*** Democracies Online Newswire - http://www.e-democracy.org/do *** Just below is an article submitted by Bob Hansan, President of Capitol Advantage. Far below are my comments. - SLC The Business of Internet and Politics in 2000 What a year! Do you remember? This was going to be the year the Internet would change politics. This was going to be the year no candidate could afford not to have an Internet strategy. This was going to be the year that when a lot of money and an idea, you would be able to change the world and in the process make yourself and everyone around you wealthier than ever imagined. This was going to be the year when the entire political industry would spread its delicate wings and fly. Well...it looked real good on paper. Millions of dollars have been invested in the Internet and politics space this year and the results have been mixed at best. The most commonly mentioned companies in this space -- Voter.com, Grassroots.com and Speak-Out -- have either run out of money or changed their business model. And a few companies who were around before the dot com explosion were caught up in the dot com implosion and their future now seems tenuous at best. The bottom line in this space has and will always be measured by activism. Companies that lost sight of this bottom line in 2000 will not be around in 2001. But not all is lost, according to an e-advocates/Juno survey, candidate websites did make a difference. The study found that in the eight toss-up U.S. House and Senate races where a challenger won, an overwhelming majority - 75 percent - employed a superior Web strategy, as defined by online voters in a February 2000 e- advocates/Juno survey and candidate rankings on top search engines. Additionally, in seven out of the eight races, the winning challenger raised less money than the losing incumbent - an anomaly in the results of all congressional races nationwide. As President of Capitol Advantage, I have had a front row seat watching this space try to take flight. To those that are new to this space I say welcome. To those that are already tired of this space I say please do not give up. To those that say there is a lot of gold in those hills I say read the first paragraph again, and again. For this space isn't just about money. This space is and always will be about connecting people to those in our government that are charged with the difficult responsibility of governing. It seems many of us may have lost sight of that sometime during the past year. Fourteen years ago Capitol Advantage published its first directory on Congress. Four years ago, we decided to put our information online. We did so in a way to allow for more and more people to use our tools to learn more about their elected officials and those who wanted to represent them. The course we took was different than most. Instead of creating a destination site, we instead tried to distribute our product to those places where activists are most likely to visit. C-SPAN http://congress.nw.dc.us/c-span was our first client, naturally. Today our flagship Internet product CapWiz [SLC Added - http://congress.nw.dc.us/yourorg/ ] is currently in use by over 700 organizations. An individual using our product on one of our client's site may never know about Capitol Advantage or our mission. More likely, they are merely focused on the issues that affect them deeply. They join a group, they chat, they rally and all the while the tools are there for them when they are ready to act. And act they do. Over six million messages were sent to elected officials throughout the past year using CapWiz. This isn't big business, but it is important business. If people question their ability or opportunity to be involved in the political process then that should give us great pause. How many people today know how to get the phone number to Dominos pizza but not the name of their Congressman? The tools for political involvement should be as common in our lives or as easy to get as the phone number for Dominos. Although 2000 saw a big increase in activism online, we can do so much more. We can educate more. We can empower more. We can as an industry, if focused on what matters, give every person the opportunity to make his or her voice heard. And if the political legacy of 2000 is the realization that every person should have an opportunity to be heard, than the future of the Internet as a tool for involvement is very bright indeed. Bob Hansan [EMAIL PROTECTED] COMMENTS FROM STEVEN CLIFT Over the last few months I have had a couple interesting conversations with Bob Hansan, President of Capitol Advantage. Whether your activities are commercial, non-profit, or governmental you need to develop a sustainable model. As you may have noted, I am a big fan of the syndication model. I want to find ways to get good civic content out to as many citizens as possible be it through commercial or non-commercial models. I asked Bob to write up an article sharing his opinion on the commercial politics online situation that I could share with DO-WIRE subscribers. The fact that so many sites use their products including Yahoo <http://politics.yahoo.com/> is a testament to the syndication (or distributed integrated multiple sites interface model). A fundamentally interesting question that came up in our discussions is - what should be left to the .com world and what should be .org/.gov. What should foundations fund, what should taxes pay for, what is best provided competitively? As sustainable commercial models emerge, this will be a grey area to explore policy wise. In Minnesota, I plan to propose in our E-Democracy Legislative Study <http://www.e-democracy.org/study/> that the Secretary of State be required by law and funded to create a *public domain* database of all elected and appointed officials from all units of government. I want this frequently updated database to be made available to anyone, including the major web sites in Minnesota so they can integrate elected official look-ups into their own web sites. There is currently no integrated government database of all elected officials, I have never seen one that lists all government units comprehensively for that matter. The policy question - is this a fundamental tax funded (or foundation-funded) requirement for an Internet-age democracy or should such a directory be left to the commercial sector? I am not sure, except to say that it will emerge differently in different states across the United States. If you would like to spend some time creating a value-added article for the 1600+ subscribers on DO-WIRE, please send me a proposal. I'd like to get some additional perspectives from the .com, .org, and .gov community. Sincerely, Steven Clift [EMAIL PROTECTED] Democracies Online http://www.e-democracy.org/do ^ ^ ^ ^ Steven L. Clift - W: http://www.publicus.net Minneapolis - - - E: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Minnesota - - - - - T: +1.612.822.8667 USA - - - - - - - ICQ: 13789183 *** Please send submissions to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *** *** To subscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *** *** Message body: SUB DO-WIRE *** *** To unsubscribe instead, write: UNSUB DO-WIRE *** *** Please forward this post to others and encourage *** *** them to subscribe to the free DO-WIRE service. ***
