This week, a few hundred convened to attend the 2-day Politics Online Conference 2008 hosted by the  Institute for Politics Democracy and the Internet (IPDI) at the Renaissance Hotel in Washington, DC. 

On Day 2, I had the pleasure of participating on the Morning Plenary panel sponsored by Politico entitled, “White House 2.0.”  We discussed how the Internet, which has been so prevalent in the current presidiential race, will possibly change how a future Administration will govern.

The panel, moderated by Ari Schwartz, Center for Democracy and Technology included Sunlight Foundation Executive Director Ellen Miller, former Congressman Rick White of the Wood Bay Group and Tom Steinberg from the UK’s mySociety.org.

It was a very lively discussion where a number of innovative ideas for citizen activist and engagement websites were shared - but, in my opinion, most would be best managed outside the official dot gov arena.  There are a number of current restrictions and regulations that govern federal government sites that may provide some barriers to participation. 

Read the rest…

In preparation for an upcoming speaking engagement, I was doing some research on Sen. Lieberman’s (Independent-CT) past comments during a U.S. Senate hearing on E-Gov reauthorization.  So, I went to Google and searched for “lieberman egov” which yielded the following top organic result:

http://.senate.gov – Technical difficulties.
Sorry, the http://.senate.gov web page you have requested is experiencing technical difficulties. The Webmaster has been alerted. …
www.senate.gov/~gov_affairs/egov/ – 2k – Cached – Similar pages

Then, by visiting the page, the visitor is greeted with:

Sorry, the http://.senate.gov web page you have requested is experiencing technical difficulties. The Webmaster has been alerted.

You will be automatically redirected to the http://.senate.gov Home page after 10 seconds.

If this problem persists, please contact the Office of the Secretary Webmaster at webmaster@sec.senate.gov.

After waiting 10 seconds, you are not redirected to the Senate.gov Home page, but rather to this: “Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage.”

Of course, I should have just visited the President’s E-Gov Initiative site in the first place.