• UK | A two-way message: Ed Miliband's recruiting campaign
  

  Hi it's Ed Miliband. Hope you don't mind me contacting you about the leadership election. Can I count on your support? Reply Y or N. To opt-out text stop to 86888.

  Labour leadership candidate Ed Miliband has launched a mobile recruiting campaign, trying to get response and collect information on potential voters:

What could you do with $2?

What about $250,000?

On February 12, Twitterers in 202 cities around the world asked exactly that of charity: water, raising more than a quarter million dollars online in just a few short weeks. The event, Twestival, wasn't the first to use Twitter for fundraising -- but it was the first to do so at such a large, networked and volunteer-driven scale.

The success of Twestival has a lot of non-profits and organizers thinking carefully about the opportunities -- and challenges -- of using Twitter.

Join us this Thursday, June 4th at the PdF Network, where Twestival's founder and event organizer Amanda Rose will clue us into how she did it and what other organizers can learn from her experience.

To join the call (and get the opportunity to pose your questions directly to Amanda), you’ll need to join the PdF Network.

I'm in DC this weekend for the Gov2.0 Unconference, a semi-formal get-together to discuss all sorts of topics in the government/politics/technology/transparency milieu: mobile platforms for emergency management; how to engage citizens through social media; technology options for health care reform; digital privacy; tech tools for state legislatures; and on and on.

I'm finding, however, that this conference fit the pattern of most others: the sessions are okay, but they seldom yield any breakthroughs. Instead, the value of the conference comes from the break-time conversations that evolve by having all of these people in the same place. And this time, it is especially interesting given the people that are here...