From Alex F., designer and pilot of Care2’s Flutterfrog:

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 Flutterfrog and crew are ready to go.

Every year, Red Bull sponsors a contest called Flugtag USA. Supposedly the challenge is to achieve homemade, human-powered flight, but as near as I can tell, the real goal is to dive off a pier with as much style as possible. That and to have a good time doing it.

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.

I have to say, this was one of the highlights of my time at Netroots Nation. Larry Lessig is an amazing speaker, period. His powerpoint presentation was stunning, with individual words and phrases showing up on the big screens as he said them, and many funny and fascinating photos and videos as examples.

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.”

Not much to say about Speaker Pelosi’s q&a session. Frankly, it was a bit lackluster. I heard a lot of people say they were disappointed by how lovingly people welcomed her, with a standing ovation every time she said something that they agreed with, but that she hasn’t really done anything about. There were some Code Pink protesters there, who got a little rowdy at the end, but other than that there was not so much pressure on her when she was answering the questions.

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.

Running a little late, so I’m blogging about yesterday’s sessions. (I know…so much for timeliness). Yesterday and today were very busy, needless to say.

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.

I attended this session, put on by Democracy for America, because I thought some of the techniques that they use to craft campaign messages for candidates just might translate to online campaigning. And generally, I was right.

“Republicans are consistently better than Democrats at campaign messages.” That’s how this session started. And I suppose I would agree, even though Republicans consistently use deception and cheap shots in those messages (which they talked about later).

The general idea for this session was that campaign messages should always answer the question, “What does this have to do with me?” and should identify why that particular candidate “gets it,’ (whatever “it” may be) and the other candidate doesn’t.

I have to say, I found it ironic that a session on message had such a verbose handout (three pages, front and back), but thankfully he didn’t go through it point-by-point. It in fact did end up having a lot more nitty gritty than the presentation did, which was good.

Two more key points:
- a message is not a biography
- a message is not a set of policy points

I actually take issue with the idea that we have to make our candidate look like, “one of us.” It’s my opinion that the president should not be one of us at all, but should be of extraordinary intelligence, enough so that he or she can figure out the solutions to problems that plague the middle class. But I realize that the American public would prefer to have a president that they can drink a beer with, so I digress.

Then they went into the message box, which I’ll be lazy and just link to, since it seems to me to be for the kind of person who thinks this way.

I suppose the general idea behind this session was to identify your set of policy stances, and make them into values that the general public can understand. This is where the “elitist,” comments come from, and “family values,” etc.

The rest of the session, they showed about 20 commercials for local or national races, and how they framed those particular candidates’ messages. There was an overwhelming prominence of the “I used to be a construction worker,” and “I grew up in a middle class family,” angle, which is hard to tell if it is actually accurate, especially considering how our current president manipulated that angle.

Lastly, and the part that I found to be the most practical, was to try to make your campaign messaging hit the left and the right brain of the listener/viewer. It’s important not to discount emotion in messaging, but also don’t go overboard with it. It’s best to have a balance of straight facts, emotion and memorability. That seems logical to me.

An aside - some of these commercials are so cheesy … maybe it’s a generational thing.

(As posted on the Care2 Campaigner Blog here…)

OK, a random extra post between sessions. I walked around the exhibition hall this morning and stopped at some really great booths that are exciting, both for campaigners’ work at Care2, and just for the general public.

Perhaps the most exciting was MAPlight.org. I’m not sure if I just missed the boat on this before, or if it’s a fairly new thing, but either way, it’s exciting. What they do is basically pull data baout bills, financing, etc. and allow you to access the financial contributors, committees, timeline, history, etc. of bills, interest groups and legislators. Basically, this is a campaigner’s dream. There are lots of other websites out there like this, but this one pulls information together in a really nice, one-stop kind of way. For example: Care2 did a lot of campaigns on the recent Climate Security Act. Well, look that up on MAPlight, and it comes up with all kinds of info that is really valuable: check it out (particularly the “committees” and “history and status” tabs are useful for this bill).

Another great org’s table that I visited was National Popular Vote, Inc. This nonprofit is working to propose a nationwide popular election for the President. (We joked, “what a ridiculous idea!”) It wold basically reform the Electoral College so a candidate with the most poplar votes would be guaranteed a majority. It’s about time.

And of course, there were a lot of our great nonprofit clients who had tables, including 1sky, ACLU, Alliance for Justice and Public Citizen.

OK, lunch time.

While I wanted to limit the sessions I attended to those that featured more than just one presenter, I decided that hearing about the Obama campaign’s plans for 2008 would be pretty darn interesting. And it certainly was, although my concerns about hearing only one person speak were definitely valid…by the end I yearned for variety.

The presentation was by Parag Mehta, who was very upbeat and had the rah-rah dance down for the Democratic party, which was amusing. He talked a lot about how we need to support Democrats no matter what, which I think a lot of people in the audience disagreed with, including a woman in front of me who was mumbling under her voice during the entire presentation. But it was interesting that he addressed this fact - that Democrats tend to be much less forgiving with their candidates. Like with Senator Obama’s FISA vote, he lost a lot of supporters just from that one vote. He claimed that doesn’t happen so easily on the Republican side.

He mentioned that the Republican party plans to spend one billion dollars on this election cycle. Does this seem asinine to anyone else!? Just think of what 1 billion dollars could do to help repair our country (ironically, helping to fix some of the issues the candidates are evangelizing about), but it’s going to try to brainwash people, and often get people to believe outright lies. Sickening.

Mehta then talked about 2004. He said that one criticism that he had for the way John Kerry ran his campaign was that he talked more about what was wrong with Bush than what was right with himself. Mehta said that we just can’t make that mistake this year, and that it’s the job of the party to criticize the Republican candidate (he showed some videos that do just that); Obama should focus on his own qualifications, which he seems to be doing generally.

There was then lots of talk about McCain’s votes; that he changed his mind about: torture, immigration, campaign finance, Bush tax cuts…old news.
Finally, Mehta talked about how we can win elections, and detailed Obama’s 50-state plan, which is essentially to eventually try to take all 50 states with a Democratic majority (in a nutshell…oversimplifying a bit, of course). He outlined four steps that we need to focus on:

- Take back the white house
- Expand majorities in house and senate
- Pick up governorships and statewide offices
- Build majorities in state legislatures by 2010 (when next map is drawn)

Finally he talked about canvasing, which I think was what he wanted to get to all along. His statistic (and I wish I had written down the actual numbers, but I didn’t) was that talking face-to-face with 14 people, at least 3 times, is like making more than 400 phone calls, or sending out more than 400 letters. Pretty amazing. All in all, an interesting session - more of a reinforcement than an epiphany, but still good.

Next up - some tidbits from the exhibit hall, then break for lunch.

I’m here in Austin for this year’s NetRoots Nation conference (formerly Yearly Kos) with progressive pundits, bloggers and normal folks who are interested in changing politics. And, like a proper political blogger (read: geek), I’m going to be blogging during as much of the conference as possible. I arrived Wednesday from San Francisco, checked into my hotel, had a grilled cheese at a local pub, and took care of all of my advance planning. I even walked down to see the spectacular feeding hour of the Austin bats! At that point, I found out that my camera battery is almost dead, which is a major bummer, but hopefully I’ll at least get a few good photos of Pelosi, Lessig and Dean.

Two hours ahead and waking up at 7 is a bit painful, but that’s how my Thursday started. First task - coffee. Okay, that’s taken care of. Scarf down my bagel, and rush to my first session. My first observation is inevitably the ratio of male to female - it’s got to be about 10 to 1, at least in this session. More to come…