Spencer Critchley

Communication and Change

The Web

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.

Google Wave Preview

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via wave.google.com

Tim O’Reilly: “Jens, Lars, and team re-imagined email and instant-messaging in a connected world, a world in which messages no longer need to be sent from one place to another, but could become a conversation in the cloud. Effectively, a message (a wave) is a shared communications space with elements drawn from email, instant messaging, social networking, and even wikis.”

Posted via web from Spencer’s posterous

The Desert Mothers release “Nowhere Motel”

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My new band The Desert Mothers has a new release, “Nowhere Motel”, which I’m really excited about – give it a listen. Here’s our web site, which has a music player on the home page:

The Desert Mothers: Nowhere Motel

http://thedesertmothers.com

If you like it, give it a thumbs up! You can listen to or buy it at one of my new favorite online music stores indiestore.com or Amie Street. At indiestore, you can buy it for 99 cents, right here: http://www.indiestore.com/desertmothers. At Amie Street, they have a really interesting model under which the price rises, up to 99 cents, as the popularity of the song rises. Right now, because it’s brand new, “Nowhere Motel” is just 13 cents! You have to buy a minimum of $3.00 worth of credits towards this and other songs to get started, but they have lots of great music to buy there, so it’s still a deal. http://amiestreet.com/thedesertmothers. Soon “Nowhere Motel” will also be on iTunes and a lot of other places.

I recorded it with great, great talent from across the country, using a new web-based recording service called esession.com, which is like a virtual recording studio. My players were:

  • Gina Fant-Saez on vocals. Gina is a wonderful singer and songwriter, and the engineer/owner at Blue World Studios in Austin, where U2, Sting, Shawn Colvin and others have recorded.
  • Pat Mastelotto on drums. He was a member of Mr. Mister, and has played with XTC, King Crimson, David Sylvian and many others.
  • Byron House on bass. Byron has played with the Dixie Chicks, Emmylou Harris, Buddy Miller, Dolly Parton, and many others. He also produced the latest album by the Waybacks.
  • Bruce Kaphan on steel guitar and dobro. He’s played with David Byrne, Sheryl Crow, the Black Crowes, American Music Club and the Red House Painters, among others.
  • Tom Roady on precussion. The Dixie Chicks, Kenny Chesney, Michael McDonald, Ricky Skaggs, Trisha Yearwood, many others.
  • Gene Rabbai on piano. Neil Young, Willie Nelson, Vince Gill, and more.
  • Me on guitar, songwriting & production (my brother Owen contributed to the songwriting).
  • Marc Urselli mixed it. Marc is a 2-time Grammy-winner, including for Les Paul’s "American Made, World Played", featuring Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and others.

I’ve written an article about the whole experience for O’Reilly Digital Media, complete with MP3 excerpts from the recording process. You can find it here:

http://digitalmedia.oreilly.com/2007/12/13/esession-online-recording-for-all.html.

If you find that you REALLY like “Nowhere Motel”, I hope you’ll tell your friends about it. You can: