techPresident - Open source politics - Comments

MyBO from back in the day

Jack Mitchell — Fri, 09 May 2008 20:49:23 -0400

A few quick pointers:
-MyBO was critical in organizing New England activists to get to NH all through 2007 and up to the primary.
-The MyBO Blog allows newbies to find their "blogging legs", then they can move on to the greater blogscape.
-The MyBO group listserves get the word out.
-The Admins don't "airbrush" the content in the blog comment, except when coments are waay over the line. Criticism and dissent is allowed.

I used MyBO continually from 3/07 to 1/08 for organizational purposes and information. Since the NH primary, I hardly use it, but anticipate that it will come back into play as November approaches.

Followers vs. participants

cfinnie — Thu, 08 May 2008 13:12:08 -0400

At my local DFA meeting last night, we had quite a talk about how to keep a movement like this going without a leader. Without a charismatic candidate to rally behind. Was there a candidate we could get behind? I know some groups that have done that--mostly moving to local or regional candidates. Was there an issue we could support? Some DFA groups I know of have done that. But finding a purpose for a bunch of people who came together around a single candidate is not as easy as you might think.

As one woman observed, people want to be lead. Following is what we know how to do. Being self-directed politically is still new to most of us. Top-down campaigns have been the rule since the rise of political machines and particularly since the dominance of mass media in campaigns. In the Dean campaign, they honestly didn't have the resources to manage us much. Joe Trippi has admitted that more than a few times. We did a lot ourselves because we had to. So, when a local Obama supporter recently complained about how much material they had to produce themselves, I had to laugh. I told her about making flyers from the Dean website in 2004. And told her she was lucky not to have some overpaid political consultant telling her what she could and couldn't do.

Still, many of us who got active in that campaign and others, have remained active. We have moved on to other groups, other issues, other candidates. If that happens again--and I believe the way the Obama campaign is structured will encourage that--we will see another surge in civic participation. The first was a game changer. The second will solidify the gains. And I predict we will see a transformation in civic life.

Also some fuel for ideas

Sito Wa — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 16:17:18 -0400

Yeah, also I was fueled with ideas from the following site www.omfica.org
Lot of interesting things for political scientists majoring in IT :)))))

Definitely yes to on-line Democracy

Sito Wa — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 16:12:31 -0400

I think that Internet will give an opportunity to build at least a virtual democratic society, since interactive nature of new media provides the audience an opportunity to participate in the communication flow, to select, frame, disseminate information and instantaneously react to it, serving, in some cases, as gate-keepers for traditional media outlets. As more blogs are gradually penetrating into and blurring with the mainstream media, the agenda-setting power of traditional media becomes questionable. Who, after all, sets the agenda in this new, two-sided model of mass communication?
I have a lot of works and ideas on that. Also alternative search engines do really matter

Hello from London

Rob Blackie — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 03:53:49 -0400

As a long time reader of TechPresident it would be good to catch up with you guys at the conference - I'll be one of the blokes with spiky hair. In the corporate world this normally puts me in a group of one - I suspect that at an internet conference it will make me part of a slightly larger group!

All the best,

Rob.