2010 AMP Summit: From the attendee perspective
If my own and the @bivings tweets hasn’t already tipped you off, I was fortunate to spend last Friday and Saturday at the inaugural AMP Summit. Organized by our friends at the David All Group and a distinguished leadership committee including Joe Trippi, Jerome Armstrong, Robert Bluey, Peter Corbett, Peter Greenberger, Todd Herman, Bruce Mehlman, Leslie Sanchez and Jonah Seiger, the AMP Summit built on the successes of several conferences related to technology, politics and government.
In terms of critiquing the AMP Summit, David All and his team deserve a lot of credit for effectively managing and mitigating many of the little things that irritate frequent conference goers / networking junkies. In short, it is obvious that the organizers of the AMP Summit made a decision not to cut corners and put a great deal of thought into making the experience of attendees as smooth as possible. The organization of breakout sessions into four separate tracks (Activism-Media-Politics-Lab) and categorization of panels by their focus (Case Study, How-To, Thought) was generally accurate and useful for attendees to determine their schedules.
The speakers were all subject matter experts who delivered interesting presentations while also leaving more time for Q&A than you typically see. The lunch hour and 30 minute breaks between panels provided for plenty of time to talk to presenters, network with other attendees or catch up on work emails without feeling the need to dash off to your next event. Rather than trying to cram as much as possible into the summit, there was a clear focus on quality instead of quantity. The location was easily accessible via public transportation and the conference took place in a reserved area of the hotel. The food was excellent and the Starbucks coffee was kept warm and flowing all day. Networking receptions and choice of locations was absolutely fantastic (iPad DJ @ranajune rocks!).
On the minus side, having the second day take place on a Saturday was something many attendees did not commit too. However, the smaller crowd made for more intimate discussions with panelists and even better networking among those who stayed around. Although it technically made for a 6 day work week, it is tough to imagine a better or more productive way to spend your Saturday afternoon.
Other areas for improvement include the ever vexing problem of providing quality Wi-Fi that can handle
hundreds of high bandwidth users. For next year’s AMP Summit, having the ability to connect your Facebook & Twitter accounts in order to create & share your schedule (SCHED in DC Week) and then network and connect with other attendees (Gov 2.0 Attendee Directory) would be truly valuable. Finally for those of us who live-tweet these events, having the speakers’ Twitter handles ahead of time and the presentations to view afterwards would be a big timesaver.
All in all, AMP was a good and welcome entrance to the world of technology conferences. Just like no one individual or organization has a monopoly on the internet, no one brand or organization has a monopoly on tech conferences. As an added bonus, AMP was wise to create hype for next year by awarding prior attendees with “Level 2” privileges next year.
For more on AMP check out the conference blog & Facebook Page and OhMyGov’s recap “The AMP Summit in 50 Tweets.”
Getting Personal about E-mail
I am beginning to get really annoyed when someone asks me to send personal e-mails to them using their business address. Of course, this practice has existed every since e-mail started, but after years of relatively wide Internet use and the plethora of free e-mail services (think Yahoo!, Gmail, MSN, etc.), I wonder why some people still mainly use their current work e-mail account.
My biggest concern is expectation of privacy. While privacy laws and organizational policies are relevant in this discussion, I don’t think it is worth discussing them in detail. Basically, when an organization provides an employee with an e-mail address, the organization’s infrastructure and resources support that account. Thus, it seems reasonable to assume that they have a right to ensure that the account is used appropriately. I am willing to bet that none of my employers have ever checked my accounts (other than for high level data like memory usage), but I like to act as if my employer is monitoring my e-mail. Most employers probably won’t mind an occasional personal use, but the account is meant for business purposes.
Continue reading “Getting Personal about E-mail” »
Coming to you Live from AMP Summit 2010
Several TBG staff members are at the AMP Summit 2010 (@ampsummit) in downtown Washington, DC today and tomorrow. This event brings together leaders from the political, media, and policy arenas to discuss the way that technology is impacting the consumption of news and politics in today's world. AMP2010 is very similar in theme to the Personal Democracy Forum that the Bivings Group helps sponsor every year. (click here to see the Bivings Report coverage of PDF )
We created a specific SLURP140 just for this conference, so if you would like to stay in the know about the panels and discussions happening in DC this weekend – click here (on on the SLURP140 image on the left) to check out the live twitter stream.
This image shows the SLURP140 view of the top 10 most active twitter users for the AMP 2010 summit thus far into the conference. As you can see – TBG is squarely in 7th place.
If you would like to be informed about what TBG staff is doing at the conference, follow their tweets at @bivings
Data Visualization in the Developing World: How One Company is Helping Change the face of Online Maps
On September 22nd, I attended a meetup hosted by DC Media Makers featuring DevelopmentSeed – a firm specializing in open source data visualization and map development. Over the course of the last several years, this company has created custom maps detailing election fraud and corruption in Afghanistan as well as the post-Earthquake aid work going on in Haiti by 47 different non-profits. They used data provided by various government agencies and NGOs in order to create zoom-able, customizable, and searchable maps that really told a story about events happening overseas.
Many times when web development companies create maps for their clients, the do so using flash. However, open source software has recently lent itself perfectly to creating customizable maps (a la google maps) on drupal frameworks. We love designing with Drupal here at the Bivings Group, and definitely understand and support the ability for data to be transferred into non-flash maps that tell stories and show information in unique and creative ways.
Below is the Afghanistan 2009 election fraud map.
The below is the HaitiAidMap data for the city of Port Au Prince – broken down by project.
The employees at DevelopmentSeed also created another open source product – MapBox – which is their contribution to enhance further collaboration and creation of maps to tell stories across the globe. In more technical terms MapBox is “a suite of open source tools and services for creating and using custom maps in the cloud.” According to Ian Cairns for DevelopmentSeed, this project will soon be looking for Beta Testers, so if maps and open source information development is interesting to you, feel free to click on the link above and sign up to test this software suite.
If you’re interested in other open source mapping and information gathering projects, check out http://www.openstreetmap.org/
Slurp140 & Twitter Analysis of DC Mayor’s Race- Part 1
In terms of the ability of social networks and online advertising to serve as predictors for the success or failure of candidates at the polls, the general consensus is that while the Internet alone will not necessarily predict the winner, leaving the online space to your competitor is a good way to lose money and support. In other words, a campaign that is not well organized online is probably not well organized off-line.
On August 26th we deployed Slurp140 to start tracking mentions of Mayor Adrian Fenty and City Council Chairman Vince Gray. Since then, as of 11am today have seen a total of 4,696 tweets by 1,896 people that specifically mention a candidate by name or include the hash-tags #dcmayor or #dcdebate. If your looking for an easy way to follow the campaigns down the home stretch on Twitter, please check out Slurp140 and let us know what you think!
As most of us would agree, one of the most important factors for a political candidate is authenticity, especially in regards to Twitter accounts. In this respect, the official Twitter accounts of Mayor Fenty and Chairman Gray leave much to be desired, as it is clear that both are largely, if not exclusively maintained by staffers. With a little over 9 hours to go until the polls close, Slurp140 is ranking @Fenty2010 slightly ahead with 124 tweets and 1,577 mentions and @GrayforMayor with 85 tweets and 1348 mentions since August 26th. Overall, @Fenty2010 is followed by 852 people and following 943 while @GrayforMayor is followed by 923 people and following 921.
Surveying a few popular Twitter ranking services leads to some potentially interesting insights:
According to Tweetlevel:
@Fenty2010 receives: Influence score of 56.3, Popularity score of 42.2, Engagement of 44.9 and Trust: 45.4
@GrayforMayor receives: Influence score of 55.2 Popularity score of 43, Engagement of 46.5 and Trust: 43.6
According to Klout:
@Fenty2010 has a Klout score of 12 and classification as a “Dabbler” which is defined as someone who: “Might just be starting out with the social web of maybe you’re not that into it. If you want to grow your influence, try engaging with your audience and sharing more content.”
@GrayforMayor has a Klout score of 26 and classification as a “Conversationalist” which is defined as “You love to connect and always have the inside scoop. Good conversation is not just a skill, it’s an art. You might not know it, but when you are witty, your followers hang on every word.”
According to Tweetreach:
@Fenty2010 has reached 15,006 people via his last 50 tweets and 27,703 Impressions
@GrayforMayor has reached 14,125 people via his last 50 tweets and 29,951 Impressions
For partisans and political junkies, taking the Klout score analysis for both candidate somewhat out of context aligns surprisingly well with the narratives about the candidates and campaigns we have seen in the media. For instance, Klout states that @Fenty2010 “Needs to engage more with others or be more active to gain influence,” while @GrayforMayor “Is influential to a tightly formed network that is growing larger.”
Reposted from our Impact Watch Blog. Impact Watch gives you the power to monitor and measure all of your traditional and social media coverage in real-time from an easy-to-use online dashboard.