It’s the busy season for Internet conferences, with SXSWi recently concluded,* Personal Democracy Forum just ahead and the District’s own PoliticsOnline annual conference sponsored by the Institute for Politics Democracy and the Internet (IPDI) at George Washington University. I was a panelist once during my time writing The Blogometer, if you need any more reason to take it seriously.
Well, here’s one more — IPDI is announcing a new panel that sounds to this blogger as interesting as anything covered in Austin, Texas last weekend. From the announcement e-mail:
[H]ow many of us have actually looked at the user experiences of Members of Congress, as they work through the highs and lows of social media in political office?
Or asked a Senator what it felt like to post the tweet heard around the country?
Now you can.
Join Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO), Rep. John Culberson (R, TX-7), Rep. Steve Israel (D, NY-2), Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R WA-5), and Rep. Tim Ryan (D, OH-17) for “Elected and Connected: Uses, Dangers, and Benefits of Being an Elected Official in a 2.0 World” on Tuesday, April 21, 2009 at 8:30 a.m. at the 2009 Politics Online Conference.
As alluded to here before, expectations that our duly elected congresscritters would take to blogging (as opposed to merely commissioning staff-written blogs) never did pan out, owing in largest part I believe to time constraints and authenticity. Then-Senator Obama’s lengthy commentary/response at/to Daily Kos in 2005 may stand alone in this regard, although I still suspect he did not write it alone.
YouTube has generated more member participation but still is mostly the product of their staff. Twitter on the other hand is entirely intelligible and within the capacity of anyone familiar with a BlackBerry, which nearly all of them are. Here, for the first time, members of Congress may actually have something to say about social media. Not to mention, Culberson (@johnculberson) and McCaskill (@clairemc) are widely considered among the savviest Twitter users on the Hill.
All sounds interesting to me, and if you agree, you can register online here.
*So if you were wondering why this blog went silent for a week, now you know.
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