Can state governments become incubators for innovation?

That’s the question Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley posed at the Center for American Progress this week.

The occasion: the release of a new report, Governing by the Numbers: The Promise of Data-Driven Policymaking in the Information Age by Daniel Esty and Reece Rushing.

The big idea is that local and state governments can build an information infrastructure that allows them to collect, analyze, and disseminate data – data that can be used to help government set quantitative, outcome-focused goals, measure performance, and compare results. Advances in information technology make all of this cheap and accessible.

Esty and Rushing pull together examples of how data-driven decision has work in places like Charlotte, North Carolina and Washington State, and in the corporate world. You can access a PDF of the publication here.

We spoke Rushing about implementation a data-driven decision making program and pulled it into a podcast.

Rushing lays out a three-point implementation plan:

1. Build information infrastructure to harness new technology.
2. Focus on results and compare among peers.
3. Develop systems to ensure data drives decision.

Want more details? Listen to the podcast. And check out the publication.

Next week, we’re heading to Wham! What Vonage’s $58 Million Surprise Means to YOU, presented by our friends at the Northern Virginia Technology Council. The event will be held on Friday, May 4th from 7:30 a.m. to 9:30 a.m. at Oracle (1910 Oracle Way, Reston, VA).

It’s a panel discussion about a recent U.S. District Court verdict that Vonage infringed upon Verizon patents with its Voice over Internet Protocol business and must pay $58 million in damages.

Speakers include Jim Kohlenberger (Executive Director, VON Coalition), Barry Goldsmith (Communications Patent Lawyer, Womble Carlyle Sandridge & Rice PLLC), Marko Rubin (Managing Director, ExoVentures LLC), and Michael Wu (Rosetta Stone).

Cost is $35 for NVTC members and $70 for non-members.

Register at http://www.nvtc.org/events/geteventinfo.php?event=NEWMEDIA4.

Next week is a busy week for IPDI! We’re hosting two events. The first, Ready-Made Constituent Relationships: A Look at How Technology Empowers and Enables Effective Constituent Relationship Management, will be held on Monday, April 30, 2007 from 10:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. at the U.S. Capitol Building Basement, Room HC-8

Ready-Made Constituent Relationships will look at how technology is changing constituent communications on the Hill and in elected office – and what the offices of elected officials can do to keep up.

Speakers include Kathy Goldschmidt (Congressional Management Foundation), Greg Roney (Housecall IT), and Ken Ward (Adfero Group).

Register for Ready-Made Constituent Relationships at http://www.ipdi.org/CRMevent/register.htm

Before you come, read IPDI’s latest publication, Constituent Relationship Management: The New Little Black Book of Politics.

On Tuesday, May 1, 2007, IPDI and The International Republican Institute are hosting a conference on how the concept of influentials operates in developing democracies and what international assistance can do to help strengthen the skills of pro-democratic voices around the world.

IPDI looked at the concept of influentials, which was developed by Roper/NOP World based on decades of consumer research, in a 2004 publication titled Political Influentials Online in the 2004 Campaign.

Speaker include F. Christopher Arterton (Dean of GW’s Graduate School of Political Management), Lorne W. Craner (President, IRI), Gretchen Birkle (Director, Women’s Democracy Network, IRI), Julija Belej (Deputy Director for Iraq, Middle East and North Africa Program, IRI), Henry Farrell (Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Affairs, GW’s Elliott School of International Affairs), Thomas E. Garrett (Regional Program Director, Middle East and North Africa, IRI), Dara Francis (Program Officer, Africa Program, IRI), Gina M. S. Lambright (Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Affairs, GW’s Elliott School of International Affairs), Carol C. Darr (Director, IPDI), David Williams (President, David Williams and Associates), Georges A. Fauriol (Senior Vice President, IRI).

Check out the agenda here. RSVP is required for this event. RSVP to cbuerger@iri.org.

Before you come, read the working paper, Strengthening Democracy Worldwide: Analyzing the role of influentials.

and the Republicans…

Rudy Giuliani

Positive Videos – 13

Views – 309.057

Text Responses – 1486

Video Responses - 1

Number of Times “Favorited” – 1368

Negative Videos – 11

Views – 438,811

Text Responses – 1,774

Video Responses - 3

Number of Times “Favorited” – 558

John McCain

Positive Videos – 10

Views – 2,579,341

Text Responses – 262

Video Responses - 1

Number of Times “Favorited” – 274

Negative Videos – 10

Views – 2,402,766

Text Responses – 832

Video Responses – 6

Number of Times “Favorited” – 612

Mitt Romney

Positive Videos – 12

Views – 579,276

Text Responses – 2,725

Video Responses – 71

Number of Times “Favorited” – 381

Negative Videos – 18

Views – 633,271

Text Responses – 6,668

Video Responses – 12

Number of Times “Favorited” – 1,145

We just posted some of the top notes of our quick-and-dirty look at the top 40 YouTube videos for some of the presidential candidates.

We want to know what you think. Some of our numbers are below.

Hillary Clinton

Positive Videos – 13

Views – 1,237,687

Text Responses – 4,650

Video Responses – 0

Number of Times “Favorited” – 633

Negative Videos – 17

Views – 6,084,326

Text Responses – 16,603

Video Responses – 11

Number of Times “Favorited” – 7,634

John Edwards

Positive Videos – 9

Views – 321,350

Text Responses – 884

Video Responses – 10

Number of Times “Favorited” – 355

Negative Videos – 5

Views – 475,350

Text Responses – 1,822

Video Responses – 4

Number of Times “Favorited” – 676

Barack Obama

Positive Videos – 12

Views – 1,277,361

Text Responses – 6,627

Video Responses – 17

Number of Times “Favorited” – 6,603

Negative Videos – 2

Views – 571,745

Text Responses – 1,348

Video Responses – 0

Number of Times “Favorited” - 265

Chuck Todd inspired us.

About a week ago, we packed our video camera and tripod and headed to NBC’s Washington, DC headquarters to talk to Todd, former editor of The Hotline and current political director at NBC.

One of our (many) take-aways concerned one of our favorite topics: YouTube. (You can catch the full interview on our blog soon.)

We asked Todd about the trends he was seeing the way the presidential candidates were using YouTube. He replied that they seem to be using it more for opposition research that for positive messaging.

We decided to put this idea to the test. We started by looking at the 40 most viewed YouTube videos for each of the top six presidential contenders. We wanted to find the number of positive and negative videos for each candidate. But we also wanted to look at something else: how people engaged with those videos.

Was Chuck Todd right? Here are our top notes:

• More positive videos made their way into the top 40 than negative videos about each of the candidates – except for Clinton and Romney. However, the negative videos were viewed a lot more (10,606,269 views compared to 6,304,072 views of positive videos), and people posted a lot more responses to the negative videos (29,047 text responses, compared to 16,634 text responses to positive videos).
• Clinton and Giuliani tied for most positive videos (13 videos were positive out of the top 40 most viewed).
• Romney had the most negative videos (18), but Clinton’s negative videos were viewed the most number of times (6,084,326).
• Videos that contained a negative message about Clinton generated more action on the YouTube site: viewers left 16,603 text responses, 11 video responses and 11 video responses. Viewers “favorited” those negative videos about Clinton 7,634 times.
• Romney’s videos (positive and negative) generated a lot of interaction. Viewers left 6,668 text responses and 12 video responses to negative videos about Romney. Viewers “favorited” those negative Romney videos 1,145 times. Add to this 2,725 text responses to positive videos, 71 video responses, and 381 “favorites.”
• Obama appears to have the tightest YouTube presence. With the exception of the Vote Different/1984 video, most of the videos we found in the top 40 had a positive message about Obama, and only two had a distinctly negative message about him.
• Videos with positive content about Obama generated a lot of interaction. Viewers left 6,637 text responses and 17 video responses to positive Obama content. Viewers favorited the positive Obama videos 6,603 times.
• McCain had the highest number of views (2,579,341) for positive videos, but the total views for negative videos is not far behind (2,402,766). McCain generated the lowest amount of participated on the YouTube site.
• A search for John Edwards generated the highest amount of videos with off-topic content. Almost half of the top 40 YouTube videos had nothing to do with John Edwards the candidate.
• Some of the off-topic videos (videos in the top 40 that had nothing to do with the candidate we searched for) were interesting. Ron Paul videos popped up when we searched for John McCain. Videos about Barack Obama were in the top 40 for Mitt Romney and John Edwards.

More to come . . .

In case you didn’t already know, college kids live on Facebook. Yesterday’s shootings at Virginia Tech was another indication of just how critical it is.

ABC News’ featured a report yesterday about how students and family were using Facebook to connect and figure out how they were doing. Students were updating their Facebook profiles and statuses to tell their friends that they were okay.

The news networks have also been using Facebook, in some cases capitalizing on the memorials that were created to get more stories.
Adam Conner shares his Facebook experience over at Personal Democracy Forum in which he checked up on his friends and shared in the impromptu Facebook memorial that was created within hours of the massacre. Hours after the gunman’s identity was revealed today, at least 40 Facebook groups emerged.

As we learn more about the victims, their profiles will become online memorials. But the even more remarkable aspect of Facebook is how every every college student turned to the site:

But beyond the personal connection that many of us have in a tragedy like this, there was something bigger showcased today in places like Facebook. How we all feel connected to the tragedy, even if we can’t tell a Hokie from a Hoagie. Maybe because almost everyone on Facebook hails from school and could almost imagine a similar tragedy befalling their institution. And how, when faced with the mixture of sadness and helplessness, we seek avenues to combat that helplessness and express our solidarity and support. .

The New York Times looks at why consumer are disgruntled with a mobile fundraising program called Text2Give, which was first used to raise money for after Hurricane Katrina:

What rankles the consumer group is that each donation is capped at $5 and will incur standard text-messaging fees, which on AT&T are 15 cents. “If you want to contribute $20, you have to send four text messages and you’ll be billed for four text messages,” Mr. Court said. “These contributions are structured so that consumers who want to give more pay a higher price for doing so.”

In other words, I can’t donate more than $5 per text message, and I am charged 15 cents every time I make a donation.

Travesty? Our friends at MoPocket think not. It took a lot of effort from the Wireless Foundation to get the program of the ground:

It seems to me the Wireless Foundation has done an incredibly good deed in rounding up carrier agreement, no small task, to ensure that interested donors, wherever they are, whatever they are doing at the time, can give money to the Red Cross the very moment they learn of an event that could use their help.

Why is this important? Because the carriers are starting to work together to make mobile fundraising a little more feasible.

Is this system perfect? Not yet.

Will is take time for mobile fundraising to become a feasible tool for nonprofit organization and political advocacy groups? Yes. Lots of time.

But the industry seems to be taking itsy-bitsy baby steps.

Do you have ideas about how mobile fundraising can evolve as a political tool? We’d love to hear them. Email us at ipdi@ipdi.org.

We’ve been flirting with the idea of widgets for awhile. We touched upon them briefly in Person-to-Person-to-Person (page 38, lower left-hand corner!). We used them at our Politics Online Conference in March. Some of us even use them on our personal Facebook and MySpace pages.

We just haven’t been ready to jump into a full-fledged relationship with widgets — until we read this article by Kim Hart about widgets in the Washington Post yesterday:

And here:

Sounds like a sticky concept. That’s why we turned to Eric D. Alterman, founder of KickApps, to figure out who’s using them and why. Eric authored a chapter on the important of context in social media for Person-to-Person-to-Person. It turns out that widgets are just good for displaying photos on my MySpace profile.

“It’s not about toys,” said Alterman. “Campaigns can use social media widgets and platforms to create a highly social experience that lives both on their websites and in their online community.”

Think about one of our favorite things to track this campaign season: video. Alterman says that campaigns can use a widget platform to deploy media on their sites — web videos, speeches, podcasts, etc. Supporters can them click on “Grab this Widget” and carry their favorite pieces of media with them to their blogs, profiles, and websites. When friends, readers, and visitors visit those sites, then can watch a media clip or click on the widget and travel to the campaign site for more information.

The campaigns can control what is displayed on the widget. In other words, as you update your site’s media content, you can update the media content displayed on each of the widgets your supporters have placed all over the web.

Alterman put it this way:

This of it as a television channel updated constantly on TV sets all over the web. Or think of it as a series of billboards placed all over the Internet. With widgets, my website doesn’t end on my website. My website extends all over the Internet to wherever my widgets have been placed. My windows are everywhere.

Like political wormholes.