Not to be outshone by either Organizing for America or the people who put together that "State of the Internet" video, the White House has repackaged its health-care-by-the-numbers week-long campaign into a catchy two minutes of statistics, cute graphics, and punchy music.

Credit: State.gov/opinionspace

Last week came word that the U.S. State Department was launching a project called Opinion Space, a participatory, online experiment in mapping global public opinion. It was intriguing, exciting, engaging. It was also, how shall we say, the slightest bit inscrutable. Just what is this thing, really? So I rang up Ken Goldberg and asked him. Goldberg is a robot builder, artist, and director of the University of California at Berkeley Center for New Media (BCNM), the State Department's partner in the Opinion Space experiment. What follows are some quick notes on our conversation.

Goldberg traces the roots of Opinion Space back more than a decade. "We got interested in the idea of collaborative filtering in 1997," he says, referring to his group at BCNM, and the study of applying algorithms to collective decision making. It's the same technology that powers book recommendation engines, for example, explains Goldberg. Their interest sprang from a reaction against, he says, what they were witnessing in the tech world at that time. From artificial intelligence to the early online space, the models seemed all too cut and dry, predicated on a "very clean, binary world." Fast forward to the aughts. Goldberg started seeing the same miscues in the social media realm of Facebook and Twitter. "The model that is often used is that there is a binary relationship -- friends or not friends, followers or not followers. All the nuances are not being all that well captured." The result is a world of cyberpolarization, says Goldberg, citing an idea floated by Professor Cass Sunstein (now Director of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs Cass Sunstein) in Republic 2.0. "You think everybody agrees with you," says Goldberg, "and you get more and more extreme."

"But the real world isn't like that," he goes on. "Everything is messy and shades of gray." The real world -- and the world of robotics. (Yes, you were promised robots.) ...

Credit: Google.com

Ever since Google announced its intention in February to grace at least one American community with an experimental fiber-to-the-home broadband network, cities and towns have been climbing over one another to get Google's attention. The network will run at a blazingly fast one gigabit per second, so it's understandable that the idea is appealing to many places; add to that the fact that Google has pledged to offer the service at a accessible price. (How fast is one-gigabit-per-second? Fast! Really, really fast! So fast that it's about 100 times the speed of the connection in the PdF home office in Manhattan this morning.)

Some places, like the city of Concord, Massachusetts have gone about winning Google's favor by forming a Google discussion group to rally within. Others have gone the gimmick route; meet Google, Kansas -- formerly known as Topeka.

Then there's Jersey City, in the great state of New Jersey. That city of 240,000 is attempting to convince Google that they'd know what to do with such a broadband bounty of a pipe that is, metaphorically, about a mile wide. A group of interested citizens have joined up to launch the High Speed Jersey City online organizing drive, complete with website, Facebook group, and Twitter components, all aimed at collecting Jersey Cityites' (Cityeans'?) input on just how they'd use a super-highspeed network. Google's "Fiber for Communities" project is, officially, to be won through a formal Request for Information process. But it probably can't hurt for the people of Jersey City to, collectively, demonstrate that they can handle a 1Gbps pipe.

A quick clarification. A few days back, I wrote about an email survey from Organizing for America that asked supporters, among other things, how they've been connecting to OFA online. That wasn't, as I had said, a survey of the full base of OFA contacts on the future of the organization. Instead, says an OFA contact, the organization emails 1/53rd of its full list each week to continually get a pulse of what they're thinking. This just happened to be my week. I regret the error.

Credit: BarackObama.com

Organizing for America, the field wing of the Democratic National Committee, has just emailed supporters with what is at least its third survey since last January asking allies and fans how they feel about the direction of the organization. This survey, though, is extra-heavy on Internet questions, suggesting that OFA might be putting some renewed focus on revamping -- or at least reinvigorating -- its online strategy, something the Obama campaign, of course, was particularly known for.

"How would you rate the quality of the emails you receive from Organizing for America?," reads one question on the 18-question survey, and another asks whether OFA is sending out their missives too infrequently, not often enough, or at just the right clip. One often-heard critique of OFA's early days is that while the Obama campaign's emails had a certain style, eloquence, and passion, Organizing for America's early email blasts read like those of a dozen other organizations at least -- and were a bit heavy on the fundraising asks. Supporters here are also asked to rate how likely they are to participate in "Organizing for America’s next *online* activity," like signing a digital petition or sending a letter to the editor.

Finally, Organizing for America is curious just how well its supporters are connecting with them/the President's persona online. "Are you a fan of Barack Obama on Facebook?," the survey asks. "Do you follow @BarackObama on Twitter?"

In Russia, bloggers are angrily rejecting the government's explanation of a car crash that killed a well-known Moscow doctor and another woman. (Hat tip, @KatrinaNation) In the wake of the crash, law enforcement officials blamed the two women, saying the drove their Citroen into on-coming traffic. Only thing is, a number of witnesses saw a black Mercedes swerve and hit the women's car -- a Mercedes that had a special license plate given to elites in Moscow and that happened to be driven by an executive with the Russian oil giant LUKoil. And that's tapping into anger over the special treatment that political and economic elites get in Moscow today.

Over on Global Voices, Alexey Sidorenko has the story of what happened next, beginning with the fact that "many people noticed how the official version of the road accident did not make any sense to start with."

In brief, Russian bloggers are poking hole's in the government's story, producing video mock-ups showing the implausibility of the government's explanation, organizing opposition, and making mashups that depict the LUKoil exec as a evil doer straight out of "South Park." Really, Sidorenko's full post is worth a read. Voice of America also has good coverage of this and other, similar car crashes in Russia.

Credit: Organizing for America

Organizing for America is focusing energy on what it's calling its "Final March for Reform," a week-long health-care push that gives volunteers discrete, structured tasks for each particular day. It's like the Jenny Craig meal plan of political advocacy. OFA has gotten knocked for giving its grassroots allies unstrategic* work to do that doesn't have much of a direct impact on what's happening in Washington (though that's the work's stated aim). It's a criticism that can probably be leveled at the opening stages of the Final March program too (see below). But the program probably deserves extra points for making non-campaign advocacy manageable. Like Jenny Craig.

Day one's task is to "spread the facts":

If you haven't already, please download the fliers and posters below, and make sure everyone in your community sees the facts about reform.

The mission for day two (a.k.a. today) is to call Congress:

Everything we've worked for depends on winning this upcoming vote in the House of Representatives, and it's going to be very, very close. There's no time to spare. Call today and make it clear that Americans support reform

What's up for days three through seven? Stay tuned.

Meanwhile, the White House is keeping up its dead-simple approach to giving health care traction, a media push it's calling "By the Numbers." Each day brings a new figure, disseminate through blog, Facebook, and Twitter. Today's number? 625, as in the number of people, according to ThinkProgress, who lost their health insurance each and every day of 2009.

*Unstrategic isn't actually a word, it seems. But it works there, no?

From the great state of California, land of innovation, comes WikiMeg, a crowdsourced repository a la Wikipedia for the collected wisdom and opposition research on the 30-year career of Meg Whitman, a former eBay executive who is now a Republican candidate for governor. The site's creators, the Democratic coalition group Level the Playing Field 2010 -- an outfit affiliated with nurses' and teachers' unions -- call the project "a bold new experiment in democracy," and the site's tag line emphasizes its collaborative bent, call it "a place to discover and share information on billionaire CA candidate Meg Whitman." The San Francisco Chronicle's Joe Garofoli reports on the project:

Wikimeg.com invites the rest of the world to shake the bushes for information about Whitman and enables their new research assistants to post the results on the Internet, Wikipedia-style. But this self-described "experiment in community research and information gathering" comes with potential risks in how that information is vetted.

WikiMeg.com launched this morning. The only substantive section thus far is one on her use of two eBay corporate jets. There's a placeholder for information on "Meg Sightings," too.

The Whitman oppo wiki might be a first for a political campaign, but Organizing for America recently launched something similar with its "Groundswell" project to crowdsource organize efforts amongst volunteers.

I suggested to Garofoli when we spoke for his piece that, in my opinion, that a wiki-fied opposition site on a political candidate like this would probably benefit from requiring that contributors stick to the Wikipedia rules that have somehow made that repository of the world's knowledge into a resource that is generally speaking fairly unbiased. (It also probably marks the first time I've used the word "slime" in conversation.) A big rule: contributors aren't asked for original reporting. Instead, references must be linked to another published source. WikiMeg has adopted the same spirit, though first-hand reports aren't out-and-out banned. Read the rules, "Be factual and always hyperlink to your source. If you are the source of first-hand information, say who you are and how you know what you know."

It's easy to see how something like WikiMeg could descend into mean-spirited chaos, or fall apart as a gimmick. But there's also a chance that this could be a valuable opposition research tool -- particularly since, as contacts in California suggest, Democratic candidate Jerry Brown is known for running particularly parsimonious campaigns. The people's oppo might form of bulk of the challenger-vetting that first-time candidate Whitman gets. And all available reporting suggests that, for example, it's far more of a vetting than the McCain campaign gave to Sarah Palin. So it might not be such a bad thing for the state of the political debate.

Credit: GiveYourVote.org

Here's an intriguingly curious new project from the U.K. It's called Give Your Vote, and the idea is that, given the global impact of British policies, volunteers there are offering to give up their vote in the upcoming election based on the consensus of people around the world. How does the world want Britons to vote? Organizers are putting together an online (and, importantly, mobile) process by which people in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Ghana can put questions to local candidates in the U.K., and then direct their volunteer counterparts -- via text message -- how to vote come election day. The project officially launches March 15th.

Why Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Ghana? The war, climate change, and farm subsidies.

While the gut reaction to a project like this might be to be a bit unsettled (and I don't know nearly enough about British election law to know if this runs afoul in anyway), they make a reasonable case for why democracy bounded-by-borders is outdated in a global world:

In today’s world where democracy stops at the border, the people who make these decisions are not accountable to the people they affect.

Of course, that's pretty much exactly as democracy is designed to function. British MPs, at the end of the day, represent the people of Leeds, not the people of Accra. The impact of the policy choices made in the British Parliament on the people of other countries is somewhat less important -- in a procedural sense -- than what the people they represent think about the impact of those policy choices on the result of the world. But the other way to think about this is simply as the Internet facilitating some sort of advisory council for the voters of Britain. If you desire to vote as a citizen of the world, then here's a way for you to actually know how it is the world would care for you to vote.

Intriguing stuff. Thoughts?

Credit: Robert Scoble (Title: "Jesse Lee blogging in Wordpress")

What, you don't subscribe to Delta Sky Magazine? You're missing out, then, on this interview with White House director of online programs Jesse Lee. As a Hill and DCCC vet, Lee has depth of experience in government and politics that is probably matched by only a few blog/new media folks. Here's how Lee describes his gig, and the role of the new media team in the White House:

My title is “online programs director,” but given that this is the first New Media department in the White House, we all have to kind of make up our roles on the fly. In practice, I’m the managing editor of whitehouse.gov and the main writer for the blog. I conceptualize and execute a lot of the online engagement from online town halls with the president to the more regular online video chats with senior policy folks. And I also serve as a sort of liaison to bloggers, which means I have one foot in the broader communications and press shops, and am also the main new media contact for other offices in the White House like the Office of Health Reform and the Office of Public Engagement. It’s a lot of hats, but it actually reflects well on how well integrated new media is here, which is a challenge most organizations haven’t conquered yet (we’re not just “the Internet people” as is often the case).

There was a concern when the White House new media team got its start that it would, in org-chart or in practice, be circumscribed by its place as part of the White House's communications wing. But, as Lee describes and as observation tells us, the new media shop seems to have relatively comfortably settled into a role of part outreach, part activism, part organizing, and part a dozen other things. That's probably aided by the fact that they used lingo like "Facetweet," as Lee says. That probably scares the rest of the White House staff into giving them some space.

It's a fun and enlightening interview, in general. And Lee touches on the pressing question of what a guy like him wears to work in the White House:

As a blogger, I’m actually required to wear pajamas to work, and my office was remodeled as a replica of my mom’s basement (which is sad, because it is unfinished and floods in the rain).

Hee. But take this as insight into what passes for wild and crazy behavior in DC:

Just kidding—suit and tie every day, though I have been known to wear brown shoes from time to time.

Brown shoes! Call down the Secret Service. He works in the joint.