e.politics: online advocacy tools & tactics

Will Obama Empower Government 2.0?

Guest article! The second in the past couple of weeks, too — a welcome development. In this piece, longtime friend-of-e.politics Joe Flood looks in detail at the kind of obstacles that currently frustrate federal government agencies when they try to use the social web. With Obama in office, is generational change ahead? Or will bureaucratic obstructionism win the day? This article originally appeared on JoeFlood.com, where a solid discussion has already built up around it. – cpd

Will Obama Empower Government 2.0?

By Joe Flood

There’s a really interesting article in the New York Times on how Obama tapped the power of social networks to fuel his run for the presidency. Here’s the nut graph:

Like a lot of Web innovators, the Obama campaign did not invent anything completely new. Instead, by bolting together social networking applications under the banner of a movement, they created an unforeseen force to raise money, organize locally, fight smear campaigns and get out the vote that helped them topple the Clinton machine and then John McCain and the Republicans.

Obama’s use of Facebook, Twitter, Meetup and other tools is well-known. By successfully using these tools, he’s created an online mass movement and a personal brand. The challenge he faces now is to implement his ideas across a federal government frequently mired in outdated policies and procedures. While both the McCain and Obama campaigns used every online tool available to them, the federal government is filled with restrictions on Web 2.0 technology, due to privacy regulations, Congressional intervention and IT security concerns. For example:

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3 comments November 12th, 2008 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us

Election 2008 Memento: Live at Fox 5

Well, David Almacy and I may only have managed to get on the air for a couple of minutes on election night, plus a few more live on the web (REAL news kept happening and bumping us out of the queue), but we WERE a part of Fox 5′s crack Election Coverage Team on a historic November 4th. And we have the photographic evidence to prove it: that’s me on the right, David on the left and WTTG Fox 5 News reporter Will Thomas in the middle.

Note the distorting effect of the iPhone lens — shot from below, we get a nice Mt. Rushmore effect, but in the real world I don’t really have a Hellboy-style massive left arm (in the uncropped version, my hand is about the size of my head) and David and Will are actually much closer to the same height. All around, it was a fascinating evening: besides the election itself, we got to watch from within as a local news station put together live coverage of a big event on the fly. Made up for a lot of missed parties.

– cpd

3 comments November 12th, 2008 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us