Mulling the Impact of Tech Tools on the election

I’m in an all-day meeting in San Francisco at Working Assets where progressives from around the country are comparing notes on what tools worked in the 2006 campaign. (New fellow Michael Kieschnick is the head of Working Assets and running the show.) Many of them are nuts and bolts tools that helped voters register, or identified progressive voters and got out the vote, but many groups tried to experiment on new media tools too.

I was at the first of a series of RootsCamp conferences this weekend in San Francisco too. This was a gathering of Netroots and blogger types who are leveraging a “new tool” of sorts in the form of a new kind of “unconference” called “barcamps.” These are self-organizing conferences that came out of the Silicon Valley tech scene, and are described here. But they have been adopted for political purposes by the Netroots crowd in the form of rootscamp. The regional barcamps will culminate in a big gathering in DC on Dec. 2-3 where Simon and I will be speaking too.

In the meantime, many places are compiling their own lists of what worked best in this cycle. Just today the Personal Technology Forum came up with a list that is worth perusing. The Forum’s executive director, Micah L. Sifry, is going to be driving yet another all-day post-election gathering in San Francisco this Friday that I will be attending too.

The lessons of best practices as well as disasters are coming together in various ways and the New Politics Institute hopes to do our own gathering in DC in early December that will lay out what we are finding. Stay tuned.

Peter Leyden