Web 2.0

It's part of the reason why I want to upgrade the site --so I can better integrate it to the services I use like Twitter.

How can you catch what I am writing? Open an account at Twitter.com and once you do that, "follow me" at http://twitter.com/blogdiva.

And with that in mind, who do you think is going to do better job, Barack Obama or John McCain? What do you want to see your candidate do? What do you expect them to do?

I running late with some of my posts today, so let me point to you to one I have been remiss in talking about. Paul Blumenthal of the Sunlight Foundation has done an excellent presentation on how The Cluetrain Manifesto for People Powered Politics is happening right here, right now.

Here's an example of what you can find at People Powered Politics or People Powered Governance? :

Citizens are online using government information to do their own watch-dogging, to make their voices heard on important legislative issues, and to create new ways to understand legislative and government information that not only aids other citizens but aids the governing process as well. One example connects directly with one of Sabater’s points:

“76. We’ve got some ideas for you too: some new tools we already use, some better services we’ve already produced. Stuff we’d be willing to pay you to use. Got a minute?”

Created by 20 Daily Kos users, the DOJ Documents database allows users to search through the enormous amount of e-mails relating to the Attorney purge investigation handed over to the House Judiciary Committee by the Department of Justice. This was made possible by the House Judiciary Committee posting the e-mails in large pdf files on their Web site. The committee understood that opening up the oversight process to citizens would provide additional labor at no cost while simultaneously making citizens feel like they have power to act in their government and can make a difference.

Dozens, if not hundreds or more, of citizens perused the documents and commented on them at blogs like TPM Muckraker and Daily Kos. The information that they uncovered enabled new conversations and new information to reach into the mainstream of American politics. The only problem these muckrakers discovered was the inability to search the documents. But this is the Internet and now we have a searchable database of these e-mails; a resource that is used by bloggers, journalists, and I presume could and has been used by staffers on the Judiciary Committee.

Paul has more examples of the work happening online from both ends of the political spectrum but also within government itself.

Tomorrow is Personal Democracy Forum's 2007 Conference. The theme this year is "The Flattening of Politics", a hat tip to one of the most important 'manifestos' of this millenium --The Cluetrain Manifesto.

The cluetrain was put together by a group of entrepreneurs, corporate communications experts, software engineers and new media scholars who saw 'the writing on the wall' with the new marketplace that was emerging with the rapid adoption of the internet. Yes, there was a time when many CEO looked at the web with suspicion and with a "but how are we going to make money out of this".

Notwithstanding the 1999/2000 bubble and crash, the naysayers got it all wrong.

The internet is not just changing the way we buy products or ideas. It is changing the basic dynamics of human engagement from how we meet, how we learn from each other, even how we mate.

Of course, the internet has proved to be powerful as a tool for political resource building, but in my book, it has not been used powerfully enough.

Applied to politics, the Manifesto reads as a primer on how the internet squashes any pretences of republic-like politics. Gone are the days in which engagement is only mediated by an elite 'entrusted' by the masses with every single policy and political decision making that will end up affecting their lives.

People Powered Politics is just starting in this country, but we are not there yet. Still, I believe 2008 will go down in history as the last Plato-centric, republic-like elections. Yet, after 2008, I cannot imagine the US Electoral college system surviving because people will demand more and more direct engagement in every single aspect of the political process.

Democracy literally means people (demos) power (cracy). And no self appointed leader of anthing ending with -roots will be able to rationalize a republic-like electoral system as people engage more and more with "social-technology" mediated "people power politics".

The 2008 hint at what is possible, but we are not there yet. If not, we would have had a candidate by now publish their own own 95 Theses for a new politics.

So let me take this opportunity to do it, if not for the candidates then for us, the people who are powering the movement that is flattening politics --even with this here blog. And to keep it in the spirit of the original, it would be cool if you "signed it" in the comments or with a link back to your blog.

So I give you,

The Cluetrain Manifesto for People Powered Politics

Online Constituencies...
Networked political constituencies are beginning to self-organize faster than the governments and political organizations that have traditionally served them. Thanks to the web, constituencies are becoming better informed, smarter, and more demanding of qualities missing from most political organizations.

...People of Earth
The sky is open to the stars. Clouds roll over us night and day. Oceans rise and fall. Whatever you may have heard, this is our world, our place to be. Whatever you've been told, our flags fly free. Our heart goes on forever. People of Earth, remember.

John Edwards by Liza Sabater

I have to say that John Edwards may be the hardest working candidate from the whole crop of presidential hopefuls on both ends of the political spectrum. It's not just the fact that he is the only one who continues to put out the most policy proposals on a regular basis. It's the fact that he started earlier and with a clearly long-term strategy represented by the community platform his developed under for JohnEdwards.com.

Whereas Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton have created sites to support their candidacies money making strategies, Edwards site was founded as a platform for communications, strategy deployment and community building before it became a source for his presidential fundraising.

You can tell by perusing John Edwards's site that he has a well developed and strategized use of blogs, forums, chatrooms and other new media tools. The feel and tone of his site is head and shoulders above the Obama and Clinton sites as far as full civic engagement that goes beyond his candidacy.

Which is why I am completely impressed by his use of Memorial Day to call for action. This is the kind of strategy that would not only spring from an online community but that would be called by someone who knows they can pull it off with the community of communicators, influencers and citizen leaders they have cultivated.

Every year I have been blogging (that would be since 2002), I've seen the outbreaks of "where are the women in media and technology? posts pop-up around February or March. And every year there has been an avalanch of cries, denials and recriminations.

This year it seems to have all started with Jason Kottke's Gender diversity at web conferences. Oh boy. Read all about it at BlogHer.

Among the quoted is Anil Dash, VP of Business Development at Six Apart and one of the first names to come to my mind when I coined the expression "digital ethnorati". Anil is the quintessential digital ethnorati : colored, hip,, wired to the tees but more importantly, an influential in his networks who leverages that influence to give back to his minority community.

So when the man lumped me in with an amazing group of women technologists who he believes are The Essentials of Web 2.0 Your Event Doesn't Cover, well, what can I say, I was immensely flattered :

You can tell by my previous post that technology has been heavy on my mind all this week. Not just technology but the uses of technology that allow people to either keep things same as they ever was or break free into new transformative ground. Especially as I saw them presented at The Sunlight-Berkman Conference on Political Information.

Last Monday at the Sunglight-Berkman I was able to witness some of the most interesting uses of Web 2.0 design practices that have the potential of changing not just the way we view Congress but the way we conceive of governance. Yet nothing, absolutely nothing compared to being in the presence of these two girls : Samantha (on the left) and Bianca (on the right).

People who have heard me speak at conference know what I can do with my oratorial skills. Well, I'm nothing compared to these two girls in action. I was completely blown away by how they just commanded that room and swept everybody away with their presentation of the project they're work as students of the The Center for 21st Century Skills.

Zephyr and Nisha asked us to wrap-up our thoughts with a question. I had two questions, one about technology and the other politics. They seemed to be separate questions but they're very related --and I honestly cannot remember what were my exact words. But they question that is on my mind is simple : does it make any sense to continue developing software and hardware the way people have been developing it if the face of the future is not a while man but of a couple of dark-skinned latinas from Waterbury Connecticut?

American Prospect online has published a piece that has created a good deal of discussion, yet again, around the subject of rape. This time the author, Courtney Martin, makes the connection in American Prospect Online - Willful Ignorance between abstinence-only sex education programs and the high rates of rape and sexual assault in the United States.

Every two and half minutes someone is sexually assaulted in America. Many of these assaults take place on college campuses; 80 percent of rape victims are under age 30. Two-thirds of all rapes are committed by someone who is known to the victim, not a stranger in a dark alley. (Though rape statistics are notoriously inaccurate, we can assume that these, from the Rape Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN) are at least close to the truth, as they are derived from a survey of multiple studies, including the National Crime Victimization Survey from 2005.)

The lack of public, comprehensive, and complex sex education in this country contributes to this toxic sexual culture on most college campuses. The abstinence-only sex education that most young men and women receive does not teach them how to articulate their own sexual needs and respect those articulated by their partners. Teens who are merely told "Just don’t do it" are lacking more than an anatomy lesson or information on contraceptive choices. They are also missing out on essential communication skills and life-saving knowledge about sex and power. Which is bad news for teenagers in our paradoxically hyper-sexual and hyper-conservative contemporary America who are in desperate need of wise mentorship.

This article has inspired me and irritated me in equal parts. So much so that I believe that in order to break down the barriers around the discussion of sexual education, feminists need to take action now: It's time we build an open-source feminist enclyclopedia.

Personal Democracy Forum asked the following:

As we approach the 2006 mid-terms and look ahead to 2008, the editors at Personal Democracy Forum are asking technologists, journalists, bloggers, and politicos to send us 200-word responses to the following questions:

Was the role of technology in politics different in 2006 than in 2004? How did new technology most affect Election 2006, and do you see any lessons for 2008?

Here's my response, included with comments by other technologists and political observers over at PDF:

It’s more than netroots activism. It’s more than neighborhood politics. Neighboroots is becoming and interesting trend : I find myself exchanging on almost a daily basis notes about what is happening here in my little slice of New York City with people who are in far along places like Oregon, Texas and Ohio.

The idea of neighboroots is simple : Many people are using the social networking practices they’ve developed online to expand their political engagement and strengthen relationships within their offline neighborhoods. So I have been able to share notes and ideas with bloggers and campaign volunteers in cities and towns across states such as California, Virginia and Connecticut.

These are not people involved in high profile national races. These are micro-targeted or hyper-local politics offline : City councils, school boards, state senates. Contrary to the trend of online activists or netroots to target national campaign or high profile races, neighboroots are hyperlocal, microniche politics that are being discussed and even provided with resources by online activists across the country. In most cases, these are the races abandoned by their local party machines. So finding others in similar situations is key to some of these activists. You can say that, as they are more engaged in localities, neighboroots activists also happen to be creating online neighborhoods or affinity groups through forums, blogs, wikis an email lists, in order to to exchange ideas and share resources.

So if there are many more local races these year too close to call, now you know why. Thank the activists who are growing the new political phenomenon, the neighboroots.