For IP Twitterers: The PdF Twitter Debate is On

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

________________________________________
From: Michael R. Nelson [mnelson () pobox com]
Sent: Saturday, June 21, 2008 4:47 AM
To: David Farber
Subject: For IP Twitterers: The PdF Twitter Debate is On

From the Personal Democracy Forum conference:

http://www.techpresident.com/blog/entry/26569/breaking_pdf2008_hosts_obama_mccain_twitter_debate

We're pleased to announce a first for the Internet Election of 2008: Starting Friday night, June 20, a designated 
representative of both of the major presidential campaigns are going to participate in a free-wheeling debate on 
technology and government, moderated by Time magazine blogger Ana Marie Cox<http://twitter.com/anamariecox> and 
channeled via Twitter.
The McCain campaign will be represented by Liz Mair<http://twitter.com/lizmair>, the online communications director of 
the Republican National Committee. The Obama campaign will be represented by Mike 
Nelson<http://twitter.com/mikenelson>, a professor at Georgetown University who 
served<http://explore.georgetown.edu/people/mrn24/?PageTemplateID=137> in the Clinton White House under Vice President 
Gore on tech policy issues. He is an outside advisor to Obama's campaign on issues of technology, media and 
telecommunications
The debate is an initiative of Personal Democracy Forum and is being launched in tandem with next week's annual PdF 
conference<http://www.personaldemocracy.com/conference>, which is taking place Monday and Tuesday at Rose Hall in NYC.
We're taking an open approach to this debate, as befits the medium where it is taking place. Each day, Ana is going to 
tweet a question or two, and Liz and Mike will tweet their answers. There is no set limit on answers--we're letting Ana 
make the framework up as the debate evolves. Obviously, Mike and Liz will be working within Twitter's 140-character 
limit for individual tweets, but they can link out or post multiple tweets as part of their answer to a question. It 
will be up to Ana to determine when a topic is done, and also whether to pull in comments or queries from other Twitter 
users who are following along.
Mike, Liz and Ana will be using their personal Twitter accounts, @mikenelson, @lizmair and @anamariecox, and we've also 
asked them to tag their responses with the hashtag #pdfdebate. We suggest that readers who want to follow along use a 
Twitter application like Summize.com<http://summize.com/search?q=%23pdfdebate> to track the conversation.
We think this will be a nice, lightweight and innovative way to showcase how each presidential campaign thinks about 
issues around technology policy and government reform, and hopefully the format will be fun and engaging (it's hard to 
filibuster on Twitter, and Ana is not likely to take well to someone avoiding a question).
As for when will the debate end--the answer is we don't exactly know. We expect it to run at least through the end of 
the conference Tuesday, but the beauty of web services like Twitter is that they are very flexible, and thus if new 
issues arise and the participants are willing, we could keep this conversation going as long as it's useful!


--
http://www.personaldemocracy.com
http://www.techpresident.com
http://micah.sifry.com
http://www.twitter.com/mlsif




Michael R. Nelson
703-598-5187 cell
mnelson () pobox com


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