So tonight, Tim and I attended an Internet and Politics panel discussion featuring almost everyone you've ever vaguely heard of talking about The Past, Present, and Future of the Internet and Politics. After finding our seats, we did what any self-respecting EchoDitto staffers would do--started a Rendezvous network, fired up SubEtha Edit, and collaboratively liveblogged the entire event (okay well, the first two panels. Then we went to a bar.). We promised Harish that if he paid for our tickets, we'd blog it, so Harish--this one's for you. Keep in mind that this is a collaboratively written document, so the voice may shift (ie, if it says something dumb, it must have been Tim typing).

1...2...3...TO THE BLOGS!

It's too bad Michael isn't here. He'd really like this.

Julie Barko of Donordigital
Julie says the biggest effect of the internet on this election is the increase in small donors.
I agree. And not just because we've found a new way of making money, but also because giving money truly is a proxy for involvement. When you give twenty bucks, you're more likely to follow the results, to tell your friends, and even to vote.

Democrats.com
Okay...so we just heard from a man who wants to stop spending on TV and radio and pour every dollar into building an enormous email list of Democrats and Democrats-who-don't-know-they're-Democrats-yet--ie, people who agree with us on the issues but don't quite get it. Where will these names come from? Who will be allowed to send emails to it? He doesn't answer any of these questions.

QRS Newsmedia
She just made the claim that Democrats outstripped Republicans in online "small-donor" fundraising 5 to 1. However, she didn't talk about the analysis recently posted on Kos explaining that Democrats sent over five times as many fundraising emails as Republicans. Republicans tended to send GOTV and organizing emails. Well, I guess both parties got what they asked for.

Someone just said that the republican database segments by issue, gender, age, etc, to push personalized messages to their consituents. I think she's absolutely right. Segmenting is the future.
It's in line with what I've read about Karl Rove getting his start as the Texas mad scientist of list-segmentation for snailmail junkmail projects. The Dems have only just started to experiment with this. I think sometimes our righteousness gets in the way of this. There's a feeling that if we just send a True message, then all people will react equally strongly.

Another reason we don't ever do that is because we are completely decentralized. There are so many lists floating around. The Republicans, however, are completely top-down. Every list goes to them.

Off-Topic: Don't be afraid of RFID
What's RFID? Radio Frequency ID. Like that they put in Wal-Mart items now to track them from distribution center to store. We should put those onto voters to track them from distribution center to store.

Ari Ravencraft, Kerry Dir of Online Comm
He gave a positive account of their tool connecting supporter to supporter, where a New York volunteer could direct an Ohio volunteer to her local canvass. Compare this with the Dean campaign's phonebanking tools, which had volunteers calling undecided voters. I prefer the Kerry method--it's an incredible way of cleaning a list without runnning the risk of alienating voters with untrained volunteers. I'm surprised that the DNC list was actually larger than the Kerry-Edwards list.

Someone of Limbic Systems
The main thing that we have that The Republicans don't have is an incredible amount of data!

Michael Warren's Challenge: What have you done to make sure that that data become targeted focused information that we use to win?

I understand his point. But here's the problem: everyone wants THEIR GROUP to lead the charge (and be the Keepers of the Data). So the real challenge isn't combining the data we have now. The real challenge is building a system that will automate the combination and cleaning of data.
What's the solution? Open source?

Mathew Gross, formerly of the failed Presidential campaign of Vermont Governor Howard Dean. Also a blogger.
Aaaand we hear the words "social network" for the first time in the panel. Figures it would be with a Dean person.
Building an email list of 100k people still raises the fundamental question of who controls those emails, who runs the list? A point I made earlier in this document, thereby proving that Mathew Gross is eavesdropping on my and Tim's Rendezvous network.
We need infrastructure so a local activist can tap into the network and raise money not necessarily for John Kerry, but for progressive local projects.

April Pederson, Democracy in Action
I first met April Pederson back in the spring when Chris Warshaw and I were shopping around Redraw America and needed a few tools as we put together the site--zip code database, etc. She's talking about transparency, and I can vouch that she practices it. Democracy in Action is a great group of people who are smart and dedicated--they started the group "in their spare time," how cool is that? Everyone should go give them business.

Capitol Advantage
Making their last gasp? Are legislative emails still relevant? ACLU Matt thinks not. EchoDitto would tend to agree.

The form letter thing is vastly overdone. We allow people to have a pre-written message! What we hear from Congress is that 'The impact of any communication is directly proportional to the time and energy spent writing it.'

I think this is a TRICK-- Congresspeople would love us to spend all our time writing them powerless letters. I'd like to see some empirical evidence supporting his points that these have ANY effects at ALL.

Zack Rosen, CivicSpace
Apparently everyone is jealous of Zack being in the bloom of youth.

We've had so many breakthroughs this cycle, but we dont really know where we're at. We have to coordinate. The Democratic Party is horribly decentralized, everybody knows that. And we're not going to wake up tomorrow morning and suddenly change.

Zack is so goddamn on point. The Democratic Party is exactly like the open source development community circa 1990. We're all working towards the same general goal but speaking different languages. We need open standards and open information to get things done.

Nick Gleason, CitySoft
Apparently he has a web standard. He talks about "creating a set of open web protocols to allow "us and them" to share information much more easily," as well as another effort called "i-Names" Basic gist: This is OUR platform and OUR toolset and OUR methodology is OPEN to ALL and SHARED
but please remember it is OURS.
PS: YOU have the power!

Malik Russell, Justice Policy Institute
One issue they deal with is felony disenfranchisement. It has a civil war orgin and is generally used as a racist tool to disenfranchise black and latino voters.

A lot of the people we work with--email is a novelty to them.

THANK YOU to someone for finally saying this. A hell of a lot of Democrats--of AMERICANS--just Do. Not. Have. The. Internet. I think this is a whole different question that I'd love to get into--free nationwide wireless would be an incredible boon to democracy.

Heather Holridge, CTSG
OMG she just said "GO VIRAL"!!!!!!!!!!! Heather wins the viral prize for being the first one to utter the Sacred Words. But there's the rub--is the "viral prize" really something you want to win?
Apparently the key to Going Viral is Flash. She's not totally wrong. Heather also threw out a "segmenting" and even a "sub-segmenting." Good words, Heather. Good words.

Joe "DFA" Rospars
"The Dean campaign burned out pretty quickly," Joe tells us.
Joe made a good point about translating online power into offline action--one of the strengths of the Dean list and of DFA.

Bonus Round: Internet in Politics DRINKING GAME:
Drink for:

• social networking

• empowerment
• open source
• toolset
• moral values
• top-down
• bottom-up
• "we provide tools"