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Posts filed under 'politics'
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October 15th, 2008, 02:56pm
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I blogged last Fall about an initiative here in Canada called Student Vote that runs in parallel to the general election. The program educates over 400,000 young people about political issues and allows them to cast mock ballots that are tallied according to riding, as would real ballots.
As the voting public digests the results of yesterday’s Federal election, I thought I’d bring it up once again. Viewing the disparate results between young students and those eligible to vote, I have to believe that as this next generation matures, they will elect a fairly different (and greener) Parliament than we did this time around.
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October 15th, 2008, 10:45am
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First noticed by a Xbox 360 live gamer on his RoosterTeeth (JeffSon) forum page, and subsequently reported by GamePolitics and GigaOm. It has now been confirmed (by GigaOm) that the Obama campaign has purchased advertising in the XBox 360 game - Burnout Paradise. So now, when gamers decide to make a visit to Paradise City, they may see some billboard advertisements informing them that early voting has begun, directing them to visit Obama’s webiste: voteforchange.com
EA games’ director of corporate communications, Holly Rockwood told GigaOm by e-mail: “I can confirm that the Obama campaign has paid for in-game advertising in Burnout.”
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October 13th, 2008, 10:36pm
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Welcome back to another edition of the Wikinomics Roundup: Week in Review, where I capture in brief, some of the thoughts, discoveries, and discussions that graced the blog throughout the past week.
This week in the roundup:
- Jeff DeChambeau discussed privacy and digital surveillance
- Dan Herman introduced us to ‘vote swapping’ and identified how this Web 2.0 technology now has the potential to influence elections
- Don Tapscott highlighted some new research findings in order address a common misconception about video games and gamers
- Denis Hancock reviewed some of the pitfalls of the traditional crowdsourcing model and introduced us to Poptent
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October 12th, 2008, 06:11pm
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We’ve been talking a lot about the Webification of the Obama campaign, but there are also some interesting things going on in our own backyard. As Canadians gear up for our own Federal election this week, Vote for Environment – a pro-environment lobby group - is looking to use Internet-enabled, grassroots organization to try and game Canada’s multi-party political system.
The initiative is appealing to those that believe the environment is the single most important issue. It paints the Harper government as the anti-environment party, and then specifically targets 39 ridings where the Conservative party won in the last election by less than 10%. Visitors can search for their riding and are given recommendations on who to vote for based on poll data. The goal is to consolidate the vote around the party that was the runner up; regardless of who that might be.
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October 7th, 2008, 12:53pm
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For months several of us have posted about the impact of collaboration and social networks on the election south of the border. The allure of Obama vs. McCain, not to mention their respective approaches towards technology makes for an interesting case study.
But if you’re Canadian and concerned that either the current Conservative government will get a majority hold of Parliament, or conversely concerned that it will fail to do so, then there are several appropriate story lines to follow up North. The first is a growing Facebook group called ‘Anti-Harper Vote Swap Canada,’ which now boasts over 12,000 members.
The group works as follows:
“In a completely legal fashion, it allows voters in different ridings to swap votes to best ensure the Conservatives don’t win. Almost anyone who is opposed the Conservatives can take part. If your preferred party has no chance in your riding (or if they are absolutely certain of winning) you can use your vote elsewhere to help candidates from the same party beat the Tories, while at the same time voting strategically to stop the Tories in your own riding.” Read More »
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October 2nd, 2008, 03:57pm
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Andrew Cherwenka posted an interesting article last night called Antisocial Web Marketing: Why McCain is Losing. While I’m personally not willing to jump to the conclusion that what’s happening on the web is the main reason he appears to be losing, the comparison between how the two leaders (& parties) are represented is startling. One would have thought that after all the stories about how Obama’s online presence was key to his triumph in the Democratic primaries would have led McCain’s team to focus on this… but apparently not.
Side note: for previous coverage of the role of wikinomics in this race, see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
Most interesting stat in the story? The top-20 user uploaded YouTube results for McCain are negative, and the top-20 for Obama are positive. Read More »
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September 5th, 2008, 08:37am
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I’m in Krems Austria at the Talk of the Future Conference. I have the opening keynote this morning. Last night I heard an amazing talk from Dr Franz Joseph Radermacher, head of the Research Institute for Applied Knowledge Processing and the Chair of Computer Sciences at the University of Ulm. Member of the club of Rome and an expert in artificial intelligence.. It was a profound talk. My notes are below:
The issue is not the individual. The issue is human kind as an intelligent system. We’ve been living for 4 million years. What keeps us together? Communication.
Innovations are powerful mechanism to change input output mechanisms. There is a universal mechanism of communication where by superior innovations become part of standard procedure. It took 4 million years to get us to 20 million people. 8,000 BC. Up to that point we were hunters and collectors. Read More »
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August 26th, 2008, 10:23am
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Building on Will’s posts about Obama using text messaging to announce his running mate (which I thought was brilliant), there is a great video on the BBC web site documenting how democracy has become digitized. It’s 10 minutes, but I highly recommend you take a peek.
Web 2.0 and the tools made available have changed the face of American politics. Not only are campaigns finding new ways to reach out to citizens, they’re also finding ways to engage them to become active participants and volunteers. Some people may argue that the ‘old people’ (so to speak), are the ones that vote; but for this election, Obama has mobilized the largest demographic – the children of the baby boom. And coincidentally, many of them are now coming of age and have the power to make a difference. The numbers speak for themselves. As Don Tapscott wrote in a previous post – During the Iowa preliminary, Obama had won by a landslide in millennial votes. His 28,000 vs. Clinton’s 5,400 and Edwards’ 6,900.
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August 21st, 2008, 05:14pm
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One of the most hotly anticipated political news these days is Obama’s coming announcement of who he has picked as his Vice Presidential Nominee. But while most politicians would deliver such news-cycle-dominating stuff during a carefully choreographed photo-op, Obama has decided to do so by sending a mass text message to supporters.
Great (or annoying, depending on your opinion) marketing gimmick for getting people onto the campaign’s text message list, but even more exciting are the other ways in which that list is being used.
First off, Obama uses it to tell supporters the time and location of rallies close to where the live. For a political campaign, mobilizing supporters is a core competency. But it can be difficult to do, especially when events are spur-of-the-momment. Phones often ring unanswered, emails get snagged by spam and sit unread in mailboxes for days. Text messages are received and read pretty much instantaneously, and irrespective of where the recipient is. They are also more personal than a mass email or recorded telemessage, meaning its more likely people will pay attention to them, and much less resource-intensive than a person-to-person phone call.
Second, Obama texts his supporters policy updates. I know: BORING. That’s what I thought at first. But think about it. If McCain attacks Obama, Obama’s supporters know the rebuttal before they have even heard McCain’s attack. And, they’re going to be spreading that message to people they know. Conservative TV commentators have long been accused of reciting talking points sent to them straight from the Republican Party. Whatever your view of the ethics behind that, you must admit it is an effective way to get out the message. Replace those TV commentators (which generally attract audiences with median ages of over 60) with hundreds of thousands, even millions of ordinary people of every race and every class in every corner of the country, and you have a pretty big bull horn.
Meanwhile, John McCain has yet to use text messaging at all. And I don’t just mean his campaign, I mean him personally as well. LOL I can’t wait till November.
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August 14th, 2008, 10:35am
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One rainy day earlier this summer, nGenera’s Gov 2.0 Program Director, Dan Herman, locked three summer interns in a room (Ben and Jude, and I) and asked us to think about what life - and government - would be like ten years from now. One of the results was the following short story about a day in the life of a man named Donald, in the year 2018. Hope you enjoy.
7:00 AM. The alarm rang, and Donald pressed the confirm button to silence it. His bedroom monitor switched on and began playing his morning video feeds.
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August 11th, 2008, 01:33pm
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It’s still early in the Games, but already one can see Asia — China and South Korea in particular — racking up an impressive number of medals, reflecting their growing economic clout. Of the top ten medal-winning countries, Asia currently scores 39 medals and the rest of the world 23. Countries have often used the quest for Olympic medals to showcase their economic or political strength. The New York Times has a great interactive world map here that relates each country’s size on the map to how many medals the country won during that year’s Games. The map shows the medal count for all Games starting with Athens in 1896.
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July 25th, 2008, 06:07pm
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The other day I found myself perusing the New York Times like I’m apt to do anytime I need a few minutes to de-focus and relax. The third most emailed article of the day, “If You Have a Problem, Ask Everyone,” caught my eye. “Hmm,” I think to myself. “That sounds collaborative. I’ll check it out.” Low and behold, the article is about InnoCentive, an innovation intermediary that brings together external experts to solve companies’ R&D problems.
Innocentive, founded in 2001, has grown nearly 30 percent since September of last year from 115,000 members to 145,000. Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams talk about InnoCentive in the Ideagoras chapter of Wikinomics, so it’s no surprise that it’s making waves. What interests me, though, is that this article was the third most emailed article of the day. And just to clarify, it’s the overall most popular, not the just science section. Imagine all of those people reading about ideagoras! Maybe I just get a little too excited to see Wikinomics in the mainstream media, and maybe I’m forgetting who reads the New York Times. But wikinomics is infectious, and I clearly have the bug.
More interestingly though, according to the NYT article, is that the presumptive Republican nominee for president, Sen. John McCain, has “proposed that the government offer $300 million to whoever invents a battery compact enough, powerful enough and cheap enough to replace fossil fuels.” Maybe he’s a little technologically-challenged, but at least it seems he’s ready to collaborate. If the government embraces McCain’s proposal, perhaps we will see a solution sought on yet2.com or Innocentive. Perhaps even you can be a part of that solution.
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July 11th, 2008, 12:01pm
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FreeGovernment.org, launched on July 4, is one of a growing number of online, direct democracy communities that allow users to vote on bills, draft their own legislation, and engage in debate. While these communities present an opportunity to make government more accessible and responsive to citizens, they have failed to earn any influence over politicians.
To change that, Free Government plans on electing the politicians. The community, which is also a political party, is looking for candidates to run in the 2008 US Congressional election. If elected, these politicians will be contractually obligated to vote according to the results of an online poll of constituents (for their vote to count, users will have to first be confirmed as registered voters).
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July 4th, 2008, 10:20am
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He’s mobilized youth to previously unprecedented levels, shattered fund-raising records with an Internet-enabled army of small-dollar donors, and made many impassioned calls for sweeping changes in Washington. But can Obama really transform the cynical, self-interested, and frequently factious nature of politics, while bringing new levels of transparency and participation to the process?
Three recent articles in the NYTimes cast some doubt on Obama’s ability to can adequately distance himself and his campaign from the worst elements of big-money politics , let alone change the broader equation.
The first article describes Obama’s about face on Bush’s domestic wiretapping scandal. After denouncing the wiretapping program during his primary campaign, Obama is now supporting legislation granting legal immunity to telecommunications companies that cooperated with the Bush administration to eavesdrop on citizens without warrants. Critics see it as evidence that Obama is now making the same Washington-style compromises that he campaigned vehemently against. Supporters, meanwhile, are asking themselves what happened to the “change we can believe in.” In fact, some 16,000 supporters have organized a protest on Obama’s own homepage, asking him to revisit his stance on FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act)–evidence, at least, that when it comes to providing an open forum for debate and dissent, Obama has lived up to his principles.
The second article discusses Obama’s decision to bypass public financing for the general election and thus free himself to seek out more lucrative sources of private funding. The decision marks another reversal of policy and is perhaps a further indication that Obama is having a hard time resisting the intoxicating lure of big-money politics as the realities of Washington set in.
The Obama campaign cites the record sums raised from a broad base of small-dollar donors as justification for the decision. But campaign finance experts see it as evidence that Obama is gearing up to embark on a spree of pricey fund-raising events across the country–events that will tap the resources of the large, deep-pocketed donors who have traditionally supported the Democratic party. It turns out that as the intensity of the primaries died off, so too did the long tail of political contributions.
The third article concerns Obama’s recent ambivalence over the withdrawal of troops from Iraq after visiting with commanders on the ground. Having initially promised to withdraw troops within 16 months of taking office, his timetable now seems a great deal more flexible. His steadfast opposition to the war has been a central component of his candidacy, so supporters are naturally suspicious of what appears to be yet another retreat from his principles.
What does it all mean?
For optimists, Obama still represents America’s best hope in over a generation to elect a candidate with the vision and willpower to usher in a more transparent, inclusive and participatory breed of politics. For cynics, his campaign antics are at best naive and at worst disingenuous. Naive if he really believes that as president he can do much reverse the long historical trend that has seen organized interest groups hold increasing sway over the political process and disingenuous for selling false hope while knowing all-too-well that the Washington’s political machinery will not be easily or quickly dismantled.
Which camp are you in? Are you optimistic about the prospects for change or are you cynical? Are Obama’s recent compromises ultimately pragmatic and justifiable, or do they represent a bretayal of the political principles that he has championed?
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June 20th, 2008, 03:39pm
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That’s right.
Starting tonight, a designated representative of both of the major presidential campaigns are going to participate in a free-wheeling debate on technology and government, moderated by Time magazine blogger Ana Marie Cox and channeled via Twitter. (Link)
The moderator will pose questions for the candidates’ reps to answer. The debate has no set end date.
Now, it would be way better if 1) the candidates themselves, not just their reps, were participating; 2) all topics, not just tech, were included; and 3) questions came from viewers, not just the moderator.
Still, isn’t this cool?
But does it deepen the political discussion by creating an ongoing, real-time, and open debate; or does it take the sound bite to the extreme by boxing candidates into 140-character maximums?
Thoughts?
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June 18th, 2008, 03:05pm
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Wikinomics readers are encouraged to register at Ameritocracy. The site deploys a lot of principles of Wikinomics. It allows users to vote on veracity of stories, quotes, etc. that appear on the Internet. Quotes are rated for both credibility and relevancy (see screen shot below). From the site:
The core features of Ameritocracy are adding statements (made by a person or organization) and assessing statements. For example, if you hear Jane Doe say something on tv that you find questionable, you can submit that statement to the site to see what the community has to say about it, or you can add your own assessment. Members can then rate Jane Doe’s statement for credibility and relevancy, add their own assessments, or post a comment.
From this, Jane Doe will develop a reputation based on the community ratings, and you and your sources will develop a positive reputation so long as no one identifies your submission as a misquote or deliberately inaccurate information. The goal is to get a few different perspectives for each statement, so anyone looking to know more about a statement can get a broader picture and make their own assessment.
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June 11th, 2008, 05:55pm
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It is no secret that Obama has blown his opponents out of the water on YouTube.
- Seven of the videos on Obama’s official YouTube page have drawn more than a million views, with his speech on race pushing the 5 million mark. Not one Clinton video has made it to a million, and McCain’s most viewed clip has drawn less than half that.
- The cumulative viewership of all the YouTube videos Obama has posted in the last three weeks is almost 2 million, while neither Clinton nor McCain has broken 400 thousand.
Is this because Obama just coincidentally happens to appeal to those young and wired voters who use a lot of YouTube? Partially, no doubt.But Obama is also using YouTube more effectively. Specifically, he is posting longer and more insightful videos.
Consider, for YouTube videos posted by the candidates over the last three weeks:
- The average length was 7 minutes.
- Three of the four most-viewed Obama videos are over 20 minutes, and the fourth is 13 minutes long.
- The only two Clinton videos that were longer than 20 minutes (all the others were less than four minutes) were in her top-three most viewed.
- For all three candidates, on average, longer videos get more views:
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June 8th, 2008, 10:41am
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How will policy-makers keep pace with today’s rapidly changing world and bring greater agility and dynamism to public responses to monumental challenges like climate change, food scarcity and the spread of infectious disease? How can citizens and others stakeholders feed their knowledge and experience into the policy cycle and how can policy-makers tap the collective ingenuity of society? Can we leverage the immense stores of increasingly granular and immediate data to build models and simulations that will accurately forecast the social and economic impacts of various policy options?
These are some of the issues that a group of experts and EU commissioners gathered to discuss in Brussels at the end of May. I was fortunate to be among the people that were selected to brief the European Commission, along with Andy Mulholland, CTO of CapGemini, Jeremy Millard of the Danish Technological Institute, and several others (I’m pictured below with Andy of CapGemini).
I came to deliver the gospel of wikinomics as it applies to the challenges of governance in the 21st century (see my presentation here), but I think it’s fair to say that wikinomics had already influenced their thinking. Here’s how David Broster, the EC’s head of e-government, described the policy-modeling challenge in his briefing paper:
It is now recognised that on-line collaborations have the potential to trigger and shape significant changes in the way future societies will function. Extrapolation of the present exponential growth leads to scenarios where very large percentages of populations could, if equipped with the right tools, simultaneously voice opinions and views on major and minor societal challenges, and thereby herald the transition to a different form of dynamically participative “eSociety”. While such scenarios are readily imaginable, it must be recognised that we currently do not have appropriate governance models, process flows, or analytical tools with which to properly understand, interpret, visualise and harness the forces that can be unleashed.
Much of the discussion focused on the tools and technologies that will be required to enable individuals, groups or society as a whole to forecast and understand the possible outcomes of government proposals, decisions and legislation. These tools include real-time opinion visualisation and simulation solutions based on modelling, simulation, visualization and mixed reality technologies, data and opinion mining, filtering and aggregation. They will also include translation technologies capable of enabling multi-lingual conversations in real-time.
As I argued in my presentation, however, the biggest challenges in building a participative e-Society will be political, not technological.
- Public agencies can no longer act as isolated policy-units in a world where complex transboundary issues will overwhelm their capacity to develop meaningful responses in a timely manner. Agencies will need an organizational disposition to seek out external ideas, skills and innovations and they will need to coordinate their efforts across jurisdictions and sectors. In other words, they need to embrace mass collaboration.
- The one-way broadcast model of political communications will need to be replaced by communications strategies that emphasize inclusion and outreach. Our highly educated and connected populations may be increasingly time-constrained, but I am fairly convinced that citizens can offer a great deal of insight if they are asked the right questions (e.g., they are selected to engage in issues areas where they have interest and expertise) and provided with appropriate tools that make it easy to contribute.
- Policy consultations will need clear targets and timing and must offer a genuine opportunity for influence. We should never ask the public to merely rubber stamp a preconceived plan.
- Engagements will also need trusted and inclusive public spaces — venues where citizens from diverse backgrounds and political persuasions can engage in dialogue. Digitally-enabled engagement should not merely amplify the voices and vested interests that are already overly-represented in policy-making. It will be the responsibility of elected officials to ensure that the principles of representative government are embodied in new forms of digital deliberation and decision-making.
- Finally, there are a host of non-governmental actors who wield increasing power and influence in today’s world and there is an argument that they too should be subject to greater democracy. A participative e-Society should arguably extend democratic principles into civil society, the markets, and international organizations
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June 5th, 2008, 02:39pm
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In yesterday’s blog post about Obama’s victory, Don referenced his conversation with Joseph Stiglitz, who happened to be sitting next to him at the airport in Madrid. Don also met John Newton when he was over at the World Economic Forum, as John mentioned in his recent post on Doing Davos Does Not Help Blogging. It’s an interesting read, but I wanted to highlight it because I find the sequence of pictures so fascinating. Around the middle of the post you will find a sequence of pictures of whom one might traditionally expect to be at such a meeting - Bill Gates, Henry Kissinger, Hamid Karzai, Pervez Musharraf, and others. Before them? A giant YouTuber addressing 1,000 people at the WEF, and Chad Hurley (the founder of YouTube), in addition to people like Marc Benioff that come later on. How quickly the world is changing… if you go back even a few years, could you have imagined a story about the World Economic Forum - described as “the Davos meeting of political and business leaders aims to create the foremost global partnership of business, political, intellectual, and other leaders…” - being led by a picture like this (the giant YouTuber)?
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June 5th, 2008, 11:51am
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I continue to be amazed at the pundit’s lack of comprehension about why Hillary lost. Bad tactics — this. Bad choices on where to campaign — that. Not enough focus on caucuses — this. Getting Bill involved — that. It’s like the old style pundits using their old style tools to analyze why an old style campaign failed. They’re not only locked into an old model of thinking about politics. They lack a sense of irony.
Let’s face it — Obama ran a new kind of campaign based on social networks that mobilized youth — the Net Generation. And it’s not just that young people were influential on others — which they were. In many cases they actually enabled a numerical majority. Look at the chart below. Obama was actually beaten in Iowa by both Clinton and Edwards if you only count voters 30 and over — the segment that old style politicians have always cared about. But he handily won the watershed Iowa vote because of the Net Generation (voters aged 17-29). The chart says it all.
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