New Tools

The Dawn of a New Politics

In a special pre-Inaugural video, Simon reflects on the confluence of forces that led to the election of Barack Obama and the dawning of a new political era:

For more of NDN's thinking on these historic changes now taking place before our eyes, please see:

The Long Road Back - 11/18/08

Obama to Reinvent the Presidency - 11/7/08

More Evidence of a Sustained Progressive Revival - 8/15/08

Hispanics Rising, 2 - 5/30/08

$55 million and the emergence of "a virtuous cycle of participation" - 3/6/08

On Obama, Race, and the End of the Southern Strategy - 1/4/08

"The 50-Year Strategy" - Mother Jones, 10/30/07

"The Democratic Opportunity" - Politico, 4/11/07

The End of the Conservative Ascendancy - 11/12/06

A Day of Reckoning for the Conservative Movement - 11/7/06

Foreward to Crashing the Gate - 3/7/06

Thoughts on the Internet, Politics and Participation - 12/03

Thursday New Tools Feature: Citizen's Briefing Book

This week, President-elect Obama's transition team introduced Change.gov's newest feature, the Citizen's Briefing Book. Somewhat similar to Open for Questions, the Citizen's Briefing Book allows users to submit policy proposals and vote on other submissions. From the introductory email:

We wanted to tell you about a new feature on Change.gov which lets you bring your ideas directly to the President.

It's called the Citizen's Briefing Book, and it's an online forum where you can share your ideas, and rate or offer comments on the ideas of others.

The best-rated ones will rise to the top, and after the Inauguration, we'll print them out and gather them into a binder like the ones the President receives every day from experts and advisors. If you participate, your idea could be included in the Citizen's Briefing Book to be delivered to President Obama.

Back in October, I wrote:

With the launch of new sites like BigDialogue and WhiteHouse2.org, the tools are there waiting to be picked up. These sites aim to give people a more direct voice in governance...These are some of the most exciting new tools that I’ve seen in a long time; the question is, will our next president embrace them, or ignore them?

That question seems to have been answered, and the team has even addressed the main complaint I had about Open for Questions by improving the navigational scheme for this tool. All in all, Obama's team seems to be adapting with impressive speed - this no longer seems like a gimmicky experimental feature, but something of real and lasting value.  

However, the successful implementation of this tool raises its own interesting set of questions about open-sourcing a representative democracy:

In the first round of Open for Questions, one of the top questions was "Will you consider legalizing marijuana so that the government can regulate it, tax it, put age limits on it, and create millions of new jobs and create a billion dollar industry right here in the U.S.?" At the time, the Obama team essentially dismissed the question, issuing a one-line response saying that Obama was not in favor of legalizing marijuana. However, as of right now, the top submission in the Citizen's Briefing Book is "End Marijuana Prohibition," and there are three other posts about ending the drug war in the top 20, as well as other proposals like "Revoke the George W. Bush Tax Cuts for the Top 1%" and "Get the Insurance Companies out the Health Care."

There has been much written about the massive moral and economic failure of the "war" on drugs, and I personally believe it is a very important and serious issue that deserves more attention. However, for many political and social reasons, it's something no politician will ordinarily touch with a fifty-foot pole (despite very broad acadademic and popular support for reform), and given Obama's likely pick of the wildly un-progressive Republican Jim Ramstad for Drug Czar, the prospects for these proposals seem especially grim.

In this light, it will be very interesting to see how an Obama administration handles this kind of situation - are they merely attempting to create the appearance and feel of accessibility and openness, or do they really believe deeply in the intrinsic value of this enterprise? How far will they be willing to push this experiment? How far should they? These are questions that undoubtedly will come increasingly to the fore as we enter headlong into a new era of American politics.  

Thursday New Tools Feature: Phoning It In

As I mentioned in a New Tools update this Monday, President-elect Barack Obama's decision to include a participatory text-messaging component to the Neighborhood Inaugural Ball shows that, better than most politicians today, he understands the evolving relationship between Americans and their mobile devices.

However, text messaging is only a part of the developing mobile landscape. A few new studies this week emphasize the growing importance of mobile devices in Americans' media consumption habits. One from the Cisco Visual Networking Index finds that a higher percentage of consumers in the United States watch video on their mobile phones than in any other country -- a whopping 23%.

Another report, this one from Ad Mob, documents a dramatic increase in the use of mobile phones to access WiFi networks.

Eight percent of total ad requests within Ad Mob's U.S. network came from WiFi networks, up from three percent in August.

Typically, users can access WiFi in the home, office or hotspots where personal computers are presumably present and available. Yet the results suggest that users are opting for their cell phones and are potentially more engaged with their handset than the PC.

The emergence of WiFi-capable phones, combined with ever-increasing WiFi penetration, means that more and more mobile users are able to access high-quality media on their devices. It also means that mobile phones are increasingly becoming the go-to devices for mobile internet access; for example, when I went abroad over the holidays, I brought my iPhone with me but left the laptop at home, a phenomenon which is becoming increasingly common.   

Finally, just for fun (and to see just how far mobile technology has come in a few short years), check out LG's new Watch Phone, unveiled at CES 2009 this week:


A touch-screen phone with 3G and Bluetooth capables, the watch also takes pictures and records video. I'm not sure I would rock one at this point, but only because I don't have enough yellow outerwear to go with it.

For more on why mobile phones and web video matter in politics today, and how to use mobile technology and video to message more effectively, check out our New Politics Institute papers, Go Mobile Now and Reimagine Video.

New Tools Update: A Ball for All

According to a release today from the Presidential Inaugural Committee,

In keeping with his commitment to make this inaugural celebration open and accessible to all Americans, President-elect Barack Obama will host the first-ever "Neighborhood Inaugural Ball" during this year's inaugural celebration. The ball will be the premier event of inauguration evening on January 20th and will take place at the Washington Convention Center.

With tickets available free or at an affordable price, it is the first official inaugural ball of its kind to be held during a presidential inauguration. A portion of tickets for this event will be set aside for District of Columbia residents. The ball will also feature a robust interactive component, including webcasting and text messaging, to link neighborhoods across the country with the new President and this premier event. The PIC will release more details soon about using technology to allow Americans who are attending neighborhood balls across the country to participate actively in this celebration.

This is a great move on President-elect Obama's part. Symbolically, it reinforces his message of creating a more open, "bottom-up" Washington; inaugural balls are usually highly exclusive and/or prohibitively expensive, and making this experience available to everyone is a great gesture. At the same time, it is also a great way to maintain and expand his technological presence and keep the momentum he built up during the campaign. Like the text-message VP announcement, this will surely help Obama down the road as he tries to build broad-based public support for his initiatives.  

The Census Confirms: The U.S. Increasingly More Southern and Western

On Monday, the U.S. Census Bureau released its estimates of state-by-state population, which show a decades-long pattern continuing apace: growth in the country's Southern and Western states continues to out-pace that in the states of the Northeast and Midwest.  Sound familiar? Yes, that's because you heard it here first.  Since NDN began its analysis of the Hispanic electorate and the demographic trends nationwide, we concluded that our nation is becoming:

 

 

 

 

 

Some have criticized President-elect Obama for having a Western-heavy cabinet and administration, and while this might not have been intentional, it does reflect the demographic trends of the nation.  Finally, the Census data is important because it provides our first clues as to re-districting based on the 2010 Census - for example, Texas is expected to gain three House seats, Nevada will most likely gain at least one. Stay tuned as NDN continues its demographic analysis during 2009, in preparation for re-districting analysis. 

Thursday New Tools Feature: The Multi Media

According to a new Deloitte survey on the state of the media, we are now living in a diverse media ecosystem where no one type of media is dominant. Unsurprisingly,

The millennial generation — ages 14 to 25 — is leading this charge now as it accesses content on all sorts of new devices and distribution platforms using a variety of pricing schemes and advertising models. The millennials consume the most media and are more likely to get entertainment from multiple media sources and applications. That’s in contrast to a few decades ago, when media was more expensive and so was consumed most often by older generations with more disposable income...

Millennials are less likely to watch TV or use conventional news sources, and "their preferred way of absorbing content is watching video on the web and handheld devices or listening to music on mobile phones and MP3 music players." The survey also found that "the iPhone has had a big impact on how users communicate, get their news, and entertain themselves. Many young people are using it as a replacement for a laptop." Within the next few years, many more affordable phones will have functionality comparable with the high-end iPhone. 

Along with the Deloitte survey, another just-released study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention finds that 18% of households are now cell-phone only, with migration being accelerated by the recession. 

These two studies reinforce NDN's message that understanding and adapting to this new media environment is essential for survival in this political day and age. President-elect Obama's media team understood this, and its "any and all" approach to media, advertising and outreach was in tune with Americans' media consumption. To learn more about how to use these tools effectively, check out our New Politics Institute New Tools campaign, featuring great papers like Go Mobile Now, Buy Cable, Advertise Online, Leverage Social Networks, and Reimagine Video.

The Reinvention Of Television, Continued

From today's NY Times, some rather remarkable words about the profound change coming to television, what had been the dominant media of politics for the last 50 years:

With one sweeping shift this week, the ailing NBC network reordered the playing field of prime-time television. The introduction of a five-night-a-week program starring Mr. Leno, beginning next fall, was a concession that TV norms cannot continue, at least not at fourth-place NBC.

The programming and viewing habits of the last 50 years - exemplified by the checkerboard of competing programs on the broadcast networks - are being replaced by an Internet-influenced time-shifting model of scheduling. As a result, the very definition of prime time may be changing.

"We do have to continue to rethink what a broadcast network is," Jeffrey Zucker, the chief executive of NBC Universal, a unit of General Electric, said at an industry conference Monday, hours before the news of Mr. Leno's new assignment emerged. He warned that if changes were not undertaken, "the broadcast networks will end up like the newspaper business or, worse, like the car companies." Maybe Mr. Zucker has seen the future; after all, his network has lost 50 percent of its 10 p.m. audience in the last three years.

For the past several years we've written and discussed how the old model of a campaign - large donors, lots of TV - was being replaced by a new bottom up always on model.  For anyone in the advocacy business these trends are ones that need to be closely followed, as a whole new era of political communications is dawning.

For more on this visit our affiliate, the New Politics Institute, or check out the video and transcripts from our April event, "The End of Broadcast."

Thursday New Tools Feature: "Open for Questions" Now Open for Business

Back in October, I discussed the possibility of President-elect Obama embracing or recreating tools like WhiteHouse2.org as a way to make government more interactive and participatory. This week, Obama's transition site, Change.gov, did just that by introducing its newest feature, a section called "Open for Questions." Built using the Google Moderator platform, Open for Questions allows users to sign in, submit their own questions, and vote on other people's questions. The top-rated ones will be answered by the transition team.

A few kinks remain to be worked out. After being up for only a couple of days, there are already more than 600,000 votes on more than 7,000 questions. However, the front page displays only the top-rated questions, except for one randomly-selected question at the top. This means that navigation of the questions is difficult, and it's easy for new questions to get quickly buried.  

Even so, this is a very promising system, and a lot of the top-rated entries are really excellent -- big, important questions that don't often get addressed on the campaign trail or in televised debates. Of course, the first thing on everyone's mind is the economy, and the first-rated question is

"What will you do to establish transparency and safeguards against waste with the rest of the Wall Street bailout money?"

But there are a lot of other interesting questions, too. A few examples from the top 20 questions that you might not have heard from George Stephanopoulos:

"What will you do to end the use of mercenary forces (ie Blackwater) by our military?"

"Will you consider legalizing marijuana so that the government can regulate it, tax it, put age limits on it, and create millions of new jobs and create a billion dollar industry right here in the U.S.?"

"Why are we rebuilding our national highway system instead of building high-speed passenger rail and revitalizing our cities and towns through the development of mass transit? Is this not key to our long-term economic and environmental well being?"

"Our agricultural policy, formed by Pres. Nixon, has resulted in our being both overfed and undernourished. Will you appoint a Secretary of Agriculture who understands that we have been operating using unsustainable/unhealthy farming practices?"

If they can get the navigation issues worked out, I think this feature has the potential to really shake up the debate and breathe some new life into the American political process. Of course, part of being a leader is prioritizing and making decisions, but I really hope that the Obama Administration works hard not just to ask for our input, but to thoughtfully answer the important questions that the American people are asking. 

Thursday New Tools Feature: Change.gov *(Remix!)*

Today,  the Washington Post ran an excellent piece by Ceci Connolly about how President-elect Obama's incoming administration has "begun to draw on the high-tech organizational tools that helped get him elected to lay the groundwork for an attempt to restructure the U.S. health-care system." From the article: 

The Obama team, which recruited about 13 million online supporters during the presidential campaign and announced its vice presidential selection via text message, is now moving to apply those tools to the earliest stages of governing.

"This is the beginning of the reinvention of what the presidency in the 21st century could be," said Simon Rosenberg, president of the center-left think tank NDN. "This will reinvent the relationship of the president to the American people in a way we probably haven't seen since FDR's use of radio in the 1930s."

This is something that NDN has been talking about for some time: indeed, healthcare was the specific example used at our October 28, 2008 forum with Simon and Joe Trippi (for the C-SPAN footage, click here). It is good to see that the Obama administration is working to live up to its promise of a more open, bottom-up government. As the Washington Post article reports,

The Obama team chose to begin its high-tech grass-roots experiment on the issue of health care because "every American is feeling the pressure of high health costs and lack of quality care, and we feel it's important to engage them in the process of reform," said spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter.

It started with a simple 63-second video posted on Change.gov, in which health advisers Dora Hughes and Lauren Aronson posed the question "What worries you most about the health-care system in our country?"

That triggered 3,700 responses, from personal tales of medical hardship to complaints about "socialized medicine." The cyber-conversation was interactive, allowing individuals to reply to one another and rate responses with a thumbs up or down. The top-scoring comment, a pitch for a "paradigm shift" toward prevention, had 82 thumbs up.

This is not the only good sign for open-source government coming from the Obama camp. This week, the transition site Change.gov eliminated its old, traditional copyright policy and implemented "an Attribution 3.0 Unported License which allows anyone to use and even 'remix' whatever's found on the site, just as long as they tip their hat to the transition project as the original source of the material," according to TechPresident.

This approach of letting anyone use the content in creative ways has already paid dividends; separate versions of Change.gov have been created for the iPhone and for other mobile devices, as well as an embeddable Change.gov widget (below).

For more on how Obama will reinvent the Presidency as we know it, please see:

Monday Buzz: "The Wired Whitehouse," Millennials' and Hispanics' Growing Electoral Clout, and More

In tandem with our enlightening event last week on the New Politics of the Obama Age, NDN also appeared in several stories over the past several days talking about how Obama is using technology to reinvent the presidency, including a front-page story on MSNBC, as well as stories in the Santa Cruz Sentinel, Future Majority, News24, and Fox. The MSNBC article, which also embedded Simon's recent video blog on how Obama will Reinvent the Presidency and quoted our Obama Age forum panelist Scott Goodstein, began like this:

After a historic presidential election, the tech-savvy campaigners who helped put Barack Obama in the White House say the nation is in for an equally historic four years of tech-savvy governance.

The way the Obama campaign used blogs, texting, social networking and other Web 2.0 tools to win this month's election is just "the tip of the iceberg," said Simon Rosenberg, president and founder of the political advocacy group NDN.

Rob was quoted on subjects ranging from the proposed auto industry bailout to the impending economic stimulus in the Telegraph, CNN Money, The Age, the Daily Mail, and the Independent. From the Independent article:

Robert Shapiro, an economic adviser to Barack Obama's campaign and former US under-secretary of commerce for economic affairs, was particularly helpful to the Prime Minister. When Nick Robinson, the BBC's political editor, asked him what was the risk of a big stimulus package, he said there was "no risk, there is a cost – but there is a very large risk if we choose not to do it".

Our work  on building a durable 21st century majority coalition also made its way into the media narrative this week, with New York Magazine wondering, "Can Obama Hang On to His Youth Coalition?" and Crooks and Liars asking, "The Latino Vote: Can Democrats Lock It Up for a Generation?" Morley and Mike's work on Millennials also got play from DailyKos and the Jackson Free Press; NDN's work on immigration and Hispanic issues was featured in the Guardian, the Chicago Tribune, the Denver Post, the Reporter, Hispanic Trending, the Latino Journal, and Immigration Daily.

From the New York Magazine article:

this particular generation of young people are aligned with Obama on social issues. As a group, the "Millennial Generation" — those who will make up the under-30 crowd in the next several elections — are reliably more liberal on issues like gay marriage and stem-cell research than any other generation — and that's not likely to change, said Michael D. Hais and Morley Winograd, authors of Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube and the Future of American Politics. They predict that young people will continue to vote Democratic, catalyzing a "political realignment" in this country that will play out in the next thirty years.

And from the Denver Post article, "Texas as a Swing State?":

Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg, a veteran of the Clinton administration, said that Republicans have alienated Latinos largely because of the immigration issue. Rosenberg is the founder and president of NDN, a Democratic think tank that studies immigration and other issues.

He said that Republican rhetoric surrounding recent immigration bills in Congress offended all Hispanics. A major measure that would have given illegal immigrants a path to citizenship failed last year after a revolt from conservatives, who denounced it as an amnesty for lawbreakers.

"If they do that again, it’s going to be catastrophic for the Republican Party," he said.

Rosenberg said that Texas could become a swing state as early as 2012 depending on the level of Latino participation and whether the Democratic Party will continue to make investments in the community.

Finally, Simon's recent essay, The Long Road Back, was featured on DailyKos in Kos's Midday Open Thread, and our report on computer training for American workers was featured in Progressive States.

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