Just a brief update on what has been going on here. First up: The move to my new hosting service provider Mediatemple is still going. Mostly this is due to the amount of domains that I had registered on my old account. My old partner in crime Thomas Lacher and I have had this old server for about ten years. And just like a good basement, a server is something that kind of fills up organically. It was time to clean up and throw out a lot of stuff. And once you start digging, you find things that you hadn’t thought abot for a long time but that are valuable or dear in some way nonetheless. This, and the coordination required for transferring domains to several people and domain hosters is taking somewhat longer than I had hoped, but it’s all coming together. Still, this feels like playing domain name scrabble, and this site might be down for a little while if something goes wrong. No worries, we’ll fix it as quickly as possible. There’s plenty of other ways to get in touch. You’ll find one, I’m sure.
Second, great news. In Germany 2009 is called “Superwahljahr”, a super election year. There will a European election, federal election as well as a whole bunch of state and regional elections. (A German list of the elections can be found here.) I’m excited to be part of all this as a strategic consultant to the youth campaigning team of the SPD, the Jusos. I’ll be working directly with Panorama3000, who I’ve been working with a lot lately and who I also share office space with. Since this is a paid gig I want to be completely open about this up front. Also, over the course of the year it will always be an issue of mixing my blog and other personal online accounts with the campaigning activities. This is something that I’ll have to re-consider regularly. From today’s point of view I’ll try to stick to a simple rule of thumb that has always served me very well: Full disclosure at all points. Simple as that. If I find something really cool I’ll talk about it; if I find something particularly bad I’ll talk about it. Mostly I’ll try not to make a big deal out of it, and I’ll always play with open cards on what’s going on and why I’m writing what I’m writing. (Feedback on this? Please share.)
Third, more good news. Max Senges (who I’ve also been friends with for a long time and have worked with quite a bit) has been very active in the Internet Bill of Rights coalition (IBR) and has invited me to join in and help out. The mission of the IBR is incredibly important – roughly speaking, the goal is to write down rights and duties of users (or rather: citizens online). Think United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights for the digital world. I’ll try to organize the blog and all related activities. (Thanks for the invitation, Max!) This is an open coalition. If digital rights and ethics are something you truly care for, please consider joining this effort. Drop me a line and I’ll hook you up with the folks who know much more about the details than I do at this point.
Image: Domain Name Scrabble by polaroidmemories
