All Weekly Updates

Oh come on! We all knew that I couldn’t consistently maintain a weekly blog post. That day will come, but I’m not there yet – and it’s been a really crazy month! More about that below:

1. Gov20LA Every event I attend, I gain a new perspective on the constantly changing industry I work in (Gov2.0, OpenGov, Citizen Engagement – to mention a few names for it). Gov20LA was great for me for several reasons: 1. Networking – zowie! 2. Getting an outside the beltway view of what we’re all doing here – incredibly valuable. And 3. Amazing food. No seriously – DC has got nothing on LA – and for anyone that followed my tweetstream (@wmburke) during that time, you know what I’m talking about.
2. Industry Focus The focus in this industry has been on ‘technology in government’ and is changing/ needs to change to ‘citizen-centric government’ (or perhaps ‘citizen participation’ or some other term that captures the idea even better).
3. My Role My background is in ‘things’ – engineering, product design, manufacturing, etc. but what I’m being asked to do by others all relates to ‘people’. I’ve been struggling with this adjustment, but it feels right. My role is to bring people together, to educate and inform, to connect, to facilitate the creation of things that I alone would not be able to accomplish.
4. ParticipationCamp is coming together, transformed and reborn from last year’s eDemocracyCamp. April 17th and 18th, right before POLC, with a focus on ‘advancing public participation in government by connecting government managers and staff, public engagement experts, online tool developers, and citizens’.
5. Workshop: Creating GREAT Citizen Engagement Software is up and taking registrations at http://j.mp/GREATces. This is our first event that we are charging real money for and it’s coming together fabulously. It’s target audience is developers, and the goal is to really boost their ability to build great software in this market and work together to connect citizens to their representatives. Have a look and spread the word.
6. HillCamp This is a little side project I’ve been working on for some time that is finally starting to come together. The idea is to have a staffers only unconference on Capital Hill to discuss use of social media for citizen engagement. After all, the staffers are the only experts in the sense of on-the-ground experience working within their unique situation. This could really boost comprehension and use of these tools within Congressional offices.

Alright, enough from me for this week (month). When I write it out all short like that, it doesn’t look like nearly as much as it felt like going through it. Nonetheless, I think we’re poised to have a GREAT month.

January 25 – 31 went like this – lots of meetings, not as much actual work as I would have liked. The good news is there’s still time to get it done. The bad news is that means there’s more to do in the time that’s left.

• The fabulous Kelli Shewmaker (co-organizer of Social Justice Camp) has agreed to help develop our volunteer coordination system. The goal is to make it easy for anyone interested in the future of government to get involved in making it better.
• Art Bushkin joined our Advisory Board this week. Art has been around the Internet (or its predecessors) for more than 40 years and honored me by saying, “I meet hundreds, even thousands of people, but there’s a reason I’m sitting here with you.”
• Preparing to launch a fundraising campaign focused on engaging 2,010 donors in 2010.
• Working on several upcoming events that will be announced when they are ready!
• Met with Britt Blaser to discuss the great work he’s doing with iVote4U. Is this the future of citizen to government communication?
• Jim Gilliam made some minor tweaks on GovLuv that should improve its performance and stop those pesky error pages – we’ll see. They’ve been difficult to track down!
• Discussed GovLuv with Karina Newton, Director of New Media for Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s office. She likes it! It’s easy to see why she is where she is – she’s intelligent, personable, quick-witted, and on top of her game. Impressive.
• Met with Daniel Bennett of the e-Citizen Foundation during our (new, but planned to be regular) Open Gov @ Open City meetup. They’re working on some great stuff and we discussed ways that we could work together to accomplish even more.
• Had my first discussion with Billy Grundfest (Hollywood writer – Mad About You, etc…) – he and I will be working together to manage the Language of Gov2.0 track at Gov20LA this coming weekend. He’s so much fun and quick to grasp ideas – it’s going to be an amazing weekend!

I’m excited about these short weekly updates. The goal is to provide some real insight into what’s going at the Open Forum Foundation as a starting point to building awareness of the value of the work that we’re doing and engaging more people in it!

January 18 – 24 was a busy week.

• Started off the week by meeting with Lucas Cioffi to discuss how the Open Government Directive Workshop had gone and to open a new idea, which is the next item.
• Submitted to the eDemocracyCamp planning team that we should change its focus to that of bringing together the dialogue and deliberation community (eg, NCDD), developers working in the citizen engagement space, and government employees and staffers (credit where credit is due: Kaliya Hamlin originated this idea).
• I re-organized myself with a GTD tool called Doit.im
• Connected with VoteSmart about updating information that we find wrong when working with GovLuv (for those unfamiliar, VoteSmart provides the back-end database of elected officials that we use for GovLuv).
• Met with the ED and staff of the Republican Study Committee to show them GovLuv – they were very impresssed and are excited to pass it on to their 130 or so members of the House of Representatives.
• I spoke with Britt Blaser on Friday. He is working on a citizen engagement platform called IVote4U that comes complete with a Facebook app. Doing some very exciting work!
• Gong Szeto, thinker extraordinaire, and I had a great conversation about the future of the citizen engagement space during which he gave me a brilliant idea for a conference that we could facilitate. More on that as the details come into focus.
• Finally, we ended the week with a fundraising meeting between myself, Meagen, and Dave. 2010 is about monetary sustainability and we’re taking it seriously.

I’m also considering doing these as short videos, although I haven’t gotten it all together yet. Let’s see if this tiny note provides any impetus for figuring that out…

I’m reviving the Weekly updates that were short-lived so many weeks ago now! I’m sure nothing interesting has happened in the last 62 weeks however – ha!!

Anyway, here’s the brief of what happened the week of January 11 – 17:

• Personally, I’m feeling better – Yay!! I’ve been sick since New Year’s Eve.
• I attended the Open Government Directive (OGD) Workshop on Monday. This was a free event put together by Lucas Cioffi to give federal agency employees help and support in implementing the OGD on its tight timelines. It was well done and  seemed productive for the majority of attendees.
• Tuesday I met with Kaliya Hamlin (unconference.net), who was in town from San Francisco to facilitate the OGD Workshop (she also facilitated CongressCamp back in September). We discussed may things, including how to run unconferences and the need for one specifically focused on bringing together the dialogue & deliberation community, the techies working in the citizen engagement space, and government employees.
• I sent a rough draft of a budget to Board members Nisma (Secretary) and Patrick (Treasurer) to review.
• Board President Dave, Meagen (fundraising committee chair), and I had 2 fundraising meetings this week. 2010 is the year of monetary sustainability for Open4m. We have some exciting things coming together, but I’ll save the details for the official announcements!
• Friday night I got the opportunity to facilitate an unconference on Saturday – Social Justice Camp was a rousing success (socialjusticecamp.org) and allowed me to practice my Open Space Technology skills (the process behind most unconferences). This was an important opportunity for me as I anticipate we will be running many more unconferences in the future.

Onwards and Upwards,
Wayne

But I won’t overload you with it…

This is just the beginning of the re-awakening!! We have been in hibernation, shall we say – focused on internal administrative details and networking for months – head down, making significant progress, and establishing ourselves in DC.

Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll be filling you in on more details, but for now, just have a look at our new website and see what you think – same url, different look!!

http://openforumfoundation.org

Hello all,

I hope that everyone has had happy holidays, a fantastic new year, and an exciting inaugural season. I know DC has been on fire for the last week with Obama-mania!

This is just a short post to let you know that there are a lot of exciting changes coming down the pike, and to ask you a small favor. We have entered a competition for $25,000 seed money through http://changemakers.net/ (a division of Ashoka) that is sponsored by We Media. Well, right now you can post comments and rate the ideas that have entered the competition. Consequently, I’m asking you to click through on the following link and post your thoughts and feelings to help bring attention to what we’re trying to do at the Open Forum Foundation. I think you’ll find the new perspective particularly interesting as well – you may learn something new about us in the process!

http://www.changemakers.net/en-us/node/17203

While you’re there, please browse around and see what you think of some of the other ideas that have entered. Changemakers has a very innovative program through which they are trying to encourage innovation and social networking amongst social entrepreneurs. Whatever we can do to support them will be time well spent.

If you find a particularly interesting idea that may have synchronicity with what we’re doing, please post below or send us a note!

Thanks,
Wayne

Hello dear readers!

Yet another week has passed here at the Open Forum Foundation with some progress towards completing the fiscal sponsorship agreement and solidifying partnerships. I’m working on Memoranda of Understanding with Lucas Cioffi at DeepDebate.org, David Stern at MixedInk, and Ryan Ozimek at PICnet, as well as Lou Klepner at Gateway to Gov, who has also agreed to be our fiscal sponsor. These organizations are primarily technology focused, but all with a political bent or direct applicability to Project One.

At the same time, I have met with Tim Hysom from the Congressional Management Foundation and believe that our organizations will be able to work together on this project as well (this will be slow to develop however – they run trainings for the incoming freshman Congressman, and this will take most of their resources over the next couple of months). They are well-respected on Capitol Hill and focus on research, trainings, and consulting with Congressional offices to improve their management capabilities. I’m very excited at the possibility of working with them, so I’ll keep you informed as that comes along.

Finally, I’m continuing to reach out to new people and make new contacts, but with a much stronger understanding of how to proceed now. I have been emotionally struggling with wrapping up these little details and preparing for the fundraising push, and think I’m about to get through it! I now grasp on a deeper level what I have logically understood: I am working on very important stuff! And while our society tends to look at making money as the main indicator of success, achieving acceptance of Project One will be a huge accomplishment with ramifications that reach wide and deep.

I am currently devoting my life to this project, and in order to succeed it must have money. This can not be accomplished through hopes and dreams, but only through effective application of a fairly large amount of cash. I need to find those people that have spent their lives focused on making money and also see the importance of what I’m doing, and make a deal with them; “You have succeeded in one measure of success. Now contribute that to the greater good, and together we will solidify the ability of every individual to have a legitimate voice in their government.”

While asking for money often feels bad in some way, I am seeing that in fact there is no shame in asking for money if you intend to do something valuable with it. It is not begging, nor is it borrowing, nor is it stealing. On the contrary, it is a contribution to society that falls outside the norms of Adam Smith’s invisible hand of the market.

Soon I will have the opportunity to put this into play. To meet with individuals who have the ability to share their resources with the Open Forum Foundation so that we can accomplish what we set out to do. I’m not quite ready at this moment, but I will be soon.

And I’m excited about it.

How quickly time passes…

I changed the way my updates work last week and updated the look of them to better match the website (what do you think?). I added a formal “Weekly Update”, changed the “Infrequent Newsletter” to a “Monthly Newsletter” (special thanks to Lou for the idea), and kept a separate category for miscellaneous Blog Posts. This should give each of you the ability to only get exactly what you want and how ever often you want it.

In so doing, I thought it would be nice to number the weekly updates in honor of how long I’ve been working on this project. Since the idea came to me on April 14, this update marks the completion of 29 weeks of effort devoted to the creation of a system that makes communication between elected officials and constituents as easy as possible.

Motivation

This numbering scheme provides a subtle yet continuous motivation for me to get this done as soon as possible. I believe I have referenced my frustrations with the speed of developing a non-profit in my previous writings, but all in all, it is a good place that we are at. The last couple of weeks started out at a dizzying pace, and have since slowed (to give me time to catch up perhaps?). I feel as though I have just topped a steep uphill climb, and am suddenly confused by the plateau that I’ve arrived at. It holds some minor tribulations as well as preparation for the next big push.

Specifically, we are now a legal entity and beginning to form relationships with organizations that are very well placed and devoted to developing a legitimate and reliable solution. As those relationships solidify, I will post their details on the website and let you all know about it. In addition, I am still in the process of determining the best way to solve the legal complications so that I can begin receiving tax-deductible donations. These then are the few tribulations on the plateau – we have wrapped up so many things, but these few details still await resolution.

The next big push

Resolution of those final details will prepare us for fundraising! Solidifying these partnerships is one key element to proving our legitimacy and showing that we have a team that is both committed and capable of accomplishing the task we are aiming at. The other is re-visiting the budget and getting our bank accounts and accounting software up and running. So many little things to manage in the beginning, but we are SO close!!

Alright, that’s it for now. Thank you for reading! If you know anyone that I should be talking to about, or working with on fundraising, send me an email or just click through below and add a comment. I’ll be sure to follow up!

Wayne