[LINK] Obama's web strategist to advise Rudd

[David Lochrin]

>From Fairfax Digital - http://www.theage.com.au/news/technology/web/obamas-web-strategist-to-advise-rudd/2009/02/13/1234028253832.html

Asher Moses
February 13, 2009 - 10:01AM
Page 1 of 2 | Single page

The man who galvanised scores of Barack Obama voters with an unprecedented online campaign is in Australia to advise the Rudd Government on how it engages the public and fights elections.

The last federal election saw both Kevin Rudd and John Howard dabbling with new web technologies like MySpace but, by the next election, all sides of politics will have no choice but to use the internet to create a two-way dialogue with voters, said Ben Self, founder of internet strategy firm Blue State Digital.

As part of the Obama campaign, Self led an online donation drive that netted over half a billion dollars from over 3 million donors. He devised the MyBarackObama social networking website, which involved 13 million voters from the bottom-up and created an army of Obama volunteers who knocked on doors, collected donations through events and house parties and campaigned on his behalf.

Now, Self, who was enlisted by Obama 10 days before he announced he would run for President, is in Sydney for a series of speaking engagements. In an interview he confirmed he would be meeting with the Rudd Labor Government.

"We are going to be talking to the Labor Party as a part of this," he said.

"People want to be engaged with their government and either fix it, change it or be a part of it, and so you just have to give them a way to do that."

But Self - a diehard democrat who experimented with online campaigning for Howard Dean during his 2004 Presidential bid - baulked at the idea of meeting with Opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull.

"The conservative parties tend to be much more top-down and less open to new ideas," he said.

Indeed, the Opposition this month criticised the Prime Minister for spending $1.1 million on 36 new promotional government websites.

By giving voters a legitimate stake in the movement and a say in its direction, Self said the Obama campaign was able to "leverage these people to do a phenomenal amount of things".

Since his inauguration, Obama has attempted to convert that grassroots energy into a more durable movement through his new political arm, Organising for America. He's created websites calling for people to suggest and vote on ideas - which will be presented to him as part of a "presidential briefing book" - and announced his intention to create the United States' first-ever chief technology officer position, responsible for co-ordinating all of the White House's online initiatives.

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David