March 11, 2004
Greetings From the John Kerry for President HQ
Today, I am at the John Kerry for President headquarters in Washington D.C., where I have been hired as a consultant to help them figure out what to do with their online community, blogs, forums and online activism tools.
The first few days are very typical. Lots of meetings, lots of introductions, and lots of information input. My head is full. Now I need to make sense of it, and start writing a plan.
What I can say so far is that there are a lot of people out there and all of them have different ideas about how the Kerry campaign needs to use technology and online community to enhance the traditional political campaign. Not all of these ideas are feasible and not all of them are good. We learned a lot from the successes and failures of both the Clark and Dean campaigns, and no one wants to head down the wrong path, especially because the end goal is to beat Bush and change the administration. The question is, how do we best use technology and online community to assist that goal?
Politics aside, I am excited to be given a chance to help define how technology will be used within a presidential campaign because I know that we have an opportunity here to make long-term changes in how technology is perceived (and thus, used) within the political world. If we do it right, political campaigns in the future will be very different that they were in 2000 and today.
More on this soon....
March 07, 2004
Big News Coming Soon
Contrary to popular belief, I have not been locked in an underwater Dutch prison these past few months, denied access to the Internet and tortured with readings from the Dullest Blog in the World.
No, instead I have been shuttling myself between two large east coast cities, talking to a lot of people and recovering from 5 months of intensive campaign work at Wesley Clark for President.
I have just returned to NYC (again), only to leave (again) for Washington D.C. on Wednesday and back to NYC this Friday to catch a plane for Austin, TX to speak at SXSW. I'll be back in NYC and catch yet another train to D.C. to speak at the Politics Online conference at GWU on the 19th. I have not had a chance to breathe but have caught up on 5 months of unread New Yorker magazines (yay).
On a related note, I will be looking for a cheap, decent, short-term sublet in the D.C. area. If you have some leads besides the amazing Craigslist, drop me a note and let me know. I'm keeping my apartment in Brooklyn (still subletted) because I expect to return to NYC later this year. I also expect to be coming back to NYC on a pretty frequent basis.
I'm going to get back into the mode of writing here regularly, but it may take me a few weeks to get settled. More details to come.
