Yell at your Senator, or listen to your neighbors? Another use for Govluv and Twitter.

Govluv, a new Twitter-based tool, provides a geographically-organized directory of political and governmental leaders along with their Twitter handles. It also allows politicians to identify tweets from their constituents. It is billed as a way for “connecting government representatives and citizens”, for a “more productive two-way dialogue”.

However, I had an experience yesterday that suggests it may have another important use.

I was reviewing my Govluv home page, headed up by President Obama, and I noticed this tweet:

I did a quick search and replied to @chosen7stone:

She graciously retweeted the information and thanked me.

A minor interaction all around, and certainly not one that will find any deep resonance or response in the White House. Yet I think that the dynamics highlight what may be one of the more important uses of tools such as Govluv.

Obama was not part of the conversation, not part of the two way dialogue. Instead, he served as context, and the important, indeed the only, interaction was between two citizens. What if this became a primary use of Govluv?

For instance, it’s not surprising that Senator Harry Reid, the Majority Leader, is getting a lot of tweets from his constituents regarding Health Care Reform. Instead of waiting for his office to reply, what if constituents discussed the issues with one another, e.g by providing facts on how a particular bill would affect Nevada? Or what if supporters of a particular position, e.g. the Public Option, used the tweetstream Govluv provides to find one another and organize further?

Our fascination with our political leaders should not keep us from talking, or tweeting, with one another on the issues. Think of @BarackObama and @SenatorReid as hashtags convening conversations, not just handles.

How long do Twitter search engines remember?

Less than a month ago, I tweeted
and it’s still online as a Twitter status. I search Twitter occasionally, and I’m often interested in Tweets that are more than a month old. This tweet was forgettable, but the words are unusual enough that it should be easy to find.

So it’s a good test:

• It’s no longer in Twitter search;
• Google finds it; and
• So does Tweefind (under Related News, in the sidebar on the right).

Other services which work via Google also found it. I wonder how longer Google will have it.

If you can find this Tweet in any other way, please comment.

A better question than “what’s the business case for Gov2.0?”

Don’t ask “how do I make the business case for Gov2.0?”; tell us about your agency’s relationships, and the case will become obvious.

Imagine that you’re a savvy Federal staffer in US Defense Military Health System Program. You’re excited by what the US Patent Office accomplished with its Peer to Patent program, eager to copy the success of Twestival 2008 which used Twitter to kick off events in 200 cities across the globe and raise $250,000 for water charities, and inspired by OSTP’s open government initiatives. So on Govloop, or on your blog, you pose the question: “what’s the business case for Gov2.0 (or social media or Web2.0 or Twitter)?”

and … crickets – a kiss of death for the conversation. You may get some well-meaning feedback from others who have confronted the same challenge, but the thread runs out pretty quickly. It seems that no on can help you.

What happened? You’ve focused your readers towards technology (Twitter? Youtube? Maybe a wiki?) and generalities (“communication is good”; “crowdsourcing rocks!”), and away from the relationships, mission, history, and other specifics of your organization that would give you and your readers the raw materials to create the business case.

Worse, we’ve all become distracted from your unique role in this conversation: you know the agency’s goals, its current challenges, what keeps senior management awake at night, what appropriations they’re looking forward to, and what headlines they’re dreading. You know that, or ought to. The rest of us don’t.

So, consider, instead, this conversation opener:

I work for the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs. As you may remember, one of my boss’s predecessors was featured in the Washington Post’s 2007 expose of poor conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, and we’re still working to rebuild trust with injured soldiers and their families. We’re also trying to strengthen our relationships with medical researchers. And, by the way, we run TRICARE, the military’s HMO, and we’re working hard to keep the program affordable, with low deductibles and co-pays. What Web2.0 tools would be useful to us and how should we measure results?***

Imagine the roaring conversation this would inspire:

• Your readers from the Centers for Disease Control, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services will be typing their suggestions before they’ve finished reading your post.
• Someone might point you in the direction of OrganizedWisdom — an aggregator of health expertise — and suggest that you to explore how you can engage your customers in becoming guides to military health issues
• The success of PatientsLikeMe will be mentioned as a model for supporting the wounded warriors you serve.
• Someone else might point you to Healing in Community Online, a sort of Second Life for patients and their families.

The question of metrics would become easier as well: TRICARE already surveys its beneficiaries regularly to determine how they perceive the accessibility and quality of care (and if you didn’t already know that, rest assured someone would tell you). Surely you could work some questions into that to evaluate your Gov2.0 initiative?

Now, with your help, your readers are brainstorming how your agency can accomplish its mission and deal with its challenges.

So, tell us about your agency’s key relationships, inside and outside government, and the ones that are most troubled, and watch the conversation explode.

(***Background on USDOD – Health Affairs is drawn from NAPA’s description of top “prune” jobs in the Federal Government. It might be an eye-opening exercise to review the other positions listed and brainstorm how Gov2.0 could, specifically, help each of these appointees.)

(Cross-posted from Govloop.)

CAP’s great Twitter 101 – and ways to make it even better

What was good.

Returned earlier today from a useful Twitter 101 session hosted by CAP’s Alan Rosenblatt at the Internet Advocacy Roundtable.  It was great. The next one could be even better, if we could learn more about what the presenters knew in their bones (see bottom).

Like many discussions on how to get started with social media, the conversation bounced around.

Tech: twazzup,  übertwitter for blackberry , and hootsuite were new to me and look interesting. Much more on Twtter resources here, courtesy of Shaun Dakin.

Stories: AAUW is drawn out of silent lurkerdom when they respond to a tweet from a disappointed soon to be ex-member who has misinterpreted a local chapter’s action; conversation results, the member is mollified and AAUW managers see the value. Dakin’s carefully nurtured network of robocall sleuths identifies the first (known) robo-sex-call one night, and the next day, the news hits the Rachel Maddow show.(I realized Dakin is, in effect, the real-time web’s ombudsperson for robocalls. )

Tips: Twitter is a tool, not a strategy. When you start, decide what your voice is going to be. Keep your twitter stream focused  – eclectic is ok, but beware that if you veer from months of all business to throwing in your sports enthusiasms, you’ll lose followers. (Via @epolitics)  Why would you want to hear only from people who agree with you? (Via @digitalsista)

Get senior manager’s buy-in by getting him/her on the rostrum for a new media conference, and let the infectious energy work its magic (Via @GloPan)

Conservatives tend to cluster around a few hashtags, e.g. #tcot, while progressives tend to use specific hashtags for specific issues. (This seems important, perhaps because it demonstrates degree of focus.)  (Via  @digitalsista)

Effectiveness requires listening, which amounts to research, and it’s hard, time consuming work.  (Via @henrim)

What would have made today’s session even better?

One of the presenters crystallized this for me when he insisted that the social – non-technical – aspects of using twitter could only be discovered in practice, not taught, and that it was more art than science.  But there are more than a few art schools, and though you can’t teach inspiration, you can teach craft.

I suspect that today’s presenters (and more than a few audience members) knew in their bones more than they could say about how to do it well. These questions might have helped:

• How do you insert yourself in conversations and get heard?
• What are your rules of thumb for getting started on a new campaign?
• When you “listen” to Twitter, how do you do it, what do you listen for, and when and how do you respond?
• When you’ve “fallen off the horse” in your use of Twitter, how do you get back on?

I’m sure that the presenters did their best to tell us all they knew how to say, but I doubt they told us all they knew how to do. I’m hungry for more.

Dealing with WordPress blog spam

Off-topic, but as a minor “giving back” to everyone who helps WordPress bloggers fight spammers.

I discovered this afternoon that a few of my posts had 200 or so links each to sites selling various pain medications. You probably missed it, as did I, because they were embedded between tags styled display:none, so they would show only to search engines. That’s still bad, because it increases my bandwidth load and could lead to Google deciding that this was a spam site and dropping it from their index.

So it had to be fixed.

I read up here:

• http://ocaoimh.ie/2008/06/08/did-your-wordpress-site-get-hacked/

• http://thenondesigner.com/wordpress/hidden-spam-in-wordpress-displaynone/
• http://wordpress.org/support/topic/221431

and installed the Bad Behavior plugin.

Then I went to work in the database. If any of the following puzzles you, PLEASE STOP READING HERE. I’m not guaranteeing that this will work for you. It may blow up your blog, translate your categories into French (or perhaps English), or cause your hair (or mine) to fall out.

1. I backed up the entire database via the phpMyAdmin interface, and also copied the table containing my posts, citizentools_posts in this case.
2. I was able to determine that the infected posts had the spam text right at the end, i.e. those posts ended with <u style=display:none> 100′s of bad links </u>
3. so I used this criterion to find them:
   
SELECT * from citizentools_posts
WHERE
REPLACE( `post_content` , "</u>", CHAR( 10 ) )
REGEXP
CONCAT( '^.*<u style=display:none>.+', CHAR( 10 ) , '$' )
and

4. then ran this SQL to fix them, tagging each fixed post with <–nospam–> so I could backtrack if needed
   
UPDATE citizentools_posts
SET `post_content` =
CONCAT('<!--nospam-->',SUBSTRING_INDEX(post_content,'<u style=display:none>',1))
WHERE
REPLACE( `post_content` , "</u>", CHAR( 10 ) )
REGEXP
CONCAT( '^.*<u style=display:none>.+', CHAR( 10 ) , '$' )


Thanks to the posters before me – at the links above and elsewhere – who dealt with this and left careful notes.

You can’t “own” a social network, but maybe you can teach it.

Craig Stoltz writes that it’s a mistake for Obama or anyone else to look for ways to use his extensive social network to govern. Instead, the instigator (for lack of a better word) should/can use the social network as a place to listen to the community and, respectfully, to join the conversation.

So far, so good. But there’s another opportunity: if you’re part of the conversation, you can also teach people. That’s a lesson from democratic businesses, such as Jack Stack’s Springfield Remanufacturing. Stack committed a long time ago to an employee-run business, and found that training is crucial:

Nobody can think and act like an owner without understanding the basic rules of business….
We start with the idea that there are two things every company must do to stay in business: make money and generate cash…. [E]mployees learn about all the subtle and not-so-subtle challenges of doing these two things in the various industries in which we compete.

How could the Obama Administration encourage the development
of primers on key issues? On any contentious issue, various parties would want to have their say — I can’t imagine the conservative Club for Growth letting the Service Employees International Union frame the issue of labor organizing rules, or vice-versa, and neither organization would want to leave the framing to the Administration. Or perhaps the Administration could make available the information they’re considering as they come to policy decisions. Jack Stack relies on Open Book management. What’s the equivalent here?

Links: search Citizentools resource links for more information on open book management.

User stories for open government?

As we build tools that make government more accessible, are we addressing the actual needs and wants of citizens, or the needs and wants we wish they had?

In Sunlight Foundation’s Open House/Open Senate Project discussion, Clay Shirky wrote:

Without a middle step that helps large, disorganized groups take advantage of the newly transparent information, transparency may in fact further increase the net asymmetry betwee ‘interest group with lobbyists’ vs. ‘interest groups without lobbyists’ in getting the Government to craft the needed bargains their way.

The extreme programming technique of defining “user stories” to be
handled by the software could be useful here. One format is

As a (role) I want (something) so that (benefit).

Possible user stories:

1. As a voter wondering whether to respond to Politician X’s
   fundraising appeal, I want a summary of his track record on Issue Y so
   that I can decide quickly whether to send him $25.

2. As an “Issue Y” voter, I want to know whether today is the day I
   should spend the four hours a year I have budgeted for calls and email
   to my Senator, and what I should say to him, so that my four hours
   have as much impact as possible on the Federal Government.

3. As a policy analyst, I want to identify the Senator who has been
   most vocal and consistent with my position on Issue Y, so can I get a
   Senatorial hold placed on a bad bill. (e.g.
   http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/12/18/victory/ )

4. As an investigative reporter, I want to know what changed in seven
   months, so that I can explain why FISA legislation that failed in
   December 2007 then passed in July 2008.

5. As a mash-up programmer, I want access to the geographical
   locations of all the sites earmarked for funding in Bill Z, so I can
   place them on a Google Map.

More on user stories:
http://www.agilemodeling.com/artifacts/userStory.htm.

Friend to friend canvassing: more fun, and 50% more effective

12/11/2006 update
The Grassroots Champions Coalition has used Advokit to organize precincts throughout California.

Bruce Daniels describes their implementation approach here.

What if you had tools that allowed participants to share their networks with your effort, in addition to their time, thoughtfulness, and energy?

Robo-calling: tempting for campaigns, annoying for voters, ten times the expense

In the election just concluded, I received countless robocalls, mass mailings, and email messages from candidates and elected officials. I voted, of course, but the only thing that moved me to action was a friend’s emailed account of his own door to door efforts in the Virginia Senatorial campaign.

I’m not alone. The news is filled with stories of voters in Arizona, New York and other states who are tired of getting calls.

It’s some comfort to know that robo-calling, at $275 per new vote generated, is 10 to 20 times more expensive than canvassing or phone banks.

Friend to friend

Pat Dunlavey has found a way that’s more humane and more effective.

In 1998, 1999, and 2003, Dunlavey organized ballot measure campaigns in Massachusetts to allow local governments to increase taxes to fund needed local services.

1998: Ten supporters identified per canvassser via cold-calls

In his first effort, call lists were assigned by the campaign based on geography. 85 volunteers each made 30 contacts per person, and identified only one third of the contacts as ballot measure supporters. Volunteers generally completed only 60% of their assigned contacts and found the cold calling an unpleasant experience.

Although the ballot measure passed, Dunlavey was disappointed with the results, and sought ways to avoid cold-calling.

2003: Fifteen supporters identified per canvasser via friend-to-friend

In 2003, his volunteers used a custom web application (reborn in 2004 as Advokit) to scan the town’s voter database and “tag” or claim voters that they felt, based on personal knowledge, would be supporters of the ballot measure. The 55 initial canvassers recruited an additional 40, and then each canvasser contacted more than 26 people on average and identified 15 supporters. The 2003 group was both happier — completing 85% of the calls assigned — and more effective — they converted almost twice as many of of their contacts to supporters (57% in 2003 vs. 31%in 1998)

Netalyst worked with Advokit (and CivicActions) during the fall of 2004 to support the VoteAllYourValues effort , to design an easier to use “lite” interface and to develop strategies that would allow the campaign’s ambitious targets for calls generated to be reached.

Advokit was also used with good results in that year’s New York State senate races.

The Advokit website provides an online demo and free download of this open source software.

Cellphone text messages + passion = results across the digital divide

Text messages sent by cellphone — also known as Short Message Service or SMS — are becoming a powerful tool for political and civic participation.

Last fall, activists opposing the Supreme Court nomination of John Roberts recruited 25,000 volunteers for their Massive Immediate Response effort. Each volunteer agreed to respond immediately to a text message requesting that they call their Congressional Representatives. The 27% opt-in rate was five times that observed for the most successful commercial entertainment campaigns.

Rick Santorum, the Republican incumbent running for U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania, used SMS to reach out to his supporters.

On Halloween, Pat LaMarche, the Green Party candidate for Governor in Maine, asked her supporters to provide topic suggestions via text message for a speech at an upstate university.

Note that all of these initiatives relied upon participants who were already fired up for or against particular candidates and issues — SMS is less likely to be useful in converting a luke warm supporter into a passionate participant.

Almost one third of all cellphone subscribers send at least one text message per month, with younger Americans leading the way. A recent New Politics Institute study notes that cellphone subscribers comprise more than two-thirds of the population, that more than half of 18 to 34 year olds use text messages at least occasionally, as do one in five 35-54 year olds.

Among those 35 and under, text messaging reverses the digital divide. Five out of ten Hispanics, four out of ten African Americans, but only three of ten whites use their cellphone text messaging capability. So it should not be surprising that Voto Latino announced plans in July to register at least 35,000 Hispanic youths nationwide using cellphone text messaging tools.

These tools are rapidly reaching the “point and click” stage for campaign organizers. For instance, the Mozes service allows campaign manager to set up “text message ballots” easily. A “do it yourself” American Idol is using this service to let listeners to indicate the band they prefer in one on one matchups.

To track developments further, visit mopocket, textually, and the MobileActive Community Blog.

Update: 2006/11/17
The Democracies Online wiki provides a quick overview of SMS pros and cons and describes how SMS was used the Philippines, Lancashire, Bristol, and South Korea.