Amid all the excitement around Iowa and the upcoming New Hampshire Primaries, we want to step back, take a breath, and look at what happens when all the excitement is over and Election Day is yesterday’s headline.

In 2007, we saw (to some degree) that politicians are, in fact, interested in obscure-sounding things like “interactivity” and “online communications channels” and “technology-infused conversation” – especially when reaching people online increases fundraising dollars and votes (and who can blame them, really?).

Then what? Do we expect our elected officials to chuck their techno-powered promises of creating conversations and communicating at the podium after their acceptance speeches? What responsibilities do elected officials have to continue using technology in a democratic way? What about the issue of access?

I am inclined to think that the role of digital leadership should receive increased emphasis over the course of the next few years. How does one lead, govern, and create policy in an Internet era?

Steve Clift has a few things to say about what technology-powered politics should look like after the confetti drops:

Information access, considered the safe starting point for government accountability online now mostly presents the public a daunting needle in a huge haystack. This system is so complicated that the valuable and substantive information that government produces is often ignored in the increasingly interactive public lives of active citizens. . The lack of real and effective online access to governance will substantially increase cynicism about and distrust in government among a public that demands a more participatory representative democracy.

This quote is taken from Clift’s essay, Join the Evolution – Ten Practical Online Steps for Government Support of Democracy. Clift is coming to DC to lead a discussion we are hosting on January 9^th called Great Expectations: After the vote – citizens online, e-democracy in governance, and White House 2.0. Register by Wiki at http://pages.e-democracy.org/Great_Expectations.

We’ll continue the conversation during a plenary discussion at our 2008 Politics Online Conference, chaired by Ari Schwartz (Center for Democracy and Technology) and featuring Ellen Miller (Sunlight Foundation), Tom Steinberg (mySociety.org) and former congressman Rick White (Wood Bay Group). Details at http://polc.ipdi.org.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 4th, 2008 at 12:35 pm and is filed under 2008 Election, Broadband, Congress, Events, IPDI, Open Government, Politics Online Conference, Social Web, Virtual Town Halls, Web 2.0, e-Gov. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.