How technology has changed politics

I gave a talk last night at MOCHI, the Michigan - Ohio Computer Human Interaction ACM chapter in Ann Arbor. There were about ten people there, which was good because I got to talk to all of them, and because the talk was new.

The topic of the presentation was "How technology has changed politics in the last four years (and how it will change it in the next four)". The novel thing I did in preparing for the presentation was to assemble some speaker's notes in a Socialtext Eventspace public workspace ahead of time (which you can see at the MOCHI wiki site) and got some feedback from people in the workspace before I ever gave the talk. It was a great help to have all of my notes online in a form that other people could get to them and add in more references.

As I usually do I spoke without notes except for one sheet of paper and also without slides - haven't ever mastered powerpoint and don't think I really ever will. This meant there was a lot more interaction with the group and a lot less speechifying.

The most gratifying part was showing up enough ahead of time that I got a chance to talk to people before the talk so it was not about talking to people who didn't respond! I gave a presentation once that I had to fly half way around the world to get to and where the audience though polite didn't have a single question. (That was a classic "the technology you are working on is too early" reaction.)