the fields of social capital, public engagement, planning, public consultation, and public participation. For the past twenty or thirty years — and gaining ground dramatically in the past decade — public servants and community service organizations have been exploring ways of bringing the public into organizational decision-making. They’ve discovered that decisions that have been meaningfully shaped by public input not only enjoy broader public support, but are more effective and more sustainable. It turns out that the most successful public decision-making processes are — you guessed it! — decentralized, bottom-up, and participatory.

Social movements and community activists have found a similar path. You can’t get people to support a cause by offering a laundry list of ideological justifications. You get people to participate in a political movement by listening to them, letting them set the agenda, and providing ways for them to participate wherever, whenever and however it works for them. It turns out that the most successful social movements and political campaigns are decentralized, bottom-up, and participatory.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that the Web is finally offering tools that match the best practices in public decision-making and community organizing. The Internet grew from the same cultural wellspring that inspired many civic engagement practitioners and many social movement organizers. The 1960s counterculture has been cited as a parent of hacker culture, which gave birth to the open source movement. Open source software development takes a participatory approach to the creation of computer code, allowing many people to collaboratively contribute to one or more related programs. It turns out that the fastest and most secure way of writing code is decentralized, bottom-up, and participatory.

Software developers, public planners, collaboration consultants, community organizers — they’ve all ended up on the same page, working from something like the same play book. They all see the power and joy of a decentralized, bottom-up, participatory model of collaboration. And they’re all trying to build the structures — technological, organizational, and social — that will make this form of collaboration the new standard for how to do business, make policy, create art, or communicate.

What’s exciting about Web 2.0 — yes, we really need another name for it! — is that it offers the technological infrastructure for decentralized, bottom-up, participatory collaboration. Instead of creating another community group to compete for foundation funding, like-minded members of existing community organizations can use a wiki to develop a joint proposal. Instead of distributing government surveys, public servants can access spontaneous, focused feedback by aggregating blog-based policy discussions. Instead of focusing on fundraising in order to pay campaign staff, activist groups can create far-reaching information campaigns that are powered by their members’ RSS feeds.

We’re still in the early days of discovering how the collaborative toolkit of blogging, tagging and RSS — not to mention other tools that are just emerging — can transform our organizational, social and economic structures. Net² is part of this process of discovery. So are the other “Web 2.0″ projects I’m working on, like telecentre.org.

Community-based projects like these — projects that engage with the decentralized, bottom-up, and participatory potential of Web 2.0 tools — are crucial to unleashing the transformative power of the next-generation Internet. We hope Social Signal will help to enable that transformation.

Politics Online has launched theNational Conversation project, which aims at engaging Americans in dialogue about major national issues (in the first instance, 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina). I like the effort to encourage multimedia contributions, and to allow people to simply “agree or disagree” with key statements. But this seems like a project that would be ripe for a distributed strategy — i.e. allowing people to contribute comments by blogging them and aggregating those blog posts in via tagging and RSS. Perhaps that’s how the “share” feature will work once it’s up and running? The site is still beta so I’ll be curious to see how its functionality evolves.

Today is the last day of AdvocacyDev II, a gathering of people using technology to support nonprofit and social change work. As promised by Mark Surman, it’s been a truly mind-blowing experience.

A big part of what’s amazing is the event organizing and facilitation methodology used by Katrin and Gunner of Aspiration, who organized the conference. Their approach is to bring a whole bunch of interesting people together and let them drive and structure discussions. No talking head panels here: session topics have emerged out of the interests and needs of the people in the room, and each discussion has been a mix of brainstorming, case sharing, strategy sharing, putting questions out for feedback, and coming up with really concrete ideas for projects and next steps.

The wiki helps set things on fire becuase it creates a concrete collective output from each discussion. While a room full of geeks are particularly well-positioned to make good use of the wiki dimension (if only because everyone here has a laptop), the wiki is easy enough to use for non-geek events. And while the wiki is great and useful I don’t think it’s essential to the chemistry of the event (though I’d be curious to hear what Gunner and Katrin think).

Anyone who is involved in planning or organizing a conference or event would learn a lot from participating in an Aspiration event. And if you organize events for people in the tech or nonprofit worlds, it’s a must: make sure to put one of Aspiration’s upcoming events on your calendar.

I was part of a break-out group discussion today on making online deliberation tools accessible. We discussed three facets of this challenge: tool design, user training, and motivating participation.

Our conversation began and ended with user training issues, becuase that’s what we came back to throughout our conversation. The question of motivating participation was simply too broad for our group to meaningfully address: ultimately it came down to the same kinds of motivational challenges that affect every form of on- and offline participation, not only in politics but in work, society and personal life. Tool design, on the other hand, seemed to be too specific a challenge for us to meaningfully address: ultimately the design and usability issues have to be addressed tool-by-tool, project-by-project, and developer-by-developer.

Training was the middle ground: an issue with broad applicability to many different kinds of online engagement projects, but an issue where we could perhaps take some concrete and constructive steps. The three possible ideas that emerged for ODDC work were:

1. Training guidelines for e-democracy: Some sort of written guidelines that might guide training efforts by community networks and other social or nonprofit technology trainers, that would encourage a focus on tools and skills that increase capacity for online civic participation.
2. Training initiative: Seek a grant or organization to fund a centralized effort at developing training and trainers who could foster online skills for increasing civic capacity.
3. Grassroots training: Create some tools, like how-to guides or screencasts, to faciliate self-organization by volunteers with some technical skills (like bloggers) who might organize their own community tech training sessions if it was easy and obvious how to do it.

In our plenary discussion we heard that our ideas about training guidelines and materials have been partly fulfilled by the Bristol e-democracy project, which produced some e-democracy training materials.

In the plenary we also talked about what had been done in terms of usability analysis of e-democracy projects. One suggestion was to come up with usability “juries” to get input on usability of different e-democracy projects. Another was to see if we could get a usability lab or studen to do some evaluations. Todd Davies described a recent usability workshop for six teams of open source developers.

I’m in Minneapolis for the Deepening Online Deliberation workshop hosted by the Online Deliberative Democracy Consortium.

We had a terrific conversation today about some of the tools available for online deliberation and for collaboration among deliberation researchers and practitioners. Some of the URLs mentioned include:

Conversate– a new tool for spontaneous conversation. I set up this link for us to try out Conversate as a space for ongoing ODDC conversation.

Jerry Michalski’s “boot camp for the new millenium”

Alex’s introduction to tagging and social bookmarking (Tagging 101)

You’re It — a blog about tagging (Tagging 201)

Alex’s 10 steps to RSS (RSS 101)

The Online Deliberation 2005 Conference blog

Gataga - a search engine for finding tagged content.

43 Things is a tool for creating lists of personal goals and networking with people who share goals.

del.icio.us is a social bookmarking system that lets people share web resources, for example on deliberation

For an interesting political application of wikis, see the dKospedia project to review files on Guantanamo Bay detainees. Volunteers are helping to review thousands of documents on the detainees, and are keeping notes on a wiki so that multiple readers can cross-check and edit each write-up, as seen here

Information Policy reports that the Italian government is boosting its support for e-democracy:

The government will contribute a total of EUR 9.5 million to selected e-democracy initiatives at regional and local levels.

Steve Clift has set up a wiki page for e-democracy and e-government tags, following up on my call for a common tag taxonomy.

If you work in the e-democracy or e-government field, please visit this page to add any tags or keywords that you use for tracking bookmarks or blog posts in this area.

This week’s challenge: coming up with a common set of e-democracy tags for all of the e-democracy bloggers and bookmark collectors out there.

For those new to the tagging concept, here’s a brief intro: In the process of setting up Diablogue, I’ve been exploring the world of social bookmarking and tagging. Social bookmarking systems (like del.icio.us, furl, and my favourite, spurl) allow people to create online bookmark collections (or even complete web page archives) which they can share with other like-minded folks.

The key to sharing is the use of common “tags” — essentially keywords that indicate the subject of any given web page. The tagging concept has also moved into the blogging world, where Technorati (a fantastic tool for tracking what is going on in the “blogosphere”) uses tags to categorize different blog posts. Many blogging software systems (like WordPress and Movable Type) automatically tag blog posts by converting post categories to tags.

To see what tags can do for you, check out the Technorati page for the “e-democracy” tag which shows recent blog posts that have an e-democracy tag, as well as e-democracy bookmarks from del.icio.us and furl.

Tagging is a very powerful tool for collaboration, especially among groups of colleagues who share specific interests — like all of us e-democracy, dialogue, and Internet research types.

But because tagging is currently a “folksonomy” — a grassroots generated set of keywords — there is no consistency to how blog posts and bookmarks are tagged. That limits the possibilities for collaboration and knowledge-sharing. Want a sense of the problem? Check out the OTHER technorati edemocracy tag page.

Now back to our challenge…

It would seem that the time has come for us to pursue some sort of common tagging system.

John Gotze has made a great start at establishing a potential set of tags for e-democracy (and beyond). And Steve Clift has set up a set of keywords with links to shared bookmark collections (see also http://www.dowire.org/wiki/Shared_Bookmarks).

But even John and Steve aren’t in synch yet, and their keyword systems still leave lots of gaps to plug.

Any other tagging schemes or proposals out there? Any thoughts on how we can all get on the same page?