Holy crap!! This is going to happen!!!

I imagine that for everyone who sees  a big dream come to fruition, there must be a moment like this.

You’re head down, slogging away, dealing with the myriad concerns and minutiae of bringing this thing together. You may have lost track of your progress or you may have just made a number of exciting accomplishments all at once, but at some point – when you head home at the end of the day or stop for a drink and there’s nothing else going on in your mind, it hits you:

“Holy crap!! This is going to happen!!!”

It’s scary and exciting and wonderful all at once.

I’ve spent the last fourteen months of my life focused on this one thing. People marvel at my progress and for the most part, things are moving along in the right direction. But really, at the end of the day, what have I accomplished? I mean, what tangible proof of my efforts can I point to? Honestly: nothing. Everything up until this moment has been learning and studying, networking and building trust, selling the idea and tweaking the solution – but it’s all been a dream. A wonderful, idealistic dream that social media can give every citizen a direct connection to their elected representatives.

But still a dream.

A dream no more

Well, that dream entered a new phase on June 27th, 2009. It is now a tangible path that is close at hand and it IS in fact going to become reality. Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of complexities left to contend with, but they are becoming the minority and are no longer seemingly impossible to deal with!!

What led to this revelation? Well, a number of things on Day 1 of Participation Camp including:

• finding a collaborative partner in Jim Gilliam (more on him below),
• meeting potential board members,
• learning about some likely directions for funding,
• a wonderful conversation with Peter Corbett of iStrategyLabs,
• running an excellent session on Technical Solutions for Communicating with Congress,
• meeting our 3 new social media interns (more on them in the coming weeks!), and
• realizing that the Open Forum Foundation has moved from obscurity to being a known entity in the arena of technology and politics.

It was a great day, and not to belabor the point, but I do need to give a little more information on Jim Gilliam. First of all, he is an amazing developer (I have heard him called the best working in this field). He is responsible for http://WhiteHouse2.org/, which was created as a test bed for modeling how citizens may inform the White House of their priorities. And more recently for the release of the twitter petition site, http://act.ly/.

He and I shared lunch on Saturday, realizing that we could accomplish this dream must faster as a team. Conceptually, we have both been thinking along similar lines, while pragmatically we each bring very different skill sets. He has the online community building and development experience that I was searching for, and I have built a DC network and understanding of the political and cultural complexities on the Hill that will enable the creation of a solution that will actually be adopted.

Add to this the fact that he already has the foundation for the solution built and released as open source at http://nationbuilder.com/ and we just cut about four months off the development time that I was envisioning.

It’s all very exciting, but what’s the take-away? There’s a lot of work to do!

But now, I have a tangible path to follow – a solid understanding of how to turn this dream into reality. And even moreso, the realization that it will, in fact, become reality!!

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Wayne Moses Burke
July 9th, 2009 1:05 am
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