Also check out the great slide show on Flickr.

For those of you who are wondering how the FlutterFrog’s maiden voyage turned out, it was frickin’ awesome. The audience loved our goofy costumes, and laughed in the right places at our skit. Out trip down the runway was straight, our glide was level and respectably long at forty feet, and I’ve had landings much rougher than ours in commercial jetliners. Ultimately, we did not walk away with any prizes, but we did a better job than most of the teams there, we learned a ton, we had a great time, and we’re *SO* on track for a victory in 2009!

Hopefully there’ll be video of her maiden voyage later this week.

The reason I’m bringing it up is because Alex Feinberg, one of Care2′s engineers, was inspired to submit a proposal for Flugtag, and for the past three weeks, the “Flutterfrog” has been slowly coming together in a garage just north of Redwood City.

It’s been a blast building this amalgam of treefrog and butterfly. The team is especially proud that the Flutterfrog is earth-friendly (made from over 90 percent sustainable or recycled materials).

Launch day is Saturday, August 2 in Portland, Oregon’s Tom McCall Waterfront Park. If you’re in the area, come on by and wish the flight team well! If you can’t make it out, wish the FlutterFrog team good luck via ThePetitionSite.

You can also help our team win the people’s choice award by sending a text message to 72855 (RBULL) with TEAM 17 in the body between 11am and 4pm PST on Saturday, August 2. Help us win!

If you’re curious, the San Mateo Daily News and the Daily Journal wrote articles about the project. There’s also a short slideshow slideshow to be found at Flickr. And even a series of short, homemade videos of the Flutterfrog being built:

The folks at Care2—they’re a talented bunch.

The overarching theme of Lessig’s presentation was “9%.” He even had us chant it – “nine per-cent.” After a few examples, he came out with it – 9% is the amount of people who believe that our government is performing its function to the best of its ability. This particularly had to do with the ability of our leaders to stay fair when money comes into the equation.

He used examples that ranged from the sugar industry managing to make the national standard for daily sugar intake 25% (omg, ridiculous) to Hillary Clinton’s change of vote on a bill to crack down on credit card debt after she had received contributions from credit companies.

Then, as many of the speakers at NN08 did, he called on us — the bloggers — to take responsibility for calling leaders out on these problems. He said, “You are central to building the solution to this problem” and “remaking democracy.”

And finally, he announced a new project that he and Joe Trippi have championed. It’s a site called Change Congress, where citizens and candidates can pledge to support any of these four reforms:

- No money from lobbyists or PACs
- Vote to end earmarks
- Support reform to increase Congressional transparency
- Support publicly-financed campaigns

There is also a lot more to the site, including volunteering info, a blog, and a way to contribute to candidates who have taken this pledge. It’s a fascinating site, and they are currently mobilizing to put together a blogger council, create a targeted donations project and send messages to all candidates and members of Congress asking them to respond to this pledge.

At the end of his speech, he showed a clip of a video of Al Gore on Ted Talks and had the entire audience chant, “We have to solve the democracy crisis.”

And of course, Al Gore showed up shortly after, and his speech was (as always) breathtaking. He began by equating drilling to solve our gas crisis with drinking a beer in the morning to cure a hangover, which I thought was hilariously awesome. And of course he talked a lot about the Alliance for Climate Protection, and their goal to recruit 10 million activists.

One thing I thought was really interesting was when an audience member asked him about the meat industry. He was quite humble and admitted that he perhaps hasn’t been as forceful on that industry as he should have, and that probably can be attributed to the fact that he’s a meat-eater (people cheered for this…and made me sad). But he concluded by saying that we “have to walk before we can run” and that he’s been focusing on the broader concept of a green economy, which I suppose is valid. But of course, many of us would like to see him put pressure on the meat industry.

He also talked about the atrocities that our clients at Care2 are working to stop, such as mountaintop removal mining, liquid coal and e-waste. And he said that nuclear is probably going to see a slight increase, but that he doesn’t think it’s a good solution at all, mostly because of the expense and scale of nuclear plants.

All in all it was great to see him speak, and he far overshadowed the performance of the speaker.

First thought about this session? Wow, that’s a long title. Many of these sessions have excessively long titles, but this session made up for it. I learned about a lot of interesting tools.

Andrew Hoppin started things off – he’s from the NASA CoLab, and has done a lot of work to bring more transparency within NASA. But quickly Micah Sifry took over. Sifry is with the Sunlight Foundation (who are VERY well represented at this conference) and the Personal Democracy Forum. We’ve worked with Sunlight before, and they’re a great organization whose focus is really to improve the legislative process by using the internet and the social web to “shine light” on what goes on in Washington.

He started off by telling us about some fantastic resource sites, much like MAPlight.org, which I just wrote about, that allow you to see various types of information about bills, lobbyists, funding, etc. His particular examples were fedspending.org and opensecrets.org. He mentioned that often this data is not super reliable, either because it’s outdated or because the source hasn’t exactly been forthcoming.

But what he dove into next was the most interesting – the idea that people really want to share information and opinions (made clear by sites like yelp, amazon reviews, ratemycop, discussion forums, etc.) so why shouldn’t we have this type of a feedback loop with legislation and government? This is a potential way for us to improve the legislative process by voicing our opinions. It was frequently brought up that this is not a flawless system just yet – obviously, there’s going to be a lot of noise in this feedback, and perhaps the biggest challenge is to effectively filter through this information.

Another interesting site is earmarkwatch, sponsored by Taxpayers for Common Sense. Basically, people can find earmarks to bills, analyze what they actually mean (because they’re frequently cryptic), and potentially use it as a tool for exposing shady earmarks. It’s a great tool for investigative journalists and bloggers.

He also mentioned that with the growing popularity of sites like OpenCongress, people have begun to use these sites not just to critique bills, but also to share their personal experiences about how the bill is effecting them (he used the example of a bill effecting unemployment). I think this is a fascinating and unexpected use for these types of sites.

Yet another example was publicmarkup.org, which allows people to comment on legislation before it’s actually presented to any body. Of course, legislators would have to embrace this and feel comfortable enough posting the draft online, but if many did, it would be a great tool, and could definitely change the way the legislative process works.

Here are some basic points that he talked about next:
- getting legislation and hearings online (and in advance – draft text, three days before they vote on it)
- addressable bill text – different links, sections, etc so it’s easy to digest
- doesn’t think we need more emails to Congress (uhh…I disagree )
- forums where people can give feedback, and Congress can check in on it

It’s certainly hard to see this being immediately effective and accepted by our government, but if enough people pushed for it, I could see it starting to build a movement.

Next was Jeanne Holm of NASA/Jet propulsion lab and the California Institute of Technology. She talked a lot about how NASA is using facebook, twitter, and Second Life to bring people into the process and make them feel more involved. Interesting, but not particularly relevant to me personally.

One thing I found sadly hilarious was when Justin Hamilton, a senior adviser to Rep. George Miller of CA, mentioned that they did a virtual Congressional session in Second Life, but that they didn’t ultimately think it was worth it because there wasn’t much interest. I hate to say it, but “duh.” I may be wrong about this Second Life thing, but I will be happy to laugh in people’s faces if it fails.

There were a few other topics, but the last one that interested me was the idea of putting data together in interesting ways that gets people interested, presented by W. David Stephenson. He showed some interesting examples of data graphs, map mashups, etc. One of them was a map of all the potholes in DC with frequently updated status messages. Useful, I suppose. Then there was illegalsigns.ca, something more close to my heart. This site tracks Toronto’s outdoor advertising industry, and posts the locations of illegal billboards. There’s also Chicagocrime.org, which is essentially a police blotter on a map.

A very useful and interesting session, even if it was poorly moderated and presenters didn’t get their fair time.