Social Media and Government, a mind map of a panel discussion

I just returned from an event hosted by Amanda Levinson titled “#BTVMayor: How Social Media is Redefining Politics” and as can be expected when you get a bunch of smart people in a room and give them a topic in which they are directly involved, many great insights and thoughts were shared.

I made a quick mind map of the discussion. So if you see the broadcast and it looks like I’m checking Twitter through the whole thing, now you know that I wasn’t–I was making this mind map.

Missing from this mindmap is when I got on my high horse about lack of data access in government and refused to accept “lack of resources” as a reason this isn’t actively happening (it’s lack of policy–the technical challenges are relatively easy). I was too buy being on my high horse to mindmap that part, sorry.

All of the panelists had direct experience in the intersection of politics, civic life and social media either as strategists, being a politician or being part of a media organization:

• Tyler Machado, deputy web editor of our local alt-weekly, SevenDays
• Ed Adrian, Burlington, VT city councilor and currently running for Vermont state senate
• Nicco Mele, ran Dean’s 2004 website and now runs strategy consultancy EchoDitto
• Sean Hurley, ran Miro Weinberger’s social media campaign during Miro’s successful 2011 mayoral campaign with Hearforward
• Michael Wood-Lewis, founder of the popular place-based digital community Front Porch Forum

There’s something for everyone in here, people. Even if you aren’t into politics.

If there’s interest I’ll clean up this mind map to highlight some of the particular insights and conversation that came out of it that may be hard to pull out of this more outliney draft version.

Enjoy!