So maybe I was wrong. Maybe not all elected officials are jokingly dismissive of the impact technology can have on their constituents. Today, hanging out with the FastCompany.tv crew as Robert Scoble, his son Patrick, his producer Rocky, and Warren Communications’ Andrew Feinberg, I heard three very different elected officials speak with similar enthusiasm for and knowledge of technology: Senator Tom Coburn, Congressman Tim Ryan, and Congressman John Culberson.

My note-taking capabilities were somewhat hindered during two of those interviews (thank goodness the video will be up and/or is up soon), but I did have my Moleskine notebook and mechanical pencil handy for Senator Coburn.

Three-quarters of what Senator Coburn’s office hears from his constituents in Oklahoma comes from email and blogs. “Technology,” said Senator Coburn, “sets us free and brings transparency to politics.”

For example, Americans want to know about government waste because it has a direct impact on them. Only 11% of Americans have confidence in Congress, said Senator Coburn. Putting information about spending online will bring pressure on elected officials more inclined to play above the table.

Do what you are doing [as voters online] to make us better and more transparent.

In elected office, Senator Coburn said at the beginning of the interview, “motivations are pure, but the management style is out of the 1950s.”

Scoble asked Senator Coburn about the issue of brain drain in science and technology. Senator Coburn discussed a four-tiered process to encourage innovation, education, and research and development:

1. Create a better corporate tax system (Senator Coburn’s words were “create a corporate tax system that’s not the second highest in the world).
2. Create a research and development tax credit.
3. Make higher education rewarding (my note: especially in science, technology, and engineering).
4. Don’t harm the technology system we have now.

Elected officials “should get out of the way, so companies can reinvest in R&D,” said Senator Coburn.

Some of those same points – especially the emphasis on technology as the medium of transparency echoed throughout the interviews today.

Thoughts on this?

About a week and a half ago, IPDI hosted a book discussion with Brian Reich, one of the co-authors (Along with Dan Solomon) of the book Media Rules! Mastering Today’s Technology to Connect with and Keep You Audience.

This is maybe the third or fourth time I’ve heard Reich talk about Media Rules in about as many months, and Reich’s analysis has become, for me, a new organizational leadership guide — for the digital age. Reich himself calls the book “organizational management in the new media age,” and he was compelled to write it out of frustration from working with so many organizations that lack a core understanding of how to use the Internet. “All they have,” Reich said, “is tactics.”

Here are some of the lessons I’ve learned from my time reading and listening to Brian Reich:

1. Before you begin to look at incorporating Internet tactics into your organization, focus on the meat — the information, experiences, and stuff that your organization produces. No one has room for crappy “stuff” (or information or experiences). Start with creating good “stuff.”
2. Success is measurable and unique to each space. We’re sometimes so obsessed with new media that many of us have moved away from focusing on our own core principles. All the activity in the world does not equal success. Instead, focus your organizations goals, strategies, tactics, and resources on creating measurable change.
3. Very few new media things actual create measurable change. However, in the digital era, collaboration among groups and organizations with common interests, not competing interests, is the best way to achieve meaningful, measurable change.
4. Digital leadership is defined by a two related abilities. The first is the ability to listen and hear. “We’re collecting information online, but we’re not synthesizing it,” says Reich. Once we learn how to listen, we can use all the online tools that encourage interaction and interactivity in useful ways. This includes collaborating on problems and sharing information. The second ability is the ability to teach people how to have an impact on society or in your issue area.
5. In order to create change, an organization needs to accomplish a few tasks. First, raise awareness. Second, connect, engage, and enable people on the substance of their issue and what their role can be. Third, mobilize them.

According to Reich, “old school organizations are still trying to convince people to do what the old school organizations want them to do.” Unfortunately, those old school management tactics aren’t working anymore. Media Rules! is Reich’s call to change for organizational managers. Sadly, too many organizations lose their commitment to solving issues and instead become organizations that are focused simply on surviving as organizations. They serve the cause instead of solving it.

There’s something sad and ineffective in that, but Reich’s observations is entirely true, and his message should resonate with any leader at any level trying to help guide his or her organization into the digital era.

Interestingly, the nefarious looking folks with flip cameras at the back of your next campaign event or town hall meeting might not be all that . . . nefarious.

Case in point: Chris Shank is a Maryland State Delegate from Washington County (he’s also an alum of our Graduate School of Political Management and a professor in program). When the Herald-Mail editorial page slammed Delegate Shank on May 12, supporters didn’t just write in to the editor supporting Shank – one of them also posted video.

Rex Harrill, a resident of Haggerstown, took his digicam to a speaking appearance held by Delegate Shank the next day, uploaded six minutes of video onto YouTube, and included a link in his letter. In the video, Delegate Shank discusses his role as a public servant. The video isn’t perfect, but it feels patriotic and authentic in ways that a typical political message can no longer convey.

I asked Delegate Shank about the impact this one little video made on his role as a state legislator:

I was fascinated by the integration of old-media and new-media. For years, we’ve been relying on letters to the editor to provide campaign messaging in down-ballot races. Here was something new, however, that provided a new media tool to provide un-filtered, no cost, messaging directly to my constituents. It also bypassed the negative messaging that the newspaper was hitting me with. The message from my constituent that was so refreshing was –”see for yourself.”

I also asked him about the rather – ahem – small viewership. When I tuned in this week, the video only had 50 views. Can you really change the district with 50 years?

The fact that only 51 people viewed it really wasn’t that big of a deal, I have a pretty small district. The whole episode has provided me with the desire to utilize the technology far more to connect with my constituents. I’ve always run as a grassroots guy and I see how this could really help facilitate that connection pretty easily.

Couple this response with my interview with Ric Cantrell from Utah a few weeks ago, and I can see that we are beginning to build a portfolio on how online communications is taking off on a state level.

Last week when Charles Ellison (an IPDI Fellow this year) blogged

In examining the intersection of technology, public policy and politics, I’ve thought, or perhaps, worried a bit about how that links into our national imagination and sense of purpose.  Does the proliferation of information technology actually contribute in fulfilling and long term ways to the common good?

He managed to strike at an issue I’ve been grappling with, mostly in private conversations, for the last few months.

For the past six years (and mostly during the early part of the past six years), the Internet-politics world seemed to embrace a common theme: the present, with the rise of citizen journalism and individual access to information on the Internet, is much like the rise of the printing press during the 15^th Century, during an era in which religion wove deeply into the daily lives, government, war-making, and commerce. Just as the printing press gave people access for the first time to the religious writings that were previously interpreted for them by the church, so the people of the 21^st century can access – and participate in – the flow of information about politics, current events, international relations, sports, and thousands of other issues. As many people in Europe turned away from the intermediary between humanity and the divine that was the Catholic Church, so people in the 21^st century will turn away from the intermediaries of mainstream journalism, the political establishment, and even the travel industry.

There was so much promise in this metaphor. The printing press started something. The era following its creation and the rise of what we now call Enlightenment thought carried with it so much activity, energy, invention, curiosity – all directed toward finding, building collecting, and, to some degree, improving society. The era we now call the Enlightenment wasn’t perfect. I’m certainly not trying to idealize it (although I am a tremendous fan of the System of the World), nor defend some of its negative consequences.

At the same time, I envy it.

I envy all the activity and energy, the invention, the focus on human potential to create a better government, city, way of viewing the world. I feel somewhat suffocated by the lack of creation in the name of the public good.

What does all the “stuff” we embrace – social media, twitter, widgets, online fundraising – actually do for society?

People build online communities and sites and sell them to the highest bidder. Beyond the sheer giddiness that must inevitably follow after becoming an insta-billionaire, what legacy does any of the things leave on society?

Perhaps the legacy is one of “access?” Greater access for the greater good? If this is the case, then we are certainly failing. Broadband penetration in some of the poorest, most rural parts of the country remains low. If access is our goal, then we are doing a terrible job of it.

Or is the legacy one of success for the few, but not the many? A few weeks ago, I saw a (somewhat) old program on PBS called Buffett & Gates Go Back to School. Warren Buffett and Bill Gates hold an open question-and-answer session for students at the University of Nebraska. One of the students asks Buffett what public good comes from companies like theirs. Buffet turns to Gates, then turns back to the student, and answers that the public good from their companies and the things they create mostly comes from their ability to give money philanthropically as private individuals.

Perhaps I am interpreting Buffett incorrectly, but is the only public good from the Internet boom meant to be the private philanthropic endeavors of its golden heroes – the pet projects they get to pick and choose?

How can we invest more money in building the kind of country that uses all the marvelous gadgets, widgets, social tools, and broadband access to continue the tradition of innovation and invention – not just to make a few billion bucks but to solve local problems and engage the citizens and residents of this country in new ways?

What kind of environment must we create to encourage the current and future generations of Americans to use technology for the greater good? More investments in education? Better rewards for applying technological skills and aptitude in the public arena? Leadership that values and fosters the entrepreneurial spirit?

I loathe to think that all of the potential good of our era (and its technological advances) devolves into frivolity or meaninglessness. Or perhaps we must wait a few more centuries to see this greater good?

A final note: If you have stories that conflict with my doom and gloom, then please send them my way. I’m desperate to collect them.

It looks like a lot of people are unhappy with their communications with Congress, according to a new report by the Congressional Management Foundation called Communicating with Congress: How the Internet Has Changed Citizen Engagement.

• 92% of Internet users who contact Congress through email, web forms, etc. want a response.
• Only 63% recall receiving a response.
• Almost half (46%) were dissatisfied with the response.
• More than half (64%) say the response did not address their concerns and that the response was too political biased.

It gets (a little) worse: only 39% of those who contacted Congress (and 36% of those who had not contacted Congress) thought the information they received from their Senators and Representatives was trustworthy.

More than half said they did not think their Members cared about what they had to say (55%) or were interested in what they had to say (62%).

That’s a lot of disgruntled voters, but there is a silver lining, according to Kathy Goldschmidt and Leslie Ochreiter, authors of the study. Despite their dissatisfaction, voters want their Senators and Representatives to update them on their activities and the policy issues they are addressing in Washington. As Goldschmidt and Ochreiter reveal, almost half of Americans contacted a U.S. Senator of Representative in the past five years (44%), providing elected officials with an opportunity to create more positive moments with constituents who communicate with their offices – if they use the technology effectively.

This is where Communicating with Congress transitions from being just a research study into a handbook. Goldschmidt and Ochreiter spend half of the publication reviewing the implications their research has on Congress and suggestions tactics to help Congressional offices better communicate with constituents – and help the advocacy community better communicate with Congress.

One recommendation asks Congressional offices to “reconsider the tone of your responses”:

many [Congressional offices] use their responses solely as opportunities to talk up the Senator or Representative and explain all the actions and votes he or she has taken on the issue. These messages often sound like press releases or marketing materials. When people express their views and opinions, responses which “sell” the Member may not be the best approach, as it amounts to an exchange of opinion without a meeting of the minds. Congressional offices may want to consider how to craft response with the primary goal of acknowledging constituents’ key concerns and a secondary goal of conveying the Member’s accomplishments.

This may go some (but perhaps not all) of the way toward turning potential dissatisfied constituents into satisfied constituents.

While I focus on satisfaction in this post, some of the Goldschmidt and Ochreiter’s most interesting findings look at the role advocacy play in citizen communications with Congress. You can find a copy on the Congressional Management Foundation website.

“The Long Game” is the title of the third episode of the new Doctor Who Series 1. In that episode, the Ninth Doctor, his assistant, Rose, and some random guy arrive on a space station floating somewhere above the earth. It’s centuries in the future, and the earth is experiencing a new golden age, thanks largely to the space station.

This satellite, floating somewhere in the sky, is much like Google: all of the world’s information is stored and sorted and rebroadcast on thousands of channels back down to the earth. Desktop computers are somewhat obsolete, since the “reporters” on board the satellite have the most interesting gadgets that open up their foreheads and send a steady stream of information directly into their brains.

This is my favorite episode. But what happens when nefarious forces start to control the information? If all of the world’s information is sorted and stored and rebroadcast from one entity, what happens when some kind of intergalactic bad guy decides to control the flow of information?

Questions like these are precisely why I kept my mouth shut today during New American Foundation’s event, Google UnWired, with Larry Page (co-founder of Google and President, Products) and Michael Calabrese (Director of the Wireless Future Program at New America Foundation).

Page was in DC to talk about broadband access, which he described as a human right. It’s also an issue that we have started to investigate, and one on which we have held discussions in the past. This event looked at what Calabrese described as pervasive connectivity: wireless access anytime, from anywhere, through ubiquitous networks.

Page read his read a few notes off his Blackberry before looking up at the room:

It doesn’t make sense to have Google if you don’t use it.

According to Page, Americans use only 3-5% of the total spectrum at any given time. “Spectrum’s not like water in the sense that by not using it, you’re not storing it up somewhere for future use,” he said.

There are philanthropic reasons to improve access. Page described a recent trip to Uganda, when he visited students in a trigonometry class. When he asked them if they used mobile phones, a third of their hands went up. But when he asked them how many used the Internet, the translator couldn’t even think of a word for it. They had no word for Internet.

Or, for example, the opportunity to build something distributed and decentralized to store information. Page discussed the state of phone records after Hurricane Katrina that were centralized and underwater on somebody’s ruined desktop computer. Distributed networks, by comparison, are more resilient.

There are benefits for consumers and business, including what Page described as Wi-Fi on steroids with greater range, increased speed, and open innovation.

And then there are selfish reasons to improve access. Increasing access means more people using Google.

Organizing the world’s information is a big task, but if no one is providing access, then we will step up and do it because it doesn’t make sense to organize information without access.

And this is what made me think of Dr. Who, the satellite, and organizing all of the world’s information. What’s worse than living in a world in which all the information is controlled by some alien with a hateful streak? Living in a country that is quite possibly slipping backwards in time. In recent years, the United States fell from 3rd to 15th place in the OECD’s broadband rankings.

The U.S. is eclipsed by the UK now in terms of business, and that’s probably because of broadband. They are doing a better job. No where else in the US (outside of major cities like DC) can you get a 100MB connection. Our own employees only have 1MB service. Our employees can’t build 100MB services if they only have a 1MB connection.

And it’s not just a matter of increased access. It’s also a matter of openness

We feel strongly about openness because we lived in a closed world and we didn’t like it very much as computer scientists.

What’s holding them back? Not the technology. Rather, Page suggests that regulatory issues are mostly to blame.

We can get more done by thinking about how we want to regulate it. (Page offered several solutions. You can watch them all on the event page.)

And more people will lobby to change regulation once we start purchasing better devices.

Remember the “random guy” who landed on the satellite with the Doctor and Rose? He got a better device. He had a gadget implanted in his forehead. A click of the fingers opened his mind and allowed all of the information in the world to flow in. Imagine coming back to the present day and having your brain fly open every time some clicks her fingers.

It’s 2008. We call this the digital era. Yet, in the United States we seem to lack political leaders with a vision for technology, much less an interest in the ways technology can make all levels of government services more efficient, effective, and accessible to regular voters.

Yes, indeed, the rumblings are starting to get a little louder – snuggled, as they currently are, within our niche community of tech-savvy politicos and politics-friendly techies. Is a technology transformation upon us?

For some, the transformation begins when elected officials use technology to listen. There’s a word – listening. In the middle of an election season that has seen a glut of staged conversations, online and offline. Andrew Feinberg rants about some of these so-called listening exercises today at Capitol Valley. There’s a difference between talker at voters and listening to them.

Talkers get headlines. Listeners get things done.

Like fixing potholes and handling case work, increasing the efficiency and efficacy of government programs. A year ago, IPDI published Constituent Relationship Management: The New Little Black Book of Politics, which looks how political campaigns and elected office can use online and offline feedback loops to run case management and constituent communications. Many elected officials and political candidates already use database platforms to help this process.

The next step? Government institutions that employ tech-enabled feedback loops to deliver better goods and services.

In their Politico column, Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry write about some of the ways in which foreign citizens and governments are using technology to listen and act, including e-petitions in the United Kingdom and the government of New Zealand’s wiki for a new Policing Act. As Rasiej and Sifry put it, you can use the Internet to file your taxes, but you can’t use it to make suggestions on how your tax dollars ought to be spent:

Imagine then, that the next time you file your taxes online, your government asks for your feedback on how those tax dollars are being spent. Or it takes your suggestions on how to make a law more understandable. Or it helps you find groups near you that are doing things that benefit your community. It may sound mundane, but today in America, it would be the equivalent of a revolution. How much longer do we have to wait to bridge yet another digital divide?

What about tech policy?

At the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, Robert D. Atkinson writes,

we need a debate in America that focuses on the most important issues like to get fast broadband networks to all Americans; how to use IT to transform our health care system, transportation system, education system, and government; and how to encourage all organizations to become digital, thereby driving productivity and income growth and a better quality of life.

Atkinson thinks that better private-public partnerships can help create an environment of “digital transformation.”

Over at Open Left, Matt Stoller blogs about the successful efforts of blogger and member of the California Democratic Party platform committee, Dante Atkins, to get Net Neutrality in the party platform:

California Democrats, in order to promote vigorous free speech, a vibrant business community, and unfettered access to all information on the Internet, support policies to preserve an open, neutral and interconnected Internet. California Democrats strongly agree with recent rulings by the Federal Election Commission that political communications, including blogging, which take place independent of a political party, committee or candidate, receive a media exemption from campaign finance regulations. California Democrats further reaffirm their support of the right to free speech as expressed in the First Amendment, including the right to critique any elected official or comment on any and all public policy, whether during war or peace, without fear of reprisal.

 Perhaps it is time that we — voters that we are — begin to expect more from our elected officials and encourage digital leadership on our blogs as well as in our voting booths.

Perhaps its a signal of what Senator Obama called the “political silly season” last night, but the New York Times ran another controversial story recently. Oh, perhaps its not quite as enthralling as sexual innuendo regarding presumptive Republican nominee John McCain, but it might be enough to get a few technogeeks to fisticuffs (or at least a LAN contest of World of Warcraft).

Simply put, Barack Obama is a Mac and Hillary Clinton is a PC.

The article, remiscient of attempts to read into the Bush campaign by analyzing their bumper sticker, looks at the Web sites of the Obama and Clinton camps. The metaphor is intentional, and (for obvious reasons) the interpretations of the campaigns will line up with the media-created story arcs.

That said, there is certainly an argument being made here. As the Internet becomes ubiquitous, we will expect a smooth, classy, high-tech, user-friendly….Mac-like experience? As the generation of narcissism and self-esteem classes grows into their 20’s and 30’s, we will expect to be catered to with nice visual effects and a user-friendly, “do-not-shout” pitch.

Obama-Jobs ‘08: The Wave of the Future.

Calling Harrison Ford.

The White House is under attack. It’s time for the President to heroically start dropping terrorists with an Uzi rifle, defending the Executive Mansion for God, family and country…perhaps even bellowing “Get out of my house!” before strangling the last Al Qaeda villain to death with his bare hands.

Well, maybe not quite like that.

According to a post from the geeks over at bigmouthmedia, the White House may soon disappear from the search results preferred to the info-hungry public by our good friends at Google. Thanks to a technical solution devised by the White House to insure that it stays hale and healthy in search engine rankings, the robots.txt file is quite close to passing the 100kb limit, at which point Google quits reading the site.

As a result, it is now theoretically possible that, as the White House Web site grows and expands (as it, no doubt will, albiet at a slower pace that the deficit or size of government) under the next Administration…certain new pages added to the White House’s online parking space may no longer emerge on our search results.

Perhaps, aside from the inevitable promises for a middle-class tax cut coming from all corners in the 2008 election, it might be time for a candidate to take the hard pledge to cut down the size of their Web site.

For the past year, the American electorate has been treated to the teasing possibility that former Tennessee Senator Fred Thompson could become the next President of the United States. With his tersely worded withdrawal statement, Fred Thompson exited stage right.

For Republicans, this meant the end of the possibility that a leader could emerge who would hold together the increasingly shaky Reagan coalition of traditional values, economic libertarianism and a security-focused foreign policy. For Internet political watchers, the Thompson candidacy had been an opportunity to break down the nominal modes of campaigning, knocking down the conventional wisdom that a candidate needs to go from pizza parlor to pizza parlor in rural Iowa to secure a victory in that state’s Byzantine caucus system.

As Stephen Hayes, a reliable conservative voice, posted today in the Daily Standard, the initial conceptualization of Fred Thompson’s White House bid was organized solely around the Internet. Unlike the bottom-up Ron Paul campaign, where there was hardly any direct coordination between the Arlington-based campaign and the grassroots support that sprung up in reaction of the 71-year old Texan’s offbeat message, the Thompson campaign would be a managed Internet venture unlike anything ever tried before.

For all the talk of Howard Dean serving as the “Internet candidate” in 2004, his primary tactic was leveraging (as Paul has as well) his online presence as a means to raising a colossal amount of cash. Fred Thompson planned on using a string of videos, such as this famous retort to liberal filmmaker Michael Moore, and straight-talkin’ bloggin’ to garner media attention. The idea was that Thompson could ride a wave of publicity and voter interest into large fund-raising totals, which would reinforce his ability to talk to wide swaths of voters at once via the Web. This was, in essence, the first shot at the purest sort of Internet campaign that pundits have theorized about since at least 1996.

And he was, initially, fairly successful.

The crash-and-burn of Fred Thompson does not mean that Establishment politics, that pancake flipping events and wintry town halls, will always remain victorious. As the Internet becomes something that we carry with us (think iPhones) rather than something we leave at home or work, as online voting becomes a reality, candidates may well be able to meld elements of the Thompson campaign’s dreams (well-produced YouTube videos, constant blogging, and perhaps even Ross Perot’s dream of the electronic town hall) into a way of bypassing the archaic way we currently choose the men (or women) who will serve as our President.

Give us a candidate who will announce immediately, show up at debates, and remain actively on the online trail…and give us the Internet aspirations of the Thompson campaign…in about four or eight years.

Until then, it might be time for the truly Webbed out campaign to take another nap.