Topic: Politics
The four presenters in the session on Connected Politics get together for Q&A moderated by John Sculley: Andrew Rasiej, Adrian Wooldridge and Joe Trippi. [The last of four IT Conversations audio recordings from the Pop!Tech 2004 session on Connected Politics.]
"Politics is broken; our democracy is broken...It's time for us to examine the electoral college." So says Andrew Rasiej who has spearheaded several innovative projects that support efforts to bridge the "Digital Divide" in public education. [The first of four IT Conversations audio recordings from the Pop!Tech 2004 session on Connected Politics.]
Joe Trippi, the former campaign manager of the Howard Dean presidential campaign from Pop!Tech 2004. This is the third of four IT Conversations audio recordings from the session on Connected Politics.
"Connected politics is not cesessarily left-wing politics...Taking power away from the political elites, the media elites and the rest of the elites and handing it to the great American public will not necessarily shift politics in the country to the left."
[The second of four IT Conversations audio recordings from the Pop!Tech 2004 session on Connected Politics.]
Pop!Tech was about much more than just technology, and the agenda didn't skirt controversy.
Thomas Barnett calls globalization "this country's gift to history" and explains why its wide dissemination is critical to the security of not only America but the entire world. As a senior military analyst for the U.S. Naval War College, Barnett is intimately familiar with the culture of the Pentagon and the State Department (both of which he believes are due for significant overhauls). He explains how the Pentagon, still in shock at the rapid dissolution of the once evil empire, spent the 1990s grasping for a long-term strategy to replace containment. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Barnett argues, revealed the gap between an outdated Cold War-era military and a radically different one needed to deal with emerging threats.
Dave Winer has had a huge impact on the Internet as we know it. Blogging and RSS? They might not exist if it weren't for Dave. Live from the Democratic National Convention, Dave joined The Gillmor Gang to discuss
ConventionBloggers.com and the reaction it has received from the traditional press who have no idea what's under the covers. Dave says the DNC is "truly visionary" and have accepted this "technology transplant" but they probably don't realize what they've done. This could be the the turning point for RSS--when it becomes just another part of the infrastructure.
Where will blogging and RSS go? Deeper into local politics? Are RSS and the web as powereful as talk radio on a 50,000-watt AM station? Dave and The Gang also debate the importance and future of audio blogging and the need to link to or excerpt multimedia content. It's one thing to download a one-hour show to an iPod, but when you can blog a sound bite as easily as you can a text byte, then look for a boom. You'll hear this and much more in another great edition of The Gillmor Gang.
Our special guest, Dave Sifry, founder and CEO of Technorati, will be providing real-time analysis of the political blogosphere for CNN at next week's Democratic National Convention. Dave discusses this announcement and gives us his social and technical insights into Technorati: "tracking patterns of influence and authority in real time." 140+ servers give Technorati a huge grid-computing system, and Dave explains how their technology is different from traditional search engines. On open-source software, "We wouldn't exist without it." He even goes deep into the Postgres/MySQL debate.
Americans are polarized regarding the occupation of Iraq, but people on all sides of this issue want to help the people. Spirit of America transcends the politics to bring humanitarian aid to the people of Iraq and Afghanistan. Listen to this interview with two organizers of Spirit of America and hear how they discovered SoA and how it's changed their lives. It could change yours as well.
This panel discusses best tools and practices for online advocacy, as well as online advocacy's impact on participatory democracy.
This is the question-and-answer session that followed Joe Trippi's keynote presentation.
