Molly Webb
Former Demos researcher
Molly Webb worked as a Demos researcher on science, technology and innovation from January 2005 - August 2007.
at 12:23pm on Monday, 21st May 2007
The personal democracy forum conference (and unconference) are over until 2008.
Two main things struck me. First, the younger generation (as Danah Boyd pointed out) don't think of the internet as 'not real' - it is an indivisible part of their social lives. It follows that the virtual/physical divide won't be as obvious in the next elections either. The Pew survey on politics and the internet shows how quickly things are changing. In 2006, 23% of people who are using the internet for politics are creators - not only consumers - of content.
This brings us to video. If in 2004 the Dean campaign showed us the mobilising power of the internet, then 2006 showed us that YouTube's power has a part to play in making or breaking the reputation of candidates.
Andrew Rasiej (founder of PDF) put it this way: "We're going from a literate to 'viterate' society, where video becomes one of the main media for communication - how will it be part of our lives?"
So 2008 will be the remix and mashup election. Here are some of the websites letting your create your own video channels to support candidates.
http://www.ourmedia.org/
http://splashcastmedia.com/
But it wasn't all about the US presidential elections. On Friday, I spoke (download the talk) during a session on 'E-lessons from overseas' along with Jeremy Heimens of avaaz.org and Jaime Aparicio, former Ambassador of Bolivia to the US, representing NewLink Political. Most interesting was to hear Jeremy's view that there may be even more innovative online political tactics outside the US. But avaaz.org does face a huge challenge in creating an international political culture.
Luckily we were able to follow up on Saturday thanks to Pete and Niamh, who boldly put Everyday Democracy up as a topic for discussion. This was the discussion where people really warmed to the topic. Micah Sifry challenged our group to think about how we could expand the area of what Yochai Benkler calls 'social production' over the next year - before the PDF conference 2008. Some ideas were: open source voting, geographically-oriented myspace (or pledgebank), developing new stories about what everyday democracy online looks like, and tools to 'manage my politics'.
Other cool stuff:
The Sunlight Foundation - Micah, Andrew and Greg Elin (who also came along to the unconference ED session) are technology advisors at Sunlight. Founded in 2006, it's aim is to explore using technology to enable citizens to be more active in politics.
Foneshow was there - think twitter for voice? And there is lots of content to subscribe to
The Front Porch Forum - an online neighborhood forum, helping people organise activities in their neighborhoods started in Vermont.
Daylife: A news website but more crucially, it provides an open API that would give you the power of LexusNexus for your own website.
Two main things struck me. First, the younger generation (as Danah Boyd pointed out) don't think of the internet as 'not real' - it is an indivisible part of their social lives. It follows that the virtual/physical divide won't be as obvious in the next elections either. The Pew survey on politics and the internet shows how quickly things are changing. In 2006, 23% of people who are using the internet for politics are creators - not only consumers - of content.
This brings us to video. If in 2004 the Dean campaign showed us the mobilising power of the internet, then 2006 showed us that YouTube's power has a part to play in making or breaking the reputation of candidates.
Andrew Rasiej (founder of PDF) put it this way: "We're going from a literate to 'viterate' society, where video becomes one of the main media for communication - how will it be part of our lives?"
So 2008 will be the remix and mashup election. Here are some of the websites letting your create your own video channels to support candidates.
http://www.ourmedia.org/
http://splashcastmedia.com/
But it wasn't all about the US presidential elections. On Friday, I spoke (download the talk) during a session on 'E-lessons from overseas' along with Jeremy Heimens of avaaz.org and Jaime Aparicio, former Ambassador of Bolivia to the US, representing NewLink Political. Most interesting was to hear Jeremy's view that there may be even more innovative online political tactics outside the US. But avaaz.org does face a huge challenge in creating an international political culture.
Luckily we were able to follow up on Saturday thanks to Pete and Niamh, who boldly put Everyday Democracy up as a topic for discussion. This was the discussion where people really warmed to the topic. Micah Sifry challenged our group to think about how we could expand the area of what Yochai Benkler calls 'social production' over the next year - before the PDF conference 2008. Some ideas were: open source voting, geographically-oriented myspace (or pledgebank), developing new stories about what everyday democracy online looks like, and tools to 'manage my politics'.
Other cool stuff:
The Sunlight Foundation - Micah, Andrew and Greg Elin (who also came along to the unconference ED session) are technology advisors at Sunlight. Founded in 2006, it's aim is to explore using technology to enable citizens to be more active in politics.
Foneshow was there - think twitter for voice? And there is lots of content to subscribe to
The Front Porch Forum - an online neighborhood forum, helping people organise activities in their neighborhoods started in Vermont.
Daylife: A news website but more crucially, it provides an open API that would give you the power of LexusNexus for your own website.
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