• Germany | Creating a more transparent Frankfurt
  Frankfurt-Gestalten.de (Create Frankfurt) is a new space for citizen participation: the aim is tracking local political decisions, making them more transparent and motivate citizens to connect locally and to discuss on how to change their neighborhood.
  The website offers information in form of geo-referenced data and documents properly tagged. It also offer an email service and space for comments and proposals.

Those of us on the West Coast - or who stayed up extra late - were able to catch President Obama's town hall live on TV from China along with the accompanying Twitter chatter. There were some amazing nuggets from the town hall. It provided a genuine dialogue with the president, who opened up on his thoughts on everything from terrorism to the open Internet, but much of that will be lost in the Twitter streams the next day or so because Barack Obama admitted (*gasp*) that he has never used Twitter.

Newark's Mayor Cory Booker shares President Obama's deep understanding of the power of digital media as a means for community organizing. As of yesterday, Mayor Booker has 833,779 Twitter followers, and 14,768 Facebook supporters.

According to the US Census Bureau the Population of Newark is 281,402 (2006 estimate) which means that Booker has more than 3 times the population of Newark following him on Twitter and the equivalent of 5% of the population of Newark as Facebook supporters.

When he post to his Facebook page, you can see by the volume of "comments" and "likes" that his Facebook supporters are actually engaged in conversation with him. So, what is he doing that fosters engagement?

Authenticity and humor are powerful tools when it comes to getting your audience to engage with you, and Mayor Booker understands this. He, jokingly, used Facebook and Twitter as a platform to challenge Obama. He asked his Facebook supporters and Twitter followers if they thought his jump shot is better than Obama's.

He uses Twitter to warn the citizen's of Newark should they litter, they are in danger of getting pulled over by him.

And he shares words of wisdom that inspire him.

So Mayor Booker--I am not sure if you jump shot is better than Obama's, and I promise you that I won't litter in Newark-or anywhere else for that matter. I thank you for your words of wisdom and I applaud you for your understanding of social media engagement.

I've been chewing over the CRS's Twitter report this afternoon. Spurred on by a case of Twitter burnout, I thought I might calm the fears of ashamed netroots writers: "out-tweeting" someone is no big deal. One of my followers tweets all day long about why I should buy an inflatable boat. Nobody listens.

So while GOP congressmen may be tweeting a lot, is anybody listening? They have lots of followers. But does that matter? Are those followers paying attention? Are these representatives using Twitter to their advantage--to attract and sustain supporters and to help constituents--like Whole Foods and Southwest Airlines have used it to improve customer support and add a human face to their brand? Or are they the DC equivalent of the inflatable boat guy, incessantly linking to press releases that nobody ever reads?