• UK | The Conservative Technology Manifesto - and the importance of skunkworks
  The Conservative Party recently launched the Conservative Technology Manifesto "to make the British government the most technology friendly in the world" (Rishi Saha talked about the Conservative party strategy at PDF Europe): increasing broadband speed, improving access to government data, creating 600.000 jobs are the keypoints. Anyway the document is ambitious and it seems to have one very innovative commitment: creating "a small IT development team in government – a 'government skunkworks' – that can develop low cost IT applications in-house and advise on the procurement of large projects".

An earlier version of this post misstated the date of this call; it is happening this Thursday, Feb. 18th. We apologize for the error!

In 2004 and 2006, the Republican party led the political field in microtargeting, with big results.

In 2008, the opposition caught up. The Obama campaign, wrote Marc Ambinder, was "buttressed by a year-long, psychographic voter targeting and contact operation, the likes of which Democrats had never before participated in."

How can your campaign best use data to figure out how to reach and activate individual supporters -- without having to start from scratch every election cycle?

Join the PdF Network on Thursday, February 18 as Jeff Crigler, CTO and Bob Blaemire, Director of Business Development, Catalist, the architects of the Obama targeting effort, clue us in to latest advances in voter targeting.

Thursday, Feb 18th at the PdF Network
Data is Power: How to Target Supporters & Win Votes in 2010
1-2 p.m. EST

Join the call!

Check out our upcoming PdF Network calls...

This year’s European elections marked an all time high for disengagement and an all time low for turnout, reaching a meagre 43% pan Europe (that’s 20% - or a third - down on 30 years ago), worse even in the UK at an mightily undemocratic 34.7% (up from 24% 10 years ago mind).

Back at the end of June this year, I was invited over to PDF 2009 as one of the Google Fellows to experience the buzz and brains of the Personal Democracy Forum for the first time in person. And it didn’t disappoint.

The European Union is a proto-democratic polity, focused on the city of Brussels, dispersed over 27 member states and 500 million citizens, based on a story of overcoming centuries of violence and held together by complex administrative procedures and a small number of Europeanised elites willing to invest time and effort in bridging the gaps that are still obvious.

Due to the multiplication of breaking news related to online criminality in Italy (Facebook groups exalting famous mafia bosses, Google executives accused of defamation and violating privacy for “allowing” a video to be posted online showing an autistic youth being abused, growing concern about online piracy, etc..), the issue of Internet regulation has acquired a very important role on the Italian political scene.

At a time when so much of the world is in crisis, how can you effectively use online networking tools to rally support and action around your issue?

Since its launch in July 2008, the Pickens Plan, a blueprint to reduce America's foreign oil dependence, has recruited 1.5 million online supporters, built a 200,000 person strong social network (push.pickensplan.com) and produced over 1.1 million emails to Congress and the administration. The campaign won Campaign & Elections' Reed Award for "Best Use of Social Networking Technology" and the AAPC's Pollie Award for "Public Affairs Campaign of the Year."

This Thursday, the team behind the Pickens Plan online program will share detailed insights of how they did it. From 1-2pm EST on May 28th, internet strategy consultants Todd Ziegler of The Bivings Group and Heather Lauer of Tribe Effect LLC will discuss "How the Pickens Plan Recruited 1.5 Million Volunteers in Nine Months."

To join the call (and get the opportunity to pose your questions directly to Todd and Heather), you’ll need to join the PdF Network.

Maybe there weren't that many "P.U.M.A.s" after all. A new Harvard study -- from some PDF friends at Berkman -- reports that male voters displayed "in-group" bias for people who shared their candidate preference in the 2008 Democratic presidential primary, while women voters did not.

The tendency to favor fellow Obama or Clinton supporters was measured through a generosity exercise, the "dictator game," which found that male voters chose to be more generous to others who supported their preferred candidate, be it Clinton or Obama. Women voters did not exhibit that tendency. "In-group favoritism existed in male Democrats after Clinton's concession in June," reports the study, and "persisted into August."

What about all those unity gestures during the Democratic Convention?