techPresident - Who Will Be America's First techPresident? Grading the Democrats - Comments

Draft Bloomberg to Become the First Independent TechPresident!

CitizenSmith — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 19:13:47 -0500

If we want a Tech President we need a President that understands the importance of technology. While many of the democratic candidates are paying lip service to these ideals, none has close to the technological background of Mike Bloomberg. He would make a fantastic leader for this and many other issues, which is why we are trying to Draft Mike Bloomberg for President at UniteForMike.com

Thanks Luigi...

Vermonter — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 19:48:04 -0500

I should have written "BSD-style system." The new DFA-link is indeed quite integrated and very useful.

Blog for America and DFA-Link

Luigi Montanez — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 14:04:11 -0500

Just a quick correction... DFA-Link was not built by Blue State Digital (as was Party Builder and My.BarackObama), it was built in-house in the summer of 2005 (a few months after Dean went to head the DNC). I believe Party Builder launched in the early part of 2006. Later in 2006, we also switched Blog for America into a community blogging platform, tied closely with DFA-Link. So DFA groups have their own blogs on Blog for America. Blog diarists on BFA can include location-aware attributes (city, state, zip) to a blog post, which allows blog posts to be searchable by location:

http://www.blogforamerica.com/state/NJ

Thanks Peter...

Vermonter — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 23:24:58 -0500

You said more clearly what I was getting at, I think.

Social networking is great for creating private networks. But, if you go to the home page of Facebook, for instance, you have no idea what's going on in the site. It is only through the private interactions with "friends" and "groups" that you get to realize the power or interest in the system.

However, during the Dean campaign, if you read through the comments on any post of Blog for America you instantly were able to take the pulse of the active online supporters. Similarly, the Obama HQ blog is almost entirely un-censored as far as I can tell, which encourages a lively discussion. Yet because it's not the only destination for supporters, it seems like the Obama HQ comments section is just one more micro-community in a sense -- as opposed to a central meeting place.

Of course, despite the wonderful sense of shared purpose of Blog for America, the Dean campaign (or really any of the other candidate sites) didn't provide usable tools to allow people to do their own organizing. Nor did it ever embrace the Scoop style community blog model even when it morphed into Democracy for America (which could likely have surpassed Daily Kos, in my opinion, if it had.)

DFA instead opted for the same Blue State Digital system as Party Builder and Obama, DFA Link... Which is really pretty useful in allowing each member to create regional or topical groups to help build micro-communities for local action.

The trick, I suppose, is to do a better job of merging the best qualities of both of these models. But maybe that's just the optimistic view of a "both/and" Obama supporter.

Social Networking vs. Community blogging

Peter Erickson — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 23:56:30 -0500

I think Neil has a really important point about what the Obama campaign was reaching for.

Blue State Digital's platform definitely copies the social networking model more than the community blogging model.

Facebook, for example, suffers from many of the same problems. It has all kinds of internal walls that make organizing and community interaction difficult --- I wonder if/when Facebook will embrace first blogging and then community blogs.

Jerome Armstrong actually had a few comments about this in an interview in an article in The Nation, even tying the difference into a generational distinction:

"He's skipped right over the blogosphere to the younger social networking sites, where he can be embraced in a way that he is more comfortable with," says Armstrong, arguing that Obama's boomer campaign managers prefer to sell him to the Millennials as a cool brand name with its very own catchy slogan, "Generation Obama," that they can embrace.

It raises some interesting questions anyway.

Thanks...

Vermonter — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 13:23:57 -0500

... for the reply, Micah...

I think we do agree largely on this. Thanks for clarifying the comment...

But, I wouldn't necessarily conclude that it's intentional for the purpose of keeping control of public conversations. (It could very well be, but I just don't know).

Rather, might it be more likely that the people in charge of the Web effort just don't quite understand the blog/comment community web site dynamic as those of us who've been living within this world for the past half a decade?

Might there be a bias toward the social networking model, which based on my personal blog-centric experience seems to be a much less user friendly community-building environment?

Despite the lack of a more open system, though, there's quite a lot of conversation in the main HQ Blog comments section, though that hasn't always been the case.

Regardless, the quick embrace of One Million Strong by Obama supporters certainly suggests that there was a hunger for a better system that allowed for easier communication.

Again, I don't really know why they haven't done a better job of using the site to build community, I'm just not sure if "control" is ultimately the root cause.

Thanks again for your response...

-Neil

Obama could do better

Micah L. Sifry — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 12:48:28 -0500

Neil--
I don't think we really disagree with each other about this. The Obama campaign has built a state of the art platform for community engagement, and yet the site buries that community under layers that it alone controls. There's little sense of a lateral network of conversations reaching critical mass on barackobama.com. As Peter Erickson notes, they've received 15,000 policy proposals but done nothing to open up a big conversation around any of them. He writes, "There's a need for a recommended list, for greater visibility of the diaries, for creating more opportunities for interaction, and for increased efforts to highlight the work of independent bloggers and activists." That's exactly our point. As best as we can tell, they're not doing that because they don't want to give up that much control.
Micah

Obama's Control?

Vermonter — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 11:27:57 -0500

You write:

--That said, we wish he didn't tout his own campaign's use of technology as demonstrating how he will open up governance, as we know the Obama campaign has maintained strong control over how its supporters use its web tools.--

As a community member of My.BarackObama.com, I don't really understand this comment. There are plenty of valid critiques of Obama's web operation (an almost carbon-copy of Party Builder, of course -- also built by Blue State Digital), having to do with the way the site is structured that makes connecting in the community a little too circuitous. But also of how the campaign interacts with its supporters through the site. Peter Erickson has a good diary on this at One Million Strong, (a site largely set up to provide a more active discussion area for Obama supporters).

But, control of the tools is not really the problem from my experience. In fact, I'd say just the opposite -- they are there for the use of all community members with little or no mediation. In general, I think there is too little direction for how to use them effectively.

And related: the campaign has started a tech discussion blog:

Neil Jensen
Vermonters For Obama

Who Will Be America's First techPresident? Grading the Democrats

the editors — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 12:07:08 -0500

Who will be America's first techPresident? It's time to grade the candidates on their understanding of the power of the internet to transform America's future. We start with the Democratic field...