|
|
 |
|
|
|||||
| |||||
|
|
SessionsThese sessions will be part of the Digital Democracy Teach-In. Please check back often as we will be adding sessions and panels in the days to come. For more details about specific speakers, see the Speakers page. Down from the Mountain: My Experience with the Dean Campaign Former Dean campaign manager Joe Trippi took Internet campaigning to a whole new level, and, in the process, catapulted the obscure ex-governor of Vermont to front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination. Trippi used the Internet to raise over $40 million in small donations, and to marshal a committed, decentralized corps of volunteer campaign workers. Dean may no longer be in the lead, but the political process will never be the same. Trippi will tell the story of how he used the Internet to change the rules of the game. Q & A with Joe Trippi - Moderated by Ed Cone
Meetup and "On the Ground" Organizing Strategists from both sides of the aisle note that Meetup and other tools for "on the ground" organizing have been even more important to their success than blogging. From Howard Dean's record-breaking Meetups and quick adaption by the all the leading Democratic presidential contenders to how the conservatives stake claim to the fasting growing Meetups of all time as forged by Townhall, the online voice of the Heritage Foundation, Scott Heiferman, founder of Meetup.com, will explain how Meetup works, and how it can be used to set up face-to-face meetings for your own local volunteers. Effective Political Blogging Blogging is the voice of the revolution. Unscripted, bottom up -- blogging lets people on the ground tell their own stories -- while syndication technology gives wide readership and lets news and insights bubble up to the top. This session will teach participants the essentials of successful blogging. What works. What doesn't. How to track the conversation flow and measure the impact of your own contributions using tools like feedster, technorati, blogdex and daypop. Gatekeepers No More? The Grassroots Challenges the Journalist Priesthood Professional journalists have been the chief gatekeepers of news about political campaigns and governmental operations. That's changing, fast, as the Internet and other technical tools open up a variety of avenues for other participants in the information process. Campaign blogs are only one such avenue. MoveOn.org's invitation to the public to come up with anti-Bush advertisements showed the way toward a democratization of opinion-making. The Dean campaign invited bloggers -- even those who don't support Dean -- to join an uber-blog about Iowa's caucuses, and created an RSS feed to make it easier to track the flood of data. This session explores technology's impact on the media's role in the political process. Electronic Voting and Transparency The vote counting problems of the election in 2000 created much interest in improved voting systems. The natural inclination of many technologists would be to apply computer technology to the problem, but whether this can be done in a reliable and trustworthy way is a controversial subject. Many respected computer scientists don't think it can be done at all. This panel will explore the issues and let each side make its case. Come, listen, and decide for yourself. MoveOn: Bringing Ordinary People Back into Politics In five short years, MoveOn.Org has become one of the largest and most effective advocacy organizations in the world, with more than two million members and a unique bottom-up style that allows the members to set the organization's priorities. MoveOn is working to bring ordinary people back into politics. With a system that today revolves around big money and big media, most citizens are left out. When it becomes clear that our "representatives" don't represent the public, the foundations of democracy are in peril. MoveOn is a catalyst for a new kind of grassroots involvement, supporting busy but concerned citizens in finding their political voice. Co-founder Wes Boyd will explain the principles and internet-based tools that make MoveOn so effective. Advocacy as Application If we think of democracy as a social/political operating system, advocacy is a key source of "application development," where advocacy groups and processes may be seen as the applications. The Internet can also be seen as an operating system where innovative applications support interactivity and social network development. Currently we see an explosion of activity as the synergy of the two systems is increasingly obvious as campaigns focused on candidates and issues of the day successfully form, enhance, and sustain coalitions using Internet applications along with traditional work on the ground. This panel will discuss best tools and practices for online advocacy, as well as online advocacy's impact on participatory democracy. Emergent Democracy Worldwide While we're building great new tools to build communities, we've done very little to ensure that people around the world have access to them. And even when we've made it possible for people in developing nations to speak, we've done little to ensure that anyone listens. How do we ensure that the "Second Superpower" Jim Moore proposes includes the poor as well as the rich? When a new democratic structure emerges from highly-wired westerners, how do we ensure it's fair and just for those currently unwired? The answer is more complex than bridging the so-called "digital divide" - it involves bridging countless cultural divides. Emerging technologies make it easier than ever to bring first-person perspectives, as well as images, movies and music to people in other nations - is this enough to bring cultures together and ensure they care about one another? O'Reilly Home | Privacy Policy  © 2004, O'Reilly Media, Inc. |
|
