Development Seed Blog

Almost every hand shot up in the crowded auditorium when Zack Exley, a chief organizer of Roots Camp, asked, "How many of you have been to an election recap meeting?" It was close to 11:00 am on Saturday morning, and 400 progressive political junkies had descended on Washington from all over the country for a different kind of election recap. This time we were just looking at what happened online and what we can learn from each other as we move into the national election.

Ian, Jeff, and I joined the crowed. We weren't sure if it was going to be the official kick off to 2008 campaign planning or if it would simply reveal that there is no break between elections. By the end of the day the energy in the room clearly showed that it was the latter and that everyone was fueled with the momentum of the huge Democratic win and looking for the tools to take it up a notch.

While Development Seed's main focus is international development, we are increasingly fighting the good fight with some organizations here in DC, including Planned Parenthood’s SaveROE.com, Public Campaign’s VotersFirstPledge.org along with several other projects, and some themeing work for Senator Chris Dodd’s website Dodd.senate.gov.

We attended Roots Camps to learn what other people are doing and also share some of our own experiences, specifically the SMS campaign we worked on with Planned Parenthood. Jeff and Steve Olson from Planed Parenthood led a really sharp talk about the campaign’s success, the Drupal module that made it possible, how great Mobile Accord’s team is, and how helpful we found the MobileActive community. Hopefully we will pull some numbers and share the details in another post shortly.

Aside from our presentation, we left with some great notes on furthering our use of YouTube and a plan to set up an office in Second Life (thanks to an awesome discussion on the meta world lead by Andrew Hoppin and Ruby Sinreich).

The timing of the conference was perfect. We were all finally recharged after the election madness, and everyone had digested the election and revived their work. But we have to stay creative – come January we have a lot of gearing up to do.