10Questions is an experiment; one with ambitious goals. Namely, we want to prove the efficacy of the internet's crowd sourcing ability, combined with the connective power of online video. Doing so will help open up public participation in political debates around campaigns and allow us, Americans from every walk of life, to directly participate in what should be a truly democratic discussion each election season.

• Former Maryland Governor and current Republican gubernatorial candidate Bob Ehrlich takes to YouTube to explain that, hey, he might not like early voting, but them's the rules. "I believe it's a solution in search of a problem, but it is the law in the state of Maryland," says Ehrlich, in a man-on-the-street-style clip. "We're going to live with it, and we're going to talk advantage of it." (via the Baltimore Sun)
• Apple's Ping promo drops Lady Gaga's Prop 8-related tweets, as well as mentions of mention of being her fan's "hooker."
• NASA takes its photos to the commons. And beyond! No, not really. Just to the public domain.
• Slate's Lean/Lock political prediction thingy adds four new races, including the newly clarified Manchin vs. Raese Senate match-up in West Virginia and the McAdams vs. Miller contest for Alaska Senate seat.
• And THOMAS, the Library of Congress's legislation database, spends the summer getting a bit more BlackBerry friendly.

Designing Obama is out, and online. The book chronicles the art and design of the 2008 Obama presidential run, from the perspective of Scott Thomas, the campaign's online creative director, and was notably funded through a Kickstarter campaign.

The remarkable consistency of the Obama campaigns public face, from the Gotham font to the instantaneously recognizable "O" logo to dozens of more minor yet consistent style choices, branded the Obama campaign in the early going as serious, considered business. This wasn't the old way, at least amongst Democrats. This was something different. Something blue. The same precise shade of blue, in fact, from rally sign to website to button. Creative directors make Don Draper-level bucks because their work can convince people of powerful things, and while I sometimes joke that the early success of Obama's long-shot bid came in large part because of his savvy typographical choices, I'm really not kidding.

Legendary design guy Michael Bierut has written the introduction to Designing Obama. In it, talks about how the campaign uniquely empowered quote-unquote outsiders to roll their own campaign by freely providing them with convincing design elements:

It isn't just strict standards and constant police work that keeps an organization on brand. It's the mutual desire for everyone to have every part of the effort look like The Real Thing. At the height of the campaign, my daughter asked me if I could design a flyer for a friend's Obama benefit party at a little bar in Hoboken, New Jersey. We took the text and reset it in Gotham, downloaded the O logo, and put it together in minutes. "Wow," my daughter said. "It looks like Obama's actually going to be there!'" Exactly.

Beirut also writes that while the candidate himself reportedly felt that his own logo was too polished, he was surrounded by political professionals who had other ideas. Speaking of David Axelrod and other top-level campaign officials, Beirut writes, "they must have know that the revolution, when it finally came, would have to be wrapped up in the most comprehensive corporate identity program the twenty-first century has yet seen."

(Today's 'dragging out Nancy's old political memories' day, but I do recall being asked to whip together a design identity for a very high-level politician at an extremely critical moment just because I'd shown some limited facility with design in the past.)

Whether Obama could have also won with Arial, an ever-shifting slogan, and a color palette that was all over the map, we'll of course never know. But it's a testament to the wide-spread belief that being smart about design helped the Obama campaign that we seem to be seeing more and more candidates paying attention to their branding, online and off. Hey, it's not for nothing that Scott Brown went and bought himself a copy of Gotham.

Designing Obama is available as a free online doc, a $4.99 iPad app, and $79 print edition. (via Jason Kottke)

With the second annual Personal Democracy Forum Europe conference just over a month away, we're pleased to announce that with the help of our longtime sponsor Google, we are making ten fellowships available to talented and deserving political technology innovators. The fellowships cover the conference registration fee and two nights lodging at the conference hotel.

Time's video unit (apparently Time has a video unit) has a report on young Kashmiris who are "harnessing the power of social media to unite them in their struggle for independence" -- primarily, it seems, through documenting violence and spreading those materials widely.

Using Front Porch Forum only to borrow rakes or find the best electrician trivializes its potential and our community.  We don’t (or at least I don’t) live here because of our proximity to Lowes, or the many choices in refuse collection... To me respectful disagreement about philosophy and politics  is preferable to a low key social facade that isolates each of us within our own bubbles of self-consistent rationale.

-- A response to an on-going low-grade debate in that remarkably Vermont-based online discussion space about whether politics should be fair game amongst neighbors. Front Porch Forum recently won a Knight News Challenge grant to expand its platform from 25 towns to 250.

The Department of Veterans Affairs is rolling out something called the "Blue Button" that's both drop-dead simple and potentially powerful when it comes managing the health of America's soldiers and vets.

The button (really more slate colored than pure blue, but no matter) is meant to be sprinkled across the network of health sites that vets might use. Click on it, and it pulls up the vet's electronic medial record, in ASCII text file. Here's a sample. That file is now, of course, portable, and can be used in a number of different health apps, like, say, Google Health.

The Blue Button is of a piece with the Obama administration's push to use electronic health records (EHRs) to bridge the gap in care between when servicemembers are actively serving and when they retire -- including, for course, the new generation of those who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama included billions in the stimulus in the hopes of kicking America towards EHRs, quickly. Proving that they can work in the military context would be a coup on those grounds. More that that, managing to harmonize the work of the multiple agencies involved in military health care would be validation for what Obama has talked about as his vision for using technology to reinvent how American government serves its citizens. All that in one big blue button.

Here's more on the VA Blue Button project, being done in collaboration with the Defense Department and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

There are a pair of painful images seared into my memory from my past political life, when I would here and there do field work on campaigns. One is of an organizer in (coincidentially) Wasilla, Alaska, hunched over a huge stack of papers late into the night, "cutting turf," or dividing up the lists of voter names and addresses into sections for door-to-door canvassers to use in the morning. Covered in beard stubble, his eyes ringed by red, clutching an orange highlighter, this field organizer looked underfed, exhausted, and in some amount of physical pain. The other is from Davenport, Iowa. Waves of eager volunteers came back to the campaign's downtown headquarters, clutching in their hands the walk lists that they had carefully annotated with what they had learned from voters by going house-by-house on that inhumanly frigid winter day. "Just drop 'em in that box," said the field organizer in charge. He knew, I knew, the tired volunteers knew that that box was never going to be used for anything other than a paper receptacle.

Some much wasted time, wasted energy, wasted passion, and wasted knowledge. In the 21st century, with all our mobile phones and digital gadgets, it's almost criminal. Huge improvements have been made in field organizing in the years since, but those mental pictures of misused human capital have stuck in my brain. I'm always on the lookout for signs that the American political animal, of any political stripe, is getting smarter, more efficient at managing the information flow that is the lifeblood of political campaigns.

Which is a long lead-in to the the news that Organizing for America, the outgrowth of the 2008 Obama presidential campaign now housed in the Democratic National Committee, has just announced that a mid-term upgrade of its iPhone app now includes a suite of canvassings tools. It's too late for that long-ago ground-down volunteer in Wasilla and those mispent volunteers in Davenport, but there is, perhaps, hope yet for those who will come after them.

OFA's updated iPhone app equips Democratic canvassers to quickly pull up data on voters in their turf (including maps to where they live), find literature that can be passed onto interested contacts, and, important, keep track of what field organizers are learning from their time spent going after voters. Check out the video above for more. For more, give a watch to the 40-second video OFA has put together on the new app.

A reader takes rightful issue with the idea, first stated by the LA Times and passed along by yours truly in yesterday's cache, that somehow President Obama managed to post four times to Twitter, in the first-person, while similtaneously delivering his speech of Iraq, with not a computing device in sight.

That's not right, it seems. The @BarackObama account, handled by Organizing for America, shows four tweets starting at 8:20pm -- that is, after Obama had wrapped up his brief Oval Office address on Iraq, which had started at eight. Duly noted. Maybe the east coast-west coast time zone discrepency was the problem.

But frankly, in retrospect, the whole thing seems a little silly. Should we be reassured by the notion that the President of the United States could have whipped out his BlackBerry after announcing the end of combat operations and tweeted? Politicians have staff so that they can outsource the particulars of their day-to-day work, driven -- they hope -- by the spirit of their vision and priorities. Why is it considered perfectly kosher for Jon Favreau or another White House speech writer to help craft lines like "I know this historic moment comes at a time of great uncertainty..." and the rest of what came out of the President's mouth during his Oval Office address, and then suddenly decide that having a professional at Organizing for America do the same for his tweets is horribly inauthentic?

Anyway, correction issued.

• A new Vanity Fair profile brings up the question of whether Sarah Palin's outsourced her Facebook and Twitter postings to a ghostwriter, but the consultant in question says that "anything that goes out under [Palin's] name is hers" -- making "Obama speech tonite may make u dig out ur old Orwell books" pure Palin.
• The same can't be said for Barack Obama, who tweeted in the first person while also somehow delivering his Oval Office address on Iraq last night.
• You know who's a good friend to transparency? Scribd, says Sunlight.
• Paticipatory democracy victories come in many flavors. Pat Quinn, mayor of Galesburg, IL, declares one in that people will now be able to put campaign yard signs up earlier and take them down later.
• A new push to let military members from the great state of New Jersey cast their ballots online.
• Nigeria's Minister of the Interior says that the Nigeria you see online isn't the real one.
• Native tribes in the U.S. are nervous about a shift in broadband funding they were hoping to see come their way.
• And speaking of broadband, the Federal Communication's hefty National Broadband Plan is soon to be translated into Tagalog, amongst other languages.