Be Brief: Obama-McCain Debate via Twitter

by jordan | June 22, 2008 at 07:58 am | 128 views | add comment

Definitely a first: The Dem and GOP camps are facing off in the arena of tweets, as campaing junkies and technophiles follow along in their Twitter aggregators. Fittingly enough, this open-ended debate will focus on the relationship between technology and government. Disappointingly, though, McCain and Obama themselves will not be personally answering the 140-character-max questions.

It's yet another interesting use of technology to engage voters in the campaign, so long as they don't mind sorting through posts that while succinct (Twitter has a 140-character limit for individual Tweets), are already plentiful. And we can only hope that the geek community's beloved Twitter doesn't crash amid the traffic.

The McCain campaign will be represented by Liz Mair, the online communications director of the Republican National Committee. The Obama campaign will be represented by Mike Nelson, a professor at Georgetown University who served in the Clinton White House under Vice President Gore on tech policy issues. He is an outside advisor to Obama’s campaign on issues of technology, media and telecommunications

The debate is an initiative of Personal Democracy Forum and is being launched in tandem with next week's annual PdF conference, which is taking place Monday and Tuesday at Rose Hall in NYC.

We're taking an open approach to this debate, as befits the medium where it is taking place. Each day, Ana is going to tweet a question or two, and Liz and Mike will tweet their answers. There is no set limit on answers--we're letting Ana make the framework up as the debate evolves. Obviously, Mike and Liz will be working within Twitter's 140-character limit for individual tweets, but they can link out or post multiple tweets as part of their answer to a question. It will be up to Ana to determine when a topic is done, and also whether to pull in comments or queries from other Twitter users who are following along.