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:
Win congressional support for your agenda by using social networks to mobilize grassroots support and apply pressure on Congress.
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 
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 
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 
Last night I finally
My mom turns 70 on November 16th and insists there’s nothing she wants for her birthday other than photos of her grandchildren. I know the one thing that would thrill her even more: being present at Barack Obama’s inauguration. She’s a lifelong Democrat — my parents met when my Dad ran for a congressional nomination 45 years ago — and while she’s lived in Canada for 40 years, she’s never stopped feeling like an American (or dressing like one, on July 4th in particular!)
Her American-ness is particularly heartfelt when it comes to her political attentions. Over the past year, she’s spent hours every day watching CNN. For the first half of that year, we had the typical generational divide: I was pulling for Obama, and she felt it was time for a woman — for Hillary in particular. But she has been completely won over by watching speech after speech; I think that for the first time, she’s realizing that the United States is no longer the country she left in 1968, for better and for worse. On the one hand the Bush years have been far more brutal than she’d ever have imagined; on the other hand, the US she lived in was profoundly divided — particularly the segregated world of her Tennessee grandparents.
I know that the prospect of President Obama has made her feel like an American again — not just in a red-white-and-blue, Fourth-of-July outfit sort of a way, but in a return to the idea of America as a political beacon for the world. I’d love her to see it shining brightly, first hand, at the inauguration.
Our friends at ReframeIt are enjoying a couple of weeks' worth of well-deserved glowing coverage, most recently in the form of a great review on ZDnet. I met ReframeIt CEO Bobby Fishkin at this year's NetSquared, where we had an awesome conversation about how well-designed social web tools can support meaningful conversation, knowledge building and social trust, as opposed to the usual yak yak yak.
Bobby and team have brought the vision of meaningful conversation to life with ReframeIt's very pragmatic approach to in-context annotation. Install their Firefox extension and you can annotate any web page, share your annotations with the audience(s) of your choice, and read what other people are saying about that page. It's a great way to share resources with colleagues, keep your own notes about favourite web sites, or bring openness and accountability to those web sites who've yet to embrace the social web.
We've long used Technorati searches to show organizations that even if they're not hosting online conversations, people are already talking about them...and opening your doors to engagement is the best way to have a voice in the conversation. I suspect it won't be long until we start making that point by using ReframeIt to show clients what people are saying about them -- in the margins of their very own web sites.
Today I took a giant leap forward in my update-ability. (If date-ability refers to your in-person hotness, update-ability speaks to your hotness in the social media pressure cooker of Twitter, Facebook, Jaiku etc.) If I'm going to be entirely honest, my virtual hotness has been severely limited by my relatively infrequent Twitterings. Not only do I eat, change my musical selection and go to the bathroom without posting the minute-by-minute update, but I even sometimes have actually vaguely interesting thoughts that pass through my head without being captured in my conversation stream.
No more. If I'm going to hear about your gardening weather, the number of bookmarks you now have on delicious, and what your preferences panel looks like in the new Mac OS, then you're going to hear about the cute way my kid just scratched her nose, how that Mexican is food is sitting, and where you won't believe I just found my car keys.
The key to this earth-shaking transformation in my update-ability is a little doodad called MoodBlast. It lets me simultaneously update my status on Skype, iChat, Twitter, Tumblr, Pownce and Skype. (And thanks to the Twitter app on Facebook, it'll update Facebook too.) "Now I'm inhaling." "Now I'm exhaling." "Now I'm trying to decide how deeply to inhale." (Hey, this is Friday night in Vancouver. We think about these things.)
As much as I like MoodBlast's hegemonic approach to status updating, I'm pausing briefly to think about whether increasing my update-ability is, in fact, a good thing. (Now I'm pausing briefly. Here I am, pausing. Moving on...) Are all these updates for my benefit, or the benefit of my "followers"? (Kudos to Twitter for calling it like it is.)
Most people use status updates as what I think of as "expressive communication". Like many forms of online conversation, status updates make it easy to confuse the expressive value of communication with the effective value of communicaiton. I'm concerned about the expressive value of communication when I'm "getting something off my chest", "speaking my truth", or engaging in some form of creative expression. I'm concerned about the effective value of communication when I'm trying to get you to hear me, listen to me, or understand me.
In face-to-face conversation we're able to sit comfortably and move fluidly between effective and expressive communication. I sit down with my boss, Pamela, and get something off my chest ("I'm really having a hard time working with Jim") and I can immediately tune into the effective value of what I've said: its impact on the person I'm speaking with, and how it's being received. If Pamela's eyes glaze over and her smile freezes I know that I've got to tread carefully or I risk damaging our working relationship or my professional status. If Pamela leans forward and nods, I get the idea that she's interested in helping me solve this problem.
When we're engaging in any form of online conversation other than video chat (and even video chat has its limitations), we lose the nonverbal cues about the effective impact of what we're saying. We experience our speech (our blogging, our video posts, our podcasts) wholly subjectively, as a form of expression. That can be incredibly liberating: the web is now full of the creative self-expression of people who might never feel brave enough to post a poem, a drawing or a song if they were really conscious of the audience to which they would then be exposed.
But liberating cuts both ways. By experiencing communication entirely as expression, we lose track of its impact. We lose much of its effective value; we lose the ability to shape, if not control, how we are received.
When we think about the person or people who read our blog post and tweets, we reconnect to the effective value of communication -- without losing its expressive power. We can make a conscious decision about how much to indulge our expressive needs, and we can be intentional about what we want our effect -- our impact on others -- to be.
It's not a tough thing to do. In fact, Twitter gives us a little help, by showing photos of our followers: really look at those faces, and picture them as they people you're about to enlighten with, or inflict upon, your update. MoodBlast, with its deliciously minimal interface, does the reverse: it totally dissociates what I'm saying from what (someone? anyone?) is hearing.
In adopting the practice of visualizing your audience, there's more at stake than whether your status updates make you look like a self-absorbed narcissist or a thoughtful sharer. Audience awareness is a muscle: when you think about audience, about the effective value of your speech, you strengthen your connection to the people you want to reach. You sharpen the focus of your language, your message, your very reason for speaking. You can still tap into the power of expressive value of communications, but now you are realizing its effective value, too.
If you're a communications professional -- in fact, if you're anyone whose work involves communicating -- your work demands that you continually strengthen your capacity for effective speech. Picture the audience -- for your ten-second tweet, your ten-minute blog post, or your ten-months-in-the-making site relaunch -- and you ensure that the satisfactions of expressive communication are matched by the impact of effective communication.
Just realized that the incessant deluge of comment spam had masked a number of comments unrelated to Viagra, porn and serial number cracks. I’ve approved a bunch of actual genuine comments tonight, some going back to 2007
As a longtime (now mostly recovered) reader of women's magazines, I have struggled with the ever-mounting list of feminine maintenance tasks. Leg shaving, nail filing, face cleansing, check. Hair deep conditioning, sunscreening, foot pumicing, ok. Lash tinting, brow shaping, lip conditioning (hey, I'm not naming it if I haven't done it)....well, it gets to be quite a bit of work. And then you get older and the list just gets longer: hair colouring, skin de-tagging, botoxing...where do we ladies find the time?
After a dozen years and many more magazine pages, I finally concluded that the only rational solution was to keep a set number of beautification slots. If Glamour tells me to add botox, I'm giving up deep conditioning. If Elle tells me it's time for eyebrow shaping, I'll have to jettison leg shaving. There is just only so much time I have available for physical perfection and I've got to put the minutes where they count.
I've now been a computer owner for almost as long as I've been a magazine reader, and I'm afraid the challenges of tech maintenance are even more relentless than the challenges of beauty maintenance. Back in the day (you know, when we used to walk a mile to school in our bare feet) I had all my files -- and I mean ALL my files -- on a single 5.25 inch floppy disk. These days, I not only have 84 gigs of data to keep (dis)organized, I have several dozen applications I need to keep updated and debugged. I have a blog to upgrade and tweak, and a personal web site to maintain (Or not. Why yes, those are straight HTML pages you see on http://www.samuel-cottingham.com.) I need to keep my iPhone working and synced. I need to make sure our BitTorrents are downloaded on time, converted to MPEG 4 and in the right directory for our Tivo to find them.
I realize that I may be stretching the definition of "need" here, but whether your technological frontline involves BitTorrent and Tivo or typewriters and telephones, every technology you take on carries an associated workload. We commit to a the latest version of our favourite word processor, or the contact management system our friend recommended, or the totally hot little smart phone, because they promise to make us more effective and more efficient. And along with the time saved, we get a whole new to-do list: Learn the software. Configure the software. Upgrade the software. Debug the software.
For a geek like me, that isn't all bad. Yeah, I spend more time checking MacFixit for tech tips, but better database reconstruction than data entry. I'll happily take on new tool after new tool....not just despite the maintenance footprint, but in some sense because of it. It's actually fun to get my Bittorrent search engine set up in a browser that's configured to open the torrent in a client that saves it to a place where it can drop into the mpeg converter and automatically appear in the episodes listed on my Tivo.
And so my list of tools to manage grows longer and longer, until managing my tech is a full-time job. In fact, that's my fantasy solution: find somebody to pay me to manage my own personal technology, full time. I figure if I had 40 hours a week I could probably keep my software up-to-date, my hard drive organized, my data backed up and uncorrupted, and my eighteen tech devices synced. Attention, reality TV producers: just let me know when you want to start taping Geek Family Robinson and I'll dedicate myself to the job of keeping our home technology fully and perpetually optimized.
But until the producer calls, I've got to fit the tech management effort into the margins of the work the technology is designed to support. And I'm forced to acknowledge that not everybody would regard my ideal solution of full-time tech optimization as a dream job. I am told there are thousands of people -- millions, even -- who would be delighted to spend exactly no time on their technology setup whatsoever.
For these folks, unlike geeks like me, the calculation of time saved versus effort expended is much more straightforward. Trading data entry for tech troubleshooting isn't any kind of bargain for them: a minute is a minute. For them -- and probably for me too -- the best solution is akin to my Iron Law of Beauty: define the envelope of time you're willing to spend on maintenance, and if you add one new technology to your repertoire, drop another.
Easier said than done. If you're a beauty queen, you'll do what the magazines prescribe, even if you have to wake up earlier to do it. If you're a techno-compulsive, you'll sign up for that latest web app, install the newest version of the design suite, automate every last task you can find a tool to automate. Adopt and adopt until the trade-offs you make are by default -- which glitchy bit of software is bugging you the most? which stray hairs are the most unwanted? -- rather than by design.
And if you're both a primper and a geek, your choices are more brutal still. When my friend and colleague Jason Mogus recently overheard me confessing that I keep tweezers in my purse, car and desk drawer -- so I never have to endure an egregiously misplaced eyebrow hair -- he laughingly observed that the time I'm spending on my brows, he's spending on his Blackberry. I may have a better arch, but he'll respond to your e-mail quicker. I laughed along with him, then started practicing tweezing with one hand and typing with the other.
So no, I don't entirely practice what I preach. When I read about the nifty new iPhone app, I install it...without deleting any of the three dozen I already have installed. And yes, when Elle told me that eyebrow shaping was de rigeur, I picked up some tweezers.
But am I still shaving my legs? You'll have to wait until spring to find out.
Since upgrading to a 3G iPhone, I've gone on periodic app binges in which I download every app that looks remotely interesting and take it for a whirl. So far, the best discover I've made is a free app called Evernote -- and it's changed my computer use even more dramatically than it's affected the way I use my iPhone.
Evernote is a notetaking application that lets you take notes on your computer (Mac or Windows) and keep those notes synced with your iPhone and the Evernote web site. Any note that you take on your iPhone gets synced back to Evernote, too. You can keep multiple notebooks (e.g. one for draft blog posts, one for grocery lists, and one for each client project) and choose to keep some or all of these notebooks local (just on your computer) or online (synced by Evernote). While you can keep as many notes and notebooks as you want on your local computer, the free version of Evernote limits data uploads (i.e. syncing) to 40 MB a month. But it only costs $5 per month to get an account entitling you to 500 MB of data uploads, which Evernote says is enough to hold thousands of typed notes, five thousand snapshots, or 450 audio notes.
That's right: audio notes and snapshots. Use Evernote to capture audio notes on your iPhone and they'll automatically sync to Evernote on the web and on your computer -- no waiting for your next iPhone sync. Use Evernote to hold your iPhone snapshots and they're synced, too.
And since Evernote features optical character recognition (OCR), any text you snap with your phone (or another camera whose contents you drop into Evernote) becomes searchable. For those of us who are whiteboard-dependent, that means you can now capture your whiteboard notes and they'll be searchable! Ditto for business cards, flip charts, signs -- whatever you care to shoot. (OCR only works on notes that have been uploaded to the web, so if you want your images to be text-searchable, you'll need to put them in a notebook you keep synced online.)
The Evernote interface makes it very easy switch between notebooks, and to move notes back and forth among them. You can tag any note with as many keywords as you want, so that provides a further layer of categorization. In other words, it's a terrifically easy, flexible and powerful way to take notes on your computer or iPhone, and keep them in sync. (NB that you can't edit pre-existing notes on your iPhone, however, including those you created on your phone; and it would be MUCH easier to take notes on the iPhone if Evernote let you rotate the phone to use the wider version of the iPhone keyboard.)
If you install the Firefox clipper extension (or the "clip to Evernote" bookmarklet in any browser), you can use Evernote to store and tag your favourite web clippings, too. Unlike del.icio.us this lets you stash the actual web page (or highlights) rather than just the URL and description. Unlike del.icio.us there's no sharing feature, however, so it's not a del.icio.us substitute if you like the social in social bookmarking. (I'm hoping some clever person will hack together a tool for saving a web clipping to Evernote and del.icio.us simultaneously, or keeping web clippings synchronized between the two.)
One social thing you CAN do with Evernote is to share a notebook, and optionally publish it as a widget on your blog or webpage. I've created a little notebook of web clippings about how to use Evernote, and set it up as a shared notebook, which you can see here. Once you make a notebook public you can add it to a Facebook page, or to your blog, as a widget that looks like this (click on any box to open that note; you'll need pop-ups enabled):
Evernote's interface, syncing and clipping features make it a very tempting choice as a primary notetaking application. For the past three years I've been a devoted user of Voodoopad, and it's painful to think about giving it up -- not just because the migration process will be a bit arduous (see below) but because of how much I've loved VDP. It's hard to think of an application that's had a more profound impact on my work habits: where my notes used to be scattered across an assortment of paper notebooks (remember those?), Word docs, text files and scraps of paper, just about every thought, phone message, meeting record and blog post I've written in the past three years is captured in one of a dozen Voodoopad notebook. (I use one for each major client or project, plus a catch-all file.) Vooodoopad makes it a snap to keep and retrieve notes, and its creator, Gus Mueller, is the most responsive developer I've ever encountered.
I'm delighted to be writing this post as a OneWebDay ambassador. OneWebDay, which takes place on September 22, is a global day to celebrate the Internet, and the values that make the Internet such an essential part of our society. This year OneWebDay is paying particular tribute to the Internet's role in supporting democratic participation -- a role that is made possible by the Internet's character as an open, global and participatory medium.
I'm a participant in that global conversation, but I'm also part of a local online community in the city of Vancouver, where I've been part of many lively conversations in local WiFi cafes and local community sites. Like the rest of Vancouver, wired Vancouverites look forward to showing our city off to the world when we host the winter Olympics in 2010. Of course, as with any global event, the Olympics also raises concerns about what the world might see when it turns its spotlight to beautiful BC.
I'm pleased to put that concern to rest. While I was reading today's news coverage of Internet censorship at the Beijing Olympics, I stumbled onto the IOC's intranet, where I came across the following draft memo:
February 12, 2010
Dear citizen-journalist,
We are sorry to report that owing to unforeseen circumstances beyond our control, and certainly not due to any action on the part of your Internet Service Provider or the IOC, your computer may be unable to resolve certain domains. Our technicians are examining the issue, and we expect this outage to last until roughly 11:59 p.m. on February 28th.
To assist our friends in the journalism community, we have prepared this list of alternative sources:
| Instead of... | ...you can visit... |
| thetyee.ca | www.cannedtuna.ca for the very best alternative news from the pages of CTVCanWestglobemedia, a proud division of AOLTimeWarnerNewsCorporation. |
| changeverything.ca | www.changenothing.ca, the site that celebrates Vancouver's charming condos, shopping malls and car dealerships. They're perfect just the way they are. |
| adbusters.org | www.marketingmag.ca, which takes a balanced look at advertising's essential role in helping us buy more stuff. |
| cannabisculture.ca | www.coniferculture.com, a celebration of BC's favourite form of plant life. (Note: please do not smoke the trees.) |
| happyfrog.ca | www.ecstaticfrog.ca, where you'll learn how Vancouver has become the most sustainable city ever. Vancouver has become the most sustainable city ever. Vancouver has become the most sustainable city ever. Now say it with me.... |
| freegeekvancouver.org | Â www.bestbuy.com, because really - do you want a computer that some hippy's been pawing over? |
In addition, as per recent directives from the Government of Canada, you may have difficulty reaching any URL containing the numerals 2010, the number 10, the word ten, a combination of 1s and 0s, any reference to human or numerary digits, the word winter, winter-y time images or music, or images of abaci. May we show you something in a 2012?
* * *
It's easy to scoff at the idea of Internet censorship bedeviling the Vancouver Olympics the way it's now causing an uproar in Beijing. But Vancouver is in fact the home of one of the few recorded violations of net neutrality: during a 2005 labour dispute, local ISP Telus blocked its subscribers from accessing a website created by its employees' union.
Whether it's Vancouver or Beijing, daily life or Olympic bustle, unfettered access to the Internet is democracy's best friend. OneWebDay is a chance to celebrate the Internet's role in supporting effective democracy -- and a reminder of those who do not yet enjoy its full benefits.
Today marks the eighth anniversary of our other founding partnership: our marriage. July 29th, 2000 was the Big Day not only for the two of us, but also for Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston.
We know that popular opinion lays the blame for the Brad-Jen breakup at the feet of a certain Ms. Jolie, but we recognize a completely different kind of relationship pressure. With all the press coverage of their marriage, did you ever see them pictured with matching his 'n hers PowerBooks?
We don't want our own marriage to fall victim to the specter of insufficient technology. And yet the traditional roster of anniversary gifts is still geared towards the analog lifestyle.
To celebrate our half-hex anniversary, we're proud to present a new, geek-friendly set of recommended anniversary gifts. Do note that the recommended 8th anniversary gift is a nice, fresh web link...hint, hint.
| Year | Traditional | Geek | Notes |
| 1 | Paper | Manuals, documentation | Electronic documentation is just as appropriate as paper manuals. |
| 2 | Cotton | Tech conference and tech culture T-shirts | 100% cotton and size-appropriate, please, if you want to create passionate users. |
| 3 | Leather | Protective cases, luggage | Before you buy that leather laptop case, make sure your geek isn't a vegan. |
| 4 | Fruit, Flowers, Linen, Silk | Apple product | To a true geek, there is no fruit besides Apple. |
| 5 | Wood | Fonts, input devices | Early typewriters were made from wood. |
| 6 | Sugar, Iron | Red Bull, energy snacks | Sugar, in its geek-preferred form. |
| 7 | Wool, Copper | Circuit boards, hardware upgrades | Circuit boards use copper circuits. |
| 8 | Bronze, Pottery | Web links | Bronze is used for bells, i.e. a way of drawing people's attention. |
| 9 | Pottery, Willow | Data storage | For holding things -- the modern equivalent to willow baskets. |
| 10 | Tin, aluminum | Enclosures, CPUs | CPU enclosures are often made from aluminum. |
| 11 | Steel | RAM, memory | RAM chips are typically held in a computer by steel clips. Think of this as the digital equivalent of a wedding photo album. |
| 12 | Silk, Linen | Security devices and software | Silk is made by worms. Security software protects against computer worms. |
| 13 | Lace | Portable electronics devices | Microchips, like lace, used to rely on women with good eyesight to do the manufacturing (both have since automated). Assembly of small products still relies on fine motor work by women. |
| 14 | Ivory | Electronic instruments, speakers | Piano keys were originally made from ivory. |
| 15 | Crystal | LCDs | Liquid CRYSTAL displays. Get it? |
| 20 | China | GPS | Ceramics are part of the miniature antennas used in GPS devices. |
| 25 | Silver | Digital photography equipment, image capture | Silver used in early photo processing. |
| 30 | Pearl | Smart phones | Like the Blackberry Pearl. |
| 35 | Coral, Jade | Linux boxes | The Linux OS, like coral, is made up of thousands of individual contributions that are nonetheless "commonly perceived to be a single organism". |
| 40 | Ruby | Web applications | Preferably applications written in Ruby on Rails. |
| 45 | Sapphire | Laptop computers | Laptop screens use LEDs; some LEDs use a sapphire-like crystal as part of the manufacturing process. |
| 50 | Gold | MP3 players | Gold is used in semiconductors; radios were one of the earlier applications of semiconductors. |
| 55 | Emerald | Code, custom software | As created on the Emerald Isle. |
| 60 | Diamond | Pre-release alpha technologies | Synthetic diamonds are projected as a future material for superconductors, capable of withstanding great heat. |