Spencer Critchley

Politics & Society

Politicians’ Web town halls boost their approval ratings – Nextgov

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Lawmakers’ Internet-based town hall meetings increase constituents’ approval ratings for the politician, enhance citizen engagement in politics and ultimately impact the probability of participants voting for that member of Congress, according to a new Congressional Management Foundation report. CMF Executive Director Beverley Bell said online meetings offer lawmakers a flexible tool for communication in addition to traditional in-person meetings, tele-town halls and newsletters. “People like hearing from – and feeling heard by – their representatives in all formats, including online,” she said Monday.

Researchers from CMF, Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, Northeastern University, Ohio State University, and the University of California-Riverside found that members who engaged in online town halls experienced an average net approval rating jump of 18 points with similar increases in trust and perceptions of personal qualities. Town hall meetings also attract people from demographics not traditionally engaged in politics as well as those frustrated with the political system. About 96 percent of those polled said they would like to be included in similar events in the future.

Among those taking part in the study were Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin and Reps. Earl Blumenauer, Michael Capuano, James Clyburn, Mike Conaway, Anna Eshoo, Jack Kingston, Zoe Lofgren, Don Manzullo, Jim Matheson, David Price, George Radanovich, and Dave Weldon. The town halls with the House members were conducted in the summer and fall of 2006, prior to the 2006 election, and the session with Levin was conducted in the summer of 2008.

Read the full CMF report. (PDF)

via nextgov.com

Posted via web from Spencer’s posterous

WhiteHouse.gov Goes Drupal

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From Personal Democracy Forum: http://personaldemocracy.com/node/15131

WhiteHouse.gov has gone Drupal. After months of planning, says an Obama Administration source, the White House has ditched the proprietary content management system that had been in place since the days of the Bush Administration in favor of the latest version of the open-source Drupal software, as the AP alluded to in its reporting several minutes ago.

The great Drupal switch came about after the Obama new media team, with a few months of executive branch service (and tweaking of WhiteHouse.gov) under their belts, decided they needed a more malleable development environment for the White House web presence. They wanted to be able to more quickly, easily, and gracefully build out their vision of interactive government. General Dynamics Information Technology (GDIT), the Virginia-based government contractor who had executed the Bush-era White House CMS contract, was tasked by the Obama Administration with finding a more flexible alternative. The ideal new platform would be one where dynamic features like question-and-answer forums, live video streaming, and collaborative tools could work more fluidly together with the site’s infrastructure. The solution, says the White House, turned out to be Drupal. That’s something of a victory for the Drupal (not to mention open-source) community.

Four schools fixed, six to go

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I’m happy and proud to see this story from the Monterey Herald. Four elementary schools fixed, six to go, thanks to the $90 million Salinas Measure A bond campaign in 2006. Rick Rivas and I did the communications, Gary Karnes did the field organizing, and the school district staff and parents worked really, really hard.

Alisal completes repairs at four schools

Four down and six to go.

As Alisal Union School District administrators and teachers on Friday celebrated the renovation of four schools, ridding them of mold, Superintendent Esperanza Zendejas announced plans to begin the process of fixing six more.

“The good thing is that the state started issuing bonds again,” she said. Teachers and students of John E. Steinbeck Elementary gathered in the balloon-decorated cafeteria to mark the conclusion of the school’s repairs, almost three years after contamination was first discovered in four of its classrooms.

Micaela Leal, 11, still remembers when she and her classmates first felt the impact of mold. Her classroom in 2006 was not one of the contaminated ones, but the portable units brought in to house the students from the affected rooms covered the basketball courts and much of the space available for recreation. “There wasn’t any room to play, and we had all this noise — sawing and drilling,” Micaela said. “It’s a lot better now. It feels like fourth grade again.” …

Measure A, a $90million bond, was approved in 2006. At the time, the multipurpose rooms of Bardin, Alisal, Jesse G. Sanchez, Virginia Rocca Barton, Fremont and Frank Paul elementary schools had been shut down because of water intrusion. Those rooms have never reopened and they still need repair, Zendejas said.

“This is urgent for us and we knew that the classrooms were priority and that is why we fixed the classrooms first,” she said…

By CLAUDIA MELÉNDEZ SALINAS
Herald Salinas Bureau
http://www.montereyherald.com/search/ci_13477942

Wonkosphere: Political Reputation – or at Least Buzz – Management

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It’s early days, but just like the record industry, American democracy is being taken apart and rebuilt by digital technology and the web.

Several trends are converging to make this possible and, I think, inevitable. All are characterized by the loss of centralized control to open and/or free systems. These include the rise of open political platforms, such as moveon.org, as an alternative to parties; and the disintermediation of news coverage via blogs, YouTube and citizen journalism. Lately I’ve been following the rise of a third trend: alternative ways of tracking candidates’ reputations. The latest example of that: Wonkosphere.

Wonkosphere graph of buzz about Hillary Clinton, Rudy Giuliani, Barack Obama and other candidates

Wonkosphere uses patented technology licensed from the University of Arizona to track how much buzz there is about candidates, as well as the tone of that buzz. It crawls hundreds of blogs every day. To measure buzz:

[Wonkosphere] measures the proportion of buzz for each candidate in all blogs for the 24 hours preceding the latest update. Percentages for each candidate are calculated every four hours. To get the value we first analyze each blog post for each candidate, and score the prominence of the candidate’s name within the post. We sum these prominence scores across all candidates then express their scores as a percent of the total.

As for tone:

Tone measures the amount of positive and negative language used in statements about the candidate in blog posts. On the home page and top of the candidate pages, we indicate whether the tone value is high, low, or average compared to the average range of tone values for all the candidates in the last 24 hours. These values are broken out for liberal and conservative blogs.

We also calculate an average tone value across all posts each candidate for each calendar day, broken out by political persuasion of the blogs mentioning the candidate.

Wonkosphere also plans to reintroduce its “Mud Meter”, which it used in 2004 to measure mud-slinging between George Bush and John Kerry.

As I mentioned, Wonkosphere’s tech is patented (and they even trademarked “Mud Meter”), but the content is free. I don’t see any mention of plans for an open API, but that would be welcome.

As with the Wikipedia trust-coloring system (which is not limited to politics and which I wrote about here) and the Truth-o-Meter (wrote about it here), data graphics are used to powerful effect: condensing storms of information so that meaning can be seen at a glance.

And come to think of it, free, powerful data graphics generation is another trend behind technology-enabled open democracy.

How It Works

“The core of our system is a network text analysis technology developed at Arizona State University called Centering Resonance Analysis (CRA), which is licensed to Crawdad Technologies. It applies natural language processing techniques to convert blog texts into networks, then analyzes these networks to determine the relative importance of all the words in the text. This allows us to judge how much any given post is about a particular candidate, and how positive or negative the writing is. Centering Resonance Analysis has been shown in research… to be more accurate than simple ‘word counting’ methods.”

More Political Reputation-Management: The Truth-o-Meter

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Truth-o-MeterFollowing my recent post about a color-coded reputation management system* for politicians (indicating their truthfulness by the color used to display their names on web pages), I came across Politifact and its Truth-o-Meter.

Politifact is a project of the St. Petersburg Times and Congressional Quarterly that will “analyze the [presidential] candidates’ speeches, TV ads and interviews and determine whether the claims are accurate.”

I found it via the techPresident blog, where Joshua Levy notes that the it could benefit by being opened up to users:

…and let them pore through the records and make the connections. As Jay Rosen’s recent overtures to crowdsourcing and the various projects of the Sunlight Foundation have shown us, the crowd is smarter than a few individuals; open up the process to them and you’ll be amazed at what they find.

And I’d like to see a system that follows you around (the way a reputation does in oral cultures), so there’s less cover provided by the fact that the ratings are tied to particular locations on the web, which most people probably wouldn’t end up visiting. A system that follows you around like, say, your name.

*Inspired in part by Luca de Alfaro’s Wikipedia trust-coloring project.