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Meetup.com's Spontaneous Political Combustion
by Ted Leventhal
One of the biggest online political movements of the 2003-2004 campaign cycle came as a surprise to the people who founded the site.
"We did not think about politics at all when we started it up," Scott Heiferman, a co-founder and CEO of Meetup.com, said of the year-old, service created to be a forum for organizing face-to-face meetings nationwide on any subject. "We thought it would just be for the Web geeks and poodle owners," he said at Capitol Advantage Publishing conference on Friday.
Meetup has become a potent grassroots campaign tool for Democratic presidential hopeful Howard Dean and others. More than 400,000 people have registered their interest in attending Dean campaign meetings, and on Dec. 3, 40,000 Dean supporters are expected to attend 1,000 Dean events nationwide.
Conservatives are using the site, too. The Heritage Foundation's first Meetup-arranged event on Dec. 2 is expected to draw 10,000 people, Heiferman said. And events for President Bush also are being arranged, Heiferman said, even though the campaign has not endorsed the service.
Heiferman and his co-founders got the idea for Meetup after reading the book "Bowling Alone," by Harvard University professor Robert Putnam, which argues that as Americans interacted less with their neighbors and spent more time at home watching television, America's social fabric frayed. Meetup was formed in 2002.
The reason Dean "has gone from nothing to a significant candidate" is that in the Meetup phenomena, people go to one meeting, then drag along friends, family and co-workers for the next, Heiferman said. Candidates and the major parties can co-sponsor meetings, he added, getting the right to distribute literature, add attendees to their mailing lists and shape the agenda.
A recent of example of such "bottom-up and top-down" political events was a recent Dean event, where followers in 800 locations met to write letters to undecided voters in the Democratic Party. Some 50,000 to 100,000 letters were written and mailed to voters that night, Heiferman said. "The Internet supposedly killed the handwritten letter, but now Dean is using it to create handwritten letters to be dumped on Iowa."
"The irony is that we are using the Internet to go back to the beginning," when Americans socialized in groups, Heiferman said, and he said it is working. Meetup has 1 million registered users and has never advertised, he added. In addition, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar recently joined Meetup's board to help with future expansion.
"He knows how to build an open platform that's nonpartisan and built to scale," Heiferman said. "Meetup is built for your content; it's a tool; it's up to you."
Trading Places, From Austin To Washington
Barely four months after leaving the Bush administration to become the Electronic Industries Alliance's senior director for government and corporate affairs, Adam Goldman is leaving Washington to return to Texas. On Dec. 1, Goldman will start a new job as a director with Public Strategies in Austin.
The move is more personal than professional. With his wife pregnant and most immediate family members within a three-hour drive of Austin, Goldman wrote in a farewell e-mail to colleagues, "we thought the familial support system in Texas would be helpful in raising our daughter."
Judy Walsh is making the opposite trek, from Austin to the District of Columbia. SBC Communications' vice president for state regulatory policy will be moving to become senior vice president for government affairs with the firm. Walsh joined SBC in 2001 as vice president for state regulatory policy. She previously worked for the transition team of President-elect Bush and on Texas' public utility commission.
In other industry news, the National Cable and Telecommunications Association has named Steven Berry as senior vice president for government relations. Berry has been senior vice president with the Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association since 1997, and his Capitol Hill experience includes stints on the staffs of the Senate Foreign Relations, House Foreign Affairs and House Intelligence committees.
Microsoft has named Michael Byrne as its new director of justice and public safety, completing the appointments to the software firm's homeland security team. Byrne previously was with the Homeland Security Department, where he coordinated federal, state and local agencies' security planning. At Microsoft, Byrne will work with senior public-safety officials to help link the database systems of "first responders" to emergencies.
And Courtney Stadd, a former chief of staff and White House liaison for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, has been named to the board of Global Science & Technology.
Homeland Security Is Personal To Privacy Chief
For Nuala O'Connor Kelly, working for Homeland Security as its privacy officer is not just business, it is personal. She candidly described her reasons for joining the department during her swearing-in ceremony earlier this month.
"This oath is not the first, nor even the most important one, that I have been privileged to take from some part of this department," she said. "In fact, the first swearing-in ceremony in which I took part was some 21 years ago, when I took the oath of citizenship."
O'Connor Kelly added that after emigrating from Northern Ireland to escape terrorism and after having a member of her family injured in the attack on the World Trade Center, working to ensure "a life without those fears is essential to my construct of the American experience. The very freedom to live without fear of this type of violence is part of the beacon of hope that this country sends to families like mine around the world."
Guaranteeing freedom also means protection from excessive or inappropriate governmental intrusion, she said, "and I am confident that this mission can be accomplished while respecting the privacy and civil liberties of the individual. ... The role of the department is not only to protect the people and places of this country, it is to protect the liberties and the way of life that make this country great."
Also in the department, Brendan Shields, a former House Republican Conference aide, is set to become a special assistant to Frank Libutti, the undersecretary for information analysis and infrastructure protection. Shields most recently was a legislative management officer.
FCC's Wireless Bureau To Be Restructured
John Muleta, chief of the FCC's Wireless Telecommunications Bureau, is restructuring the bureau into six new divisions to better support its "strategic goals." The commission approved the reorganization Nov. 13.
The new divisions will be: auctions and spectrum access, led by Margaret Wiener; broadband, led by Joel Taubenblatt; mobility, led by Roger Noel; public safety and critical infrastructure, led by D'Wana Terry; spectrum and competition policy, led by William Kunze; and spectrum-management resources and technologies, led by John Chudovan.
Communications Firms Hire Lobbyists
Two communications firms reported the hiring of lobbyists in recent registration papers, and another firm announced that it has hired a former lobbyist full time.
Cox Communications has retained the Washington Group to lobby on "general issues relating to telecommunication[s] and the cable industry." And SBC Communications hired former Rep. J.C. Watts, R-Okla., to lobby for "general federal government telecommunications policies."
After years of representing Qualcomm and other telecom companies while a partner with the Crispin and Brenner law firm, meanwhile, Dean Brenner has moved to Qualcomm's Washington office as its lead communications attorney.
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