Ben Self: "Always a dangerous thing to start filtering content of any type"
Judging by his profile on Blue State Digital, Ben Self is a smart guy. He’s one of the brains in the US Democratic Party who just helped polevault Obama into power, crafting an online campaign without precedent:
A BSD founding partner, Ben serves as Program Director on major accounts for BSD. He is currently serving as Technology Director at the Democratic National Committee, where he supervises a wide range of technology projects and programs, including infrastructure, compliance software, voter file technology, and a large constituency-building Web site powered by the BSD Online Tools.
During his career, Ben has developed an extensive body of experience in data analysis, data warehousing, database architecture and administration, and systems design and development. For Gov. Howard Dean’s 2004 campaign, Ben served as chief data architect, responsible for reporting on, maintaining, and analyzing the complex data archive accumulated as a result of the campaign’s online constituency-building program. He built the system used by the Federal Election Commission for gathering and reporting on campaign finance data, and architected the largest distributed geographic information systems (GIS) database ever deployed for the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Ben holds a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT. He lives in Washington, DC and Lexington, Kentucky.
According to MIS Financial Review, Mr Self is currently visiting Australia and will be meeting Prime Minister Rudd: see Filtering ‘dangerous’, says Obama strategist. There’s a video of an interview with him here.
Kevin Rudd will doubtless be keen to garner tips on online strategies for his own next election campaign.
He should be more interested in Mr Self’s views on Internet censorship.
Kevin Rudd: Change or be Changed
If the Government insists on peddling lousy policies, no amount of smart salemanship will help sell them online. Unlike the mass media, the Internet is a technology that facilitates intelligent two-way communication with informed people. It’s not for conning sheep.
Ben Self may be in for a disappontment. Australia’s policy on the Internet is in a mess. The Rudd Government’s understanding of the Internet appears to be in stark contrast to the sophisticated policy (PDF document) developed by Team Obama.
Perhaps Mr Self could be offered a part-time job as Australia’s ‘Virtual Communications Minister’. His job would be to set policy. This would free up Senator Conroy to answer questions in Parliament and give interviews to the media – tasks he seems to struggle with at present.
With Mr Self in the driving seat, Communications Minister Controy might at least find himself defending defensible policies, for a change.
Who knows, he may turn out to be good at it?
