For those of you attending (or thinking of attending) the upcoming Politics Online Conference, consider attending two panels I have assembled: Social Networking/Media Strategy of the Presidential Campaigns and Open Source Advocacy. While it may be too soon to say that this aspect of online campaigns is the “be all, end all” of online strategy, there have been some great innovations in this space this campaign cycle.

Social Networking/Media Strategy of the Presidential Campaigns

The panel includes Justine Lam, eCampaign Director for Ron Paul; Amy Rubin, former Deputy Director of New Media for John Edwards; Katie Harbath, Deputy eCampaign Director for Rudy Giuliani; and Michael Turk, former eCampaign Director for Bush-Cheney ‘04 and my fellow blogger at techPresident.com.

The panel will explore two contrasting views of using the social web for campaigns: it has not been useful (for some) and it has been essential (for others). I suppose where you sit is where you stand.

In any event, come join us at 3:30p on March 4 and join the debate.

Open Source Advocacy

On March 5 at 3:00p, I am chairing a second panel on Open Source Advocacy. This panel will explore how open source software, software that is free to use, though not necessarily free to implement, can help advocacy organizations. The panel includes Michelle Murain, who blogs on Non-profit technology at the ZenofNPTech.org; Ryan Ozimek, President of PICnet and a core Joomla developer; Michael Haggerty, President of Trellon and a core Drupal developer; and Jo Lee founder of CitizenSpeak, an open source advocacy campaign tool that integrates with CiviCRM.

Both panels should be very interesting and I encourage all to attend.

The Library of Congress might well be one of the first parts of the federal government to start incorporating interactivity and social media into its web presence.

Yesterday Kevin Novak, director of web services for the Library of Congress, spoke at a Web Managers Roundtable event in Northern Virginia about social media. Novak is trying to use the Internet to encourage participatory volunteerism and reach people in a way that maintains LOC’s relevance in an era of digital media.

LOC’s current and upcoming online efforts include:

• Using Flickr to post pictures of the LOC content and ask the general public to help collect information on different items of historical interest.
• Developing a pilot program in Second Life.
• Launching a blog – the first in the federal space, according to Novak – authored by LOC’s director of communications, Matt Raymond. To date, the blog entry that generated the “busiest” response asked readers to name their favorite books.
• Online collections that include webcasts.

Novak considers LOC’s web presence to be an experiment for interactivity on the federal websites. The unknown, the gray areas, the questions that we don’t even know exist yet – those are the sticking points, according to Novak. He mentioned a few of them at the roundtable:

What process determines who gets to write the official blog for a federal organization?

Is the LOC’s web presence a part of the public record?

Do constraints to online interactivity exist that the LOC hasn’t explored yet?

How does a federal organization achieve success online?

Ahh, the unanswered questions.