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.

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.

Slashdot is soliciting questions from its readers for the presidential contenders. It follows their usual rules, except that they are looking for 5 questions only. They will send all 5 questions to each campaign, and with the Slashdot crowd, its likely we will see some interesting technology related questions.

Yesterday we hosted Steven Clift for a discussion about eGov. Yes, we held a discussion about eGov amid all the sex and rock-n-roll that is the presidential primary season, when (oddly enough) the actual process of leading may at times get lost in a fog of stump speeches, debate bickering, and negative ads.

In the United States, we’ve become incredibly effective at raising money online – for political candidates, for big, fancy non profits, for issues groups. We’re also good at generating a tremendous amount of noise online.

Perhaps part of the problem results from a lack of executive-level vision about using technology in public leadership. When I talk to leaders about using the Internet, for example, to increase government transparency and build public spaces online, I am more often than not told “you should talk to my webmaster. S/he handles this for me.” Or, “You should talk to my online consultants.” As if every major technology decision trickles hap-hazardly from a few rungs lower on the hierarchy up to the top. As if technology and technology-powered public involvement are too trivial (or overlooked or tedious or technical) to receive a place in the organization’s vision.

Clift thinks that a disconnect occurs between what people want and what politicians want. In a digital age, says Clift, voters expect two-way communications. We want to talk, and we want politicians to hear us before talking back. Politicians want one-way communication.

Where do we go from here, as the excitement of this week becomes that awkward lull between the primaries and the conventions? Clift has a top-five list of things we can do to make digital leadership an important part of the democratic process:

1. Build public life online.
2. Get candidates to make public promises about how they will use the Internet in office.
3. Contribute time and money to public spaces online.
4. Request a new government vision for technology and require more information services online.
5. Demand truly public spaces online, built from the local level up.

Ari Schwartz from the Center for Democracy & Technology has a good metaphor for this. Public parks, he said yesterday, are a precedent. Americans already value the preservation of public spaces in the form of parks. Preserving public spaces online, however, will require building public demand and pressure over time.

Building public spaces is one of the many things Clift does daily. Check out http://e-democracy.org.

We’ll cover the topic at a plenary panel Schwartz is chairing at the Politics Online Conference and a breakout panel Clift will speak on.

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 campaign season we have seen some new and interesting campaign websites. The web presence of a campaign is a big deal, and this year that is being taken to the next level. There are facebook apps, MySpace pages, and youtube channels for campaigns. I am glad to see campaigns using the full power of the Internet, but also disheartened by the fact that many do not use the greatest asset of the Internet, transparency.

That being said, Ron Paul’s website is breath of fresh air. If you haven’t checked it out, do so (www.ronpaul2008.com). I know it seems like I’ve been schilling for Ron Paul lately, but he is making big news. First with his $4.2 million dollar day and over the weekend the New York Times had a piece on his web campaign. Despite all the other web applications that campaigns use, Ron Paul has one that I thoroughly love. On his homepage he has a running total of his online donations as well as a ticker that lists his recent donors. Most campaigns time the release of fundraising totals for maximum effect, but Ron Paul’s are just out there for all to see. I checked it yesterday around 2 PM and then at 11 AM this morning. He’s pulled in over $120,000 in that time, all online. Impressive.

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.