Day Two of RootsCampDC commenced a bit later in the morning today than yesterday, perhaps owing to the late night many attendees had last night.

At a session called "Opening Up the Congress and Web 2.0," Matt Stoller led a discussion about ways to make the Senate and House more accountable and transparent using new technologies. The goal was to develop a set of recommendations for what congress should do to be more open and accountable using Web 2.0 tools. Many of the ideas discussed were similar to the goals of the Sunlight Foundation.

Karina Newton, Online Editor-in-Chief for Nancy Pelosi, described how current rules restricting House and Senate members from posting information online were essentially archaic, developed in a pre-Internet world. One goal, then, is to rewrite these rules and restrictions for the Internet age and beyond.

Marty Kearns of Green Media Toolshed discussed MAPlight.org, a project that integrates data about campaign contributions and votes in the California legislature. Users of the site can search by interest group, legislator, subject, or bill number to discover what legislators have received in campaign contributions legislators have received from specific lobby groups and what bills those legislators have supported or opposed.

Kearns and others are hoping to implement the far more ambitious project of tracking the subjects of all email traveling on Congress' servers. It would be a way to track the interests of citizens who are emailing Congress, and could help people visualize the pressures being put on Congress.

A lot of the discussion centered on creating open technologies that by their very nature encourage more transparency. For example, Ben Rahn of ActBlue mentioned that government web sites should offer official documents in html rather than as PDFs (this allows search engines to index the documents and makes it easier for people to view them).

Just as monitoring late-night Domino's pizza deliveries to Congress has clued people in about atypical busy behavior in Washington, developing tools to aggregate the waves of data published daily would give citizens insight into the ebbs and flows of Congressional business.

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[Update]

Peter Leydon from the New Politics Institute gave a presentation on New Media organizing which was essentially a session on the economics of TV and cable advertising and how to develop new, cheaper, and more effective forms of video advocacy.

Leyden says the next wave in political advocacy 2008 will be in four key areas:

- viral videos

- mobile media

- social networking (though no one knows how do that yet)

- games (it will be possible to buy ads in gaming environments)

In addition, TiVO penetration will hit a third of all American homes by 2008. This raises the real question of what happens when politics can't rely on the 30-second ad? -- TiVo users can skip TV ads.

Nevertheless, $68 million was spent on TV political ads in 2006. Where is that mony gonna go in 2008?

Filmmaker Julie Bergman talked about producing campaign videos that are strategized from the outset to be used virally, rather than just aimed at the TV market. Her Women's Voices Women Vote project made it onto blogs, HDNet, and news shows on TV. In the end over 70 million saw it but the producers never paid for TV time; instead it became news and was shown for free.

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Pete Ashdown, who ran for Senate in Utah in 2006, gave a thoughtful presentation on what he calls "Democracy 2.0," or wiki-style politics.

Ashdown, who started the first ISP in Utah in 1993, declared his Senate candidacy in March 2005, driven by a frustration with the marriage of money and politics, and one of his goals was to show how anyone could run for office. As he traveled around the state and asked people what they wanted to see in government, he noticed that people were frustrated by the disconnect between federal government and the local population.

Because of this frustration and his desire for citizens to have more influence in politics, Ashdown set up a wiki and had people add and edit policy ideas. He also started publishing his calendar online (first using the open-source Mozilla Sunbird and phpicalendar and then Google Calendar, which is free.) In this and other strategies he took up the ideas that currently make up the Sunlight Foundation's Punchclock project.

One day the wiki was Slashdotted (linked to by Slashdot.org and therefore hit with tons of traffic) and 110,000 people visited the site. Eventually the wiki suffered from so much constant vandalism that Ashdown had to create registration system; this stopped the vandalism but it also stopped most of the discussion.

Nevertheless, the wiki gave him the chance to refine his policies based on discussion on wiki, which he feels made him a better candidate. He had a very open approach to political ideas; if his supporters had a good idea he would adopt it without worrying about who owned it. It's arrogant for anyone to go to Washington and think that they know everything about anything, he said. It's better to use ideas suggested by users of the wiki. [Could this be considered a crowd-sourcing approach to politics?]

The publicly available calendar became an asset to him. Everyone on the campaign -- include his eight regular staffers -- knew where he was at all times, and so did other candidates and voters. This has become an example he hopes other candidates and elected officials will emulate.

Ashdown made an interesting comparison of politics and different kinds of media. As technology has been adopted in other fields like movies, publishing, or news, he said, it has broken down the barriers to entry. It's doing the same thing to politics as well.

Tags: rootscamp, rootscampDC

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