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The question everyone was asking about the Obama’s online campaign is what happens when he is elected? What happens to his online army of a million or more? Change.gov, the new and unprecedented website of the office of the President-elect, begins to answer that question. The domain name tells us that this is an official US government website, rather than a candidate website. My hunch is that no previous president-elect in the Internet age established an official website, but then no previous candidate put comparable emphasis on his online campaign.

Change.gov still has some of the look and feel of the Obama campaign website. It includes a full agenda of the reforms Obama plans to introduce (though according to news reports the agenda mysteriously disappeared during the weekend of November 8-9, but has now re-appeared). It contains videos of the latest Obama speeches, as well as videos of people playing major roles in the transition and the new administration. Under the rubric “America Serves,” it mentions Obama’s plans to establish service organizations in education, health care, energy independence, and support for veterans, as well as a proposed educational tax credit for college students.

Like the campaign, the site invites involvement. It provides forms for people to indicate their interest in service or in applying for political appointments. It also encourages people to share their stories and their visions. I would expect the Obama campaign is getting a lot of helpful feedback from the site, but none of it has yet been posted, and I don’t know if the campaign has any intention of posting any of what it receives.

Quite literally as I was writing this post, I received an email from the Obama campaign asking me to complete a survey about experience as a volunteer and interest in volunteering in the future. (Personal disclosure: I signed up some months ago on www.mybarackobama.com not to volunteer but simply to observe the operation.)

I also had a look at www.whitehouse.gov, the official site of the President. Under George Bush this site is completely out-of-date. It’s primarily small-print text, with a little bit of video, and little apparent interest in feedback. Obviously, when Obama takes office on January 20 next year, www.whitehouse.gov will have major changes. The question I’ll close with is how much opportunity Obama’s White House site will provide for citizen input. Will the input simply be in the form of one-way feedback, or will the site permit feedback to be visible in some way, therefore encouraging dialogue among citizens?

It’s now almost three years since my co-authors and I completed our research for our book Digital State at the Leading Edge. Since then I have continued to write about the key question the book addressed – whether IT is transforming politics and government – in my blog, first at www.intergovworld.com, and now here. I now have an opportunity to pull together these three years of observation. I will be presenting a paper at a conference in honour of Carleton University Professor Bruce Doern, one of Canada’s most distinguished public administration scholars. The papers given at the conference will then be published as a festschrift – an edited book honouring Professor Doern.

I am posting my Powerpoint deck for the conference presentation here and hope to receive some feedback. While we were writing Digital State at the Leading Edge, most of the e-activity we witnessed involved e-government, and the public servants we interviewed often commented that few politicians understood the potential impact of the IT in general and the Internet more specifically on politics. That has changed markedly in the last three years. In a way it’s not surprising, because politics is about winner-take-all competition, and the struggle for advantage usually leads to technological innovation. While the Obama campaign represents the leading edge of IT as applied to politics, the two Canadian election campaigns I closely followed – Ontario and the feds – displayed increasingly technological sophistication.
Two other themes I noted briefly in the Powerpoint presentation are the politicization of government’s online presence, driven by technologically savvy politicians, and a slowing down of initiatives in the area of online service delivery.

The Powerpoint presentation is necessarily brief, because presentations at the conference will be limited to 10 minutes, but I intend to expand on these themes in the paper that will follow. I will definitely appreciate your comments on the Powerpoint.

The do not call list is finally available at www.lnnte-dncl.gc.ca and it’s easy to register. I have call display so it was easy to spot telemarketer numbers, but their absence will be even better. I urge anyone who values their peace and quiet to sign up.

I will next post on Friday, October 3, the morning after the leaders’ English debate. I will be discussing online debate prepping and spinning here and in the US.

Yes I know all about how Facebook started as the online version of hardcopy handbooks intended to help Harvard students in residence meet one another, and yes I know how when it went beyond university campuses millions of people have joined, and yes I know how for many of them it has become the main vehicle of online existence.

I had a look at the official facebook profiles for Stephen Harper (with 15,000 supporters), Stephane Dion (13,000), Jack Layton (18,000), and Elizabeth May (3000). Looking to the US, as I did in my last post, these numbers are far less than the expected one-tenth of those of the candidates in the US: Obama-Biden at 1,900,000 supporters, John McCain at 540,000, and Sarah Palin at 407,000. But my question is what is there uniquely valuable in their facebook profiles. The profiles contain some of the personal information and links to ads and videos that you can find on their party websites or on YouTube. The profiles also give supporters a chance to post their own pictures and wall posts, if the politician enables that feature – which Harper doesn’t, but the other three do. But the posts on the wall are so numerous (406,000 for Obama-Biden and even 4000 for Stephane Dion) that they cannot represent communication among supporters. Are they simply messages of support or emails to the campaign office?

The more interactive political use of facebook appears to be groups organized around a cause, such as securing Elizabeth May’s participation in the leaders’ debate, or vote-swapping among Liberals, NDP, and Green supporters. Here the members of the group would seem to have actionable information to share with one another. The CBC’s Susan Ormiston reports a total of 400 partisan facebook groups in the election campaign. Again, more of the action would appear to be in these smaller self-organized groups than in the profiles organized by the candidates. As I understand it, that is how facebook is evolving, in that people use it to keep up with a manageable list of people who, at some level, do matter to them.

A facebook group thus seems very different from a YouTube post. When a facebook group gets too big, the objective of communication is not achieved. In contrast, the objective of a YouTube post is to get a message with political implications out to as many people as possible, so high view counts are important as indicator.

Am I missing the boat on this one? Is facebook the future of political web 2.0 or is it a dead end?

The use of YouTube has been the most important development in online politics in the last two years. At this point, YouTube has three political roles: showing gaffes committed by politicians, netizens creating videos supporting or opposing candidates, and candidates themselves posting ads. The most notorious political gaffe posted on YouTube was former Virginia Senator George Allen using the racist term “macaca,” which, with 700,000 views, was a key factor explaining why he is a former senator. The most famous support video is the “Yes We Can” Barack Obama music video, with over ten million views.

Already, a few posts have gotten lots of attention. In the area of gaffes, Conservative bloggers have seized on a clip of Elizabeth May discussing the difficulty of implementing a carbon tax, claiming she said Canadian voters are stupid, while she claims she said, or at least meant to say, that other politicians think Canadian voters are stupid. A reporter from CPAC accompanied Garth Turner going door-to-door and the “typical” voter he visited was the son of his campaign manager. The May episode has gotten about 20,000 views, the Turner episode about 5,000. The most popular Netizen-generated video is a cartoon of Harper talking to Bush on the phone, originally posted two years ago, and now up to 48,000 views, most in the last few days.

Finally, all parties have posted their ads on YouTube, with the most frequently viewed being the NDP’s recent ad attacking Stephen Harper (“A New Kind of Strong”) at 17,000, while the Conservative and Liberal ads extolling Stephen Harper and Stephane Dion, respectively, max at about 10,000 views. For the parties, these posts on YouTube are another way to reach voters, in addition to posting the ads on their own websites and running them on television. What I find disconcerting is that the parties often disable comments when posting on their ads on YouTube.

So far, these are healthy view counts, especially if multiplied by 10 to compare to those in the US. Still we haven’t had a truly viral post – an egregious gaffe, particularly in a debate, or a Netizen contribution so inspiring or hilarious that everyone wants to watch – but it’s only the second week. Regardless, YouTube videos are becoming increasingly important in Canadian election campaigns.