Last week, in my role as community manager for FeaturedUsers, I interviewed Guy Kawasaki for our #FollowFriday series. We talked about the startup economy, his books, Alltop, and how to get a standing ovation.

As if that wasn’t cool enough, I got to test out Wetoku, which is a sweet little embeddable app for doing online video interviews.

You can see the interview and read the transcript here.

Last March, Bijoy Goswami and I sat down for a fascinating (and lengthy) conversation about mental models and bootstrapping at Progress Coffee on Austin’s East Side. The interview was recorded and transcribed, and we’ve broken it up into a four-part series for the blog.

While preparing it for publication, Bijoy and I both felt it was important to stress that the chief mental model being explained here, that of the Maven-Relater-Evangelist, may or may not be useful to you in understanding your own place in the world. The point is not to take Bijoy’s model, or anyone else’s, and indiscriminately apply it to your own life. The point is rather to start thinking about how you might create models to better understand your own path in life.

- Sarah

You were talking about dance partners earlier. I’m assuming those people were often relaters.

dance partners

Or mavens. Yes, exactly. They were the complementary energy. Evangelists tended to be more of my friends, but we weren’t getting anything done because we were stepping all over each other. Whereas a Maven or a Relater, and more often Mavens, because their strength was my minor, I could relate to them. But it wasn’t my deal, my core thing. One of my favorite examples is we had a teacher who was having us do Shakespeare creative projects. It was the morning it was due, and we’re waiting in front of the class for it to start, and I go, “I know, I’ll do a one-man King Lear!” So I’m writing it, I start Act I, I’m busily working on this thing, and my tall friend Jon Barden walks up to me, he says “Hey, Bijoy.” And I’m like “yeah Jon,” kind of, ‘can’t you see I’m busy?’”

Doing your one-man King Lear…

He goes, “What are you doing for your creative project?” I go, “I’m doing a one-man King Lear!” He goes, “Wanna make it a two-man?” And I looked up and went, “Oh my god! Totally!” And we blew this thing out, it was the most hilarious project that I’d done, we ended up performing it at the theater in the school. The funny part was years later, I did a short play called Mystic Cab. Same thing. I decided to do a one-man, one act play. This was like five years ago. And I had been working on this thing and it was a total mess. I’m driving downtown and my friend Kert calls me and he says, “What are you doing?” I said, “I’m working on this thing, I signed up for Frontera Fest. I’m so screwed because five days from now I’m gonna have to present something, do 25 minutes of a play, and I’ve got nothing.” And he says, “I’ll do it with you.” And I said “Oh my god, that would be so great!” And then I thought, why didn’t I think to ask him? Because he had some free time, he’s a theater guy and we’re good friends. Right?

So now, have you learned? I mean now do you reach out?

Now, after 17 bonks on the head from the universe? (laughter). Yeah, I look at all my projects as collaborations now. And I think “who’s my dance partner, or dance partners?” within anything that I’m doing. The book I wrote was written with Dave Wolpert. The film version of Mystic Cab was with Nils Juul-Hansen. Bootstrap Austin is one big collaboration. And I constantly go okay, my job is to reduce down into my thing and to create the space for others.

Now, one interesting caveat: I have a strong minor energy. Some people are very much on the points of the triangle. They’re like hard core mavens, hard core relater, hard core evangelist. Some of us are major-minors. We have a strong minor. Then we’ve got to reconcile within ourselves how those two integrate and don’t kill each other. I’ve had another journey, where I was essentially outsourcing my maven to other people, and my internal maven was kind of peeved. Like, “hello dude, I’m here, I’m a maven.” And when the evangelist essentially took people off a cliff with my tech start-up, the maven said, “look, go in the corner, I’m gonna show you what’s up.” And in a sense these last number of years have been a maven exercise. My maven energy has been dominant in terms of building these models. And he showed my evangelist energy, “guess what, that’s my contribution. Yeah there’s these great mavens and relaters, and maybe even other evangelists that we want to partner with, but what you need to evangelize are these models. These are the creations that I’m coming up with, so now let’s work together.” So that’s another interesting self-reconciliation.

I find the choice of maven interesting, because I guess in my head there’s a little bit of a disconnect. I think of a maven as a proselytizer. But you think of a maven as a learner? or as a thinker?

An expert, yes.

An expert. Alright.

I mean these are just words, so you end up having to pick some word.

I’m just trying to understand the model a little bit better. And I think I do, but we have jumped so into it that I want to clarify it at this point. An evangelist is definitely your proselytizer, that’s definitely the person who is the leader, brings people together…

"Bono, not the Edge"

Bono, not The Edge. You know, The Edge is the maven, Bono is the evangelist. Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak. You see these pairs.

And the relater? Where does the relater fit in? The relater feels like a third wheel to me, in your model. And that’s because you’re probably describing yourself that way.

That’s where I’m sitting, yeah. I live in that region of the world. The relater is the glue. The relater is, if we have the human fabric as the title of the book, the relater is the weaver of the human fabric. What they do is, mavens pick an area of the world and study it. Relaters pick people. For relaters, people are the thing. And people are this infinite puzzle, and they’re just so interested in people. Oh my gosh, your journey, and how’s your day, and all this stuff. What they’re gathering data on is this entity called a person; and where they are; and then you should really talk to this person. My youngest brother is a total relater. and I have these great relaters in my world, and I look at what they do, and it’s incredible. It’s sometimes really frustrating, because as a maven or an evangelist you don’t think of a person as a universe unto themselves. but a relater does. So they’ll sit there and if you say, tell me about Joe, they’ll go oh, you know, and 20 minutes later you’ve got a soliloquy on Joe. And I’m like no, don’t tell me that much. What they’re doing, and this is the interesting thing, is I always used to draw the triangle as maven, evangelist, relater, like that…

Maven at the top.

Maven at the top. I didn’t know why. But I learned later that a model is already communicating information when you place the elements. So my friend Tina, who did the book cover, she has a company called Spoon Bend, it’s a graphic design marketing company. She took the triangle and she tipped it. and she also did three paintings that illustrated the energies of these three. she tipped it forward, and all of a sudden it all made sense. because the evangelist was on the ground, pulling the triangle. the maven was stepping up on the top. and the relater was in the back, connecting, making sure everything is good, but taking a quiet role. That’s the thing with relaters is you can tell who the mavens are, you can definitely tell who the evangelists are, the relaters are in the background. they’re the unseen third. But really each of these two resolves the duality for the other. So when the maven and the relater have a conflict, the evangelist can come in there and broker that discussion; because all of their energies are in a tight triangle like that – so, relaters are incredibly important.

Societies also fall into the triangle. Think of America: Evangelist/Maven. Right? I mean our dominant is we’re evangelists out here, we’re the Wild West, those are our heroes. Relaters don’t get much play here. Whereas in Japan, that’s a Relater/Maven culture. What’s Japan all about? It’s how you treat each other, how you interact. Whenever you’re looking for a culture’s energy, look at what they formalize. Germany: mavens. Uber-mavens.

You mentioned Hong Kong. Did you grow up in Hong Kong?

Yeah.

So how would you describe Hong Kong?

Hong Kong at night

Oh, Evangelist. Very clearly. Which is interesting. Hong Kong and Singapore have an interesting relationship, because Singapore to me is maven, Hong Kong is very evangelist, and I always thought the obvious thing for them was to hook up and start, you know, getting all the business people in Hong Kong talking to the inventors and technologists in Singapore. That would be my economic prescription.

This is Part II of a four-part series. Here’s Part III.

Bijoy’s Amazon list of suggested reading material on mental models can be found here.

Last March, Bijoy Goswami and I sat down for a fascinating (and lengthy) conversation about mental models and bootstrapping at Progress Coffee on Austin’s East Side. The interview was recorded and transcribed, and we’ve broken it up into a four-part series for the blog.

While preparing it for publication, Bijoy and I both felt it was important to stress that the chief mental model being explained here, that of the Maven-Relater-Evangelist, may or may not be useful to you in understanding your own place in the world. The point is not to take Bijoy’s model, or anyone else’s, and indiscriminately apply it to your own life. The point is rather to start thinking about how you might create models  to better understand your own path.

- Sarah

(This interview is cross-posted from the Austin Social Media Club website, where it originally appeared.)

About Bijoy:

Bijoy Goswami was born in Bangalore, India on April 15, 1973, to a Catholic mother and a Hindu father. They moved to Taiwan when he was ten, and Hong Kong when he was fourteen. He came to the U.S. in 1991 to attend Stanford, where he studied Computer Science, Economics, History and inter-disciplinary honors in Science, Technology and Society. He moved to Austin in 1995 to join a software startup. In April, 2000 he co-founded a software company with his friend Bruce Krysiak. In 2003 he began his true work as a model-builder and evangelist.

Bijoy, thanks so much for coming to speak with me today.

Absolutely, thank you.

I have a lot of questions for you. I would love to start off just by talking about mental models and what that means. What are mental models?

Mental models are something we do as humans so much, that we don’t really realize we do it. The problem is that mental models inform everything we do. If you think about any activity that you might do as a human being, there’s a mental model underneath it. Many folks have pointed the importance of mental models: Jean Piaget in education and Peter Senge in business, to name a few. Wikipedia has a nice entry. Whether it’s being a parent, or starting a business, or having a relationship, there’s a mental model that you have about that issue, or that person, activity or or that entity.

I look at the process by which we come up with mental models: how do we articulate those mental models to each other and communicate them, and then where does it go wrong. For example, prejudice is basically a grooved-in mental model that has an incorrect view of reality. As humans we’re constantly trying to make a model of reality through our brain that mediates everything that we do. To me, having better models is what we’re about, to some extent. But because it’s so natural and so ingrained, we don’t think about the fact that this is what we’re doing. My deal is to get people to build really good mental models for themselves, and to help them expose their own thought processes to themselves and others.

Give me an example of a mental model that you’ve created for yourself, and how did it help you?

The easiest one to start with is Maven, Relater, Evangelist: MRE. Meals ready to eat (laughs). That model, number one, says that we’re all different. So it takes the Golden Rule and turns it on its head. Yes, we’re all human, but people have different energies and different locations on this triangle of energy: Maven, Relater, Evangelist. And where you’re situated on that triangle influences your personality, the way you communicate, the way you relate, and so on and so forth. It’s interesting because whenever I present the model to people they say, “But aren’t I all three? I want to be all three!” People have a desire or built-in model that they should be all three, they should be good at all things, whatever those things are. The model is saying people have these different energies. We all do these activities. Just because the maven is living in thought space doesn’t mean they take no actions. But it’s the way that they take action that is important.

So, a model for people could be, “We’re all the same,” which is the Golden Rule. The Golden Rule pops out of a model that says people are all the same. And then you’ve got personality models all along the spectrum. If you march up the hill from one: “We’re all the same,” the most common mental model we use for “We’re different” is men and women. We break up into two categories. Men are this way, women are that way. Clearly that’s a fairly useful model, but it starts running out of steam pretty quickly, especially if you’re trying to talk about our talents, our passions, and what we’re doing. MRE is number three, it has three elements to it. Models like DISC have four. Enneagram has nine. And 16, Myers-Briggs, which is kind of the Microsoft, or the Google, of those (as in the 800 pound gorilla).

Again, the starting point is “Wait a second, people are not the same?” And “Oh yeah, I guess I see the world a certain way and I don’t think about it.” So number one is I’ve got to know myself. Because knowing yourself means you discover what you’re good at and, perhaps more importantly, you discover what you’re not good at.

So did creating that model help you to know where you fell in the model? Or did you already know.

I didn’t know. And I didn’t know the implications of it. Working on the model has helped me work out a number of things within and without myself. So, one of the big implications externally is that you seek out partners. Whatever activity you’re doing, you seek out what I call a “dance partner.” I had been inadvertently finding dance partners in my life, but I hadn’t realized the natural implication of this fact. I had inadvertently been developing what I call my Evangelist/Maven. So on this triangle I’m an Evangelist/Maven, I’m dominated by Evangelist energy, but my minor is Maven. And until then I didn’t have a vocabulary for it. But it’s interesting, back in high school I won the leadership and the academic award…

Uh huh. So there you go.

There you go. It was already there, but no one said “Wow, you’re a great Evangelist, go work on that.” I would take all these leadership roles, I would give lots of talks, do theater, those are all evangelist type of activities. Yet I was very studious. When I compare the two energies, really my Evangelist is my strong one. But not having the awareness that that was going on (a model), I was just good at a lot of things.

It meant that I essentially spent a lot of time exploring avenues that weren’t necessarily useful to explore. And if I knew that, I’d probably be more efficient about the way I went about it. So once I had a model for it, I could place myself in the model and realize I’m not supposed to do everything.

This is Part I of a four-part series. Here’s Part II.

Bijoy’s Amazon list of suggested reading material on mental models can be found here.

Paintings by Tina Schweiger.

SV: Mando, welcome, and I want to thank you for letting me interview you today.

MR: Thank you.

Punk Rock Pink Chicken Coop

Let’s start with maybe the most obvious question. Tell me about your pink chicken coop.

My wife is developing an edible gardening business. We had chickens last year, but then I think our neighbors ate them…or the possum. Chickens aren’t very smart, and we let them just hang out, and then one day they were gone. First one of them, and the next day the other was gone. So then we said alright, we gotta do this again. We met this guy who lives in our neighborhood, and she gave him the design, and he hooked it up. We had leftover paint from our house, so it matches.

It’s punk rock pink.

It is, it is. It is punk rock pink. See, my wife’s from Honduras, so you know, she likes it very tropical.

Did you grow up in Austin?

I grew up in El Paso.

When I first moved into Austin I was pleased and surprised to discover there are chickens everywhere in this city, which I think people wouldn’t realize, especially if they’re from another region of the country.

I think you see it more in this part of town, on the East Side…

I don’t know, we had a lot of chickens in Hyde Park, when I lived in Hyde Park.

Really?

More than you would think.

Okay, well there you go. (laughs) My wife entered this chicken tour thing that’s happening.

Oh, like a garden tour? But for chickens?

Yeah, chicken coop tour or something. So that’s why we had to pimp out the chickens…

I want to go on that!

Yeah, you need to Google it. It’s online.  (ed. note, I Googled it, here ya go: Funky Chicken Coop Tour)  She has this cycle thing where she has the garden, the compost, we have the chickens, and it’s this whole cycle. And I just eat, and throw, and then chase the chickens…

The theme of sustainability has been coming up a lot in my conversations with people, both for Too Much Information and for this interview series that I’ve been doing for SMC Austin.

Yeah. I think Austin has the market for it. I think we’re in the top 10 greenest cities in the US. There’s a culture here of understanding food, and knowing where food is coming from, and people are more conscious about it. And so I think that’s why people in Austin are just more in tune with food. So of course sustainability comes into that, because people want to know where food is coming from and how it’s processed. Even with this whole process of sustainability, you get a light turning on, with people saying, “If I can grow my own vegetables, why not?”

And food seems to be kind of a central theme for you, really, in the work that you’re doing. I associate you with, among other things, tacos. Porque tacos?

Porque tacos? Because it is food of the Gods. (laughs) You know, I don’t know. I just love tacos. It’s a simple food, and it’s universal I think, as well as international. Everything that I do is really focused around community. And so what brings people together? Food brings people together, people, technology, you name it. So for me tacos is just one of those simple foods that people from the bottom of the chain all the way to the top can enjoy. You can enjoy breakfast tacos now at Whole Foods – from that to a taco truck here in East Austin. I just love tacos. I grew up with them. The flavors, and the creativity that comes with tacos. One day you might be craving eggs and bacon, to pork, or whatever. If you don’t eat meat you can have an avocado taco…it’s one of those foods where you can combine any type of food and put it together.

Taco Journalist

So, flour or corn?

Corn. I used to be flour though.

What changed you?

I think maybe the simplicity of the corn tortilla. The flour tortilla is good, and I grew up eating flour tortillas. But…

It’s real earthy.

Yeah, it is. It’s corn-based, it’s simple. If you just want to have one or double it up, usually people double it up. And it doesn’t fill you in one sitting. I definitely like the corn.

I’m a flour girl.

Yeah.

But I’m a white girl, too.

Yeah. There’s a tendency for Anglo-Saxons (laughs) to eat flour tortillas.

What’s your go-to taco in Austin?

I guess it has to be Taco Alayna. You know where that is?

Yep.

They just got best of Austin Chronicle this past time. I’ve been going there for years, and it’s just good.

Their beans are really good.

Yes. That’s another one of those things with Mexican food, or Latin American food. If they have good beans…and their green salsa is really good, then they good!

That’s another thing that, growing up on the East Coast in New England, a taco was always only a hard shell corn taco with ground beef and lettuce and tomato, and cheddar cheese. I had NO IDEA.

Yeah, it’s a whole other world.

I didn’t really know who you were until I saw Michelle Greer talking about the taco work that you’re doing, and I got really excited about that, because for me one of the things that’s interesting about the social media space is that everybody can find a valuable niche and a role to play, and I think that you’re an example of somebody in Austin who does that to the Nth degree. You are very clearly defined, not limited, but clearly defined. You have a real identity, it’s very strong, and what you do is interesting. I’m wondering if there was any kind of strategy behind that, or if it just kind of happened for you organically, that you became “El Mundo de Mando”?

You know, that’s funny. A friend of mine nicknamed me El Mundo de Mando.

When was that?

Oooh, years ago. My friends always think I’m either over the top, or quirky, or whatever. Or annoying (laughs). So then something would happen, and it would be some crazy stuff, and they would say, “Oh, that can only happen en El Mundo de Mando.” So they started saying, “En El Mundo de Mando…(dot dot dot)” when something funny would happen. It just kind of stuck. In my work I do a lot of engagement. That’s the core of what I do. So whether it’s engaging people in tacos, to community-based work, I think what I am is very deliberate in terms of what I put out there. And I use my personality. I believe you can create good relationships and strengthen ties when you’re authentic with people, when you’re straight up. I work at United Way, and I do civic engagement work with them, so I engage communities to be involved, and mobilize communities. I use the online space to do that, and to create interest. I’m definitely very deliberate within the whole food thing that I do as well. I do the tacos on my own time, and it’s just something that I like to do. But there’s different opportunities that I get with that, and I’m usually happy to do it.

Speaking of opportunities, RISE is coming up next week, and I know you have a lot of involvement with that. Explain what RISE is, and what your relationship is with it this year.

RISE is a Relationship and Information Series for Entrepreneurs. This is its third year. It’s workshops and sessions for entrepreneurs, by entrepreneurs. Whether you’re a business entrepreneur, a social entrepreneur, and what I call innovators. People who maybe have that idea, and they might not consider themselves entrepreneurs yet, but they’re innovators in whatever it is that they’re doing. So it’s to bring people together, to create relationships, and share ideas, and learn. That’s what RISE is. That’s going to be March 2nd through the 5th, over a hundred workshops led by all kinds of creative people in Austin. One of my night jobs is to do consulting jobs with businesses and non-profits around engagement with Hispanic communities. If someone is interested in understanding how to connect, build relationships, I call it Hispanic Engagement. Some people might think of it as Hispanic marketing. I use Hispanic Engagement because I believe that if you’re going to market, or create, some kind of loyalty with a consumer or creating advocates, you have to do it within. So it’s not just “Here, take our information.” Let’s build it, and find out what you think about it, let’s figure it out, let’s tweak it, and then you can really create a product that you can share with others, that you would really want to share with others. And that is really my strategy around Hispanic Engagement. So it’s not just “Here, buy this, buy this, buy this.” It’s more of a long-term. For non-profits it’s creating advocates. And for companies it’s building brand loyalty.

What kind of benefits are you seeing from the work that you’re doing? How is that manifesting itself?

I see it as how communities grow and work. It’s growing organically. Through the process of meeting people and connecting with people, I see that there’s a need, and people are wanting to understand and engage, build relationships with Hispanics, and understand that market. Often Hispanics are seen as just one market, but there are so many within, the Hispanic community is so diverse. So understanding that, you see the benefits of trying to connect with that specific group within the Hispanic community. For me, it’s growing a lot, really fast. I’ve been working with RISE. They were interested in putting together Hispanic sessions. One, if you wanted to learn more about the Hispanic community, or the population, or the market. And two, connect with Hispanics who are really successful in what they do. I’ve organized over 20 workshops for the Hispanic sessions. I brought in Elizabeth Avellan with Troublemaker Studios (From Dusk til Dawn, Desperado, Sin City). And James Aldrete, he was on the ’08 Obama Media Team. He’s doing a workshop on engaging the Latino community. Omar Gallaga (from the Austin American-Statesman). And different people who have different roles within the Hispanic community that want to share what they’ve been through. I’m having sessions over at the Mexican-American Cultural Center. It’s been great because it’s an opportunity to be part of something bigger. The more that I meet with people the more people are interested in trying to understand. It’s such a big market, and it’s growing so fast. So to try to understand all of it is really difficult.

Are there any basic misconceptions that you’re having to explain to people, or that you’re setting straight with people as far as the Hispanic community?

There’s a lot. (laughs). The difference between trying to market or engage these populations is going to be different. You have the business class, to the recent immigrant population, to second or third generations, and here in Austin there’s a group called “Tejanos,” Mexican-American, born and raised in Texas. Another misconception, you know how Peter Pan is never aging, he’s always the same? People think about the Hispanic community that way. There’s a myth that the Hispanic community is stuck in time, and not able to progress. There’s a lot of misconception out there that because there’s a high poverty rate, that that’s where we are. But because we’re such a diverse community – there’s over 1200 Hispanic-owned businesses in the Austin area. Our spending power is in the billions. I think there’s a misconception that we’re stuck in that need area. So what I try to do is say, how do you transition, how do you do that? And it’s about connecting with people. Just because you market once does not mean that they’ll gradually come. I think with Hispanics you have to have a series of conversations in order to build that trust and relationship. Because we’ve retreated in a way. So if you really want to engage the Hispanic community, whether it’s buying a product, or services, or whatever, you have to invest time into it. And once you do, it’s a huge market. At the same time, I like to work with well-meaning companies and non-profits. It’s not selling Budweiser ads.

What are your plans for SXSW?

I’m supposed to be doing some write-ups for Nerdabout with Michelle. And I’m thinking of doing a collaborative Taco Tweetup. Just trying to get people connected.

So, what does collaborative mean? Who’s collaborating?

I’m already going to be working with Michelle at Nerdabout, so them. And possibly I want to ping the Nuclear Taco guys. And I work with Dishola as well. So trying to figure something out. And I’m also friends with a couple of music guys who focus on Latin alternative rock. I’m trying to see if there’s a way that we can combine that as well. I’m excited about that.

Thank you very much Mando, I appreciate your time.

You’re welcome. Thanks for the coffee!

photo of Mando courtesy of Penny de los Santos.

This Monday, Matt Glazer graciously agreed to sit down with me at the Conjunctured offices for an interview. This was actually the second interview in as many weeks, as I managed to lose the entire recording of our initial interview in a feat of technological idiocy. As fate would have it, though, Matt won one of the 25 Texas Social Media Awards in the interim, which gave us an opportunity to discuss that award, his personal experiences with social media, the evolution of Burnt Orange Report from a LiveJournal diary to a nationally-recognized political journal, and his current role as New Media Director for the Lee Leffingwell Mayoral campaign here in Austin.

SV: I want to thank you for coming back to do this interview again after my technological breakdown.

MG: My pleasure.

Since we met last, you were awarded one of the Social Media Awards, so I wanted to congratulate you and the staff of Burnt Orange on that.

Thank you. Yeah, that was a big shock, looking at the people who were nominated. And I literally didn’t campaign. I sent a couple of text messages saying, “Hey, this is going on,” and the fact that I was one of the 25 and put in that company…

How did you find out that you were in the list of people being considered?

I got a Twitter message from somebody at the Statesman, so it was just kind of a surprise, because you look at people like Mike Chapman and Connie Reece and John Erik Metcalf who does this [ed. note, John Metcalf is one of the founding members of Conjunctured, where the interview took place]. There are some really big names in there, and people that I actually read and look up to in what they do. To be in that list of 25 is totally humbling. I could try to act like I’m faking it and be all cocky and confident, like oh yeah I’m great, but I’m 27 years old and I’m known for political stuff, not social media. To be in that list was incredibly amazing.

I’m glad you were in that list because I think it’s important that we don’t become the snake eating its own tail, and to have people who represent, for example, politics, and other fields, and not just social media marketing, networking that kind of thing.

Well I appreciate that. It’s just one of those things where I never have done this stuff and thought about it as a greater “whatever.” It’s just always been something I do, and something I have fun doing. I enjoy writing so I write. And I enjoy doing emails and making emails work and getting peoples’ input, so I do that for people. I like certain organizations to succeed, so I have Texas League of Conservation Voters, and CASA of Travis County. They asked for my help and I’m all too happy to do it, because I believe that children need to have a voice in the courts, and i believe the environment needs to be good and strong and clean and powerful. I’ve never actually thought about it in the sense of “I’m going to use social media.” It’s always just been, I don’t have enough money to be a philanthropist, so let me do what i can do, and this is what i can do. Looking at that list of 25 people, I never would have thought of myself that way, and now all of a sudden I guess I have to a little bit. It’s been weird because I’ve been awarded this thing, so I feel like I have to live up to something now.

I think if you just keep doing what you’re doing, you’ll live up to it just fine.

I hope so.

For the readers who aren’t familiar with the Burnt Orange Report, tell me a little bit about how that got started and how it’s developed.

It started in 2003 with Byron LaMasters and Jim Dallas and Andrew Dobbs. They were all at the University of Texas. They were watching all the stuff going on with Tom DeLay and Jack Abramoff and the redistricting in the mid part of the decade. And they saw voter disenfranchisement going on, they saw the Democrats going to Ardmore and going to Albuquerque, and they were frustrated. So they typed about what they knew, which was the legislature, city of Austin politics, and the University of Texas. At the time, 200-300 people were looking at it. It was a LiveJournal, it was just kids talking about what they wanted. It was no different than a diary. And then from that it grew, and because of this kind of weird synergy of being one of the first sites to talk about politics and talk about it from an honest, open, organic perspective, and talk about getting access to people and talking with legislators and having that in, in five years it has grown to become a community site that has writers from across the state and country that write whatever they want to talk about. It has twenty to thirty thousand people who read it daily in various ways, and we talk about everything from Texas politics to Austin politics to Dallas politics, so we’ve really thought of ourselves as a growing statewide site that talks about Progressive politics and what we can change in Texas, but it all started because of this unconstitutional redistricting and a bunch of people getting frustrated, and from that frustration bred this really solid and wonderful Progressive community.

It reminds me a lot of MoveOn.org, which started from people wanting to “move on” from the impeachment process of Clinton and get on with the political action and change.

I think that’s really right on. I think when you get in that situation, especially in politics, when the pot starts to boil over, people become creative and they become so passionate that other people are drawn to that passion. I think what Adam Green and Eli and all those guys did with MoveOn was the exact same thing. People were just frustrated anyway. Here was this guy who was gonna unify and not divide, he was a “compassionate conservative,” and what did he do? He moved into Texas and flat out Tom DeLay said “We’re gonna redistrict the Democrats into oblivion. We’re going to destroy them.” And he tried to write districts that were for 109 Republicans out of 150 seats. They didn’t succeed, but they got really close. I think that frustration, especially here in Austin where, the Supreme Court called them the “fajita strip districts” of Austin all the way down to Hidalgo, I think people in Austin especially were really frustrated by that.

To have a good, powerful, strong organization you need to have a core germination, and sometimes it comes out of this feeling of protest and banding together to fight against something that feels really wrong, and that can keep you energized into so many other places.

It would have to. I mean, we don’t make money off the site. We’re going to start moving into that area where the site’s a business, but it’s a business we’re passionate about. But for five years we’ve been doing it for love, and if you can’t find passion in it, to write 1500 words a day is exhausting. I think people sometimes forget about how rough that really is. We were writing three to four times more than most paid journalists. It’s been interesting to see that development. The most interesting thing, though, is walking the Capitol now and seeing the support we give people. Like, the cover we give them, and the fact that we can be the pillars that prop them up to go out on the house floor or the senate floor and say no, this is wrong, and not only is this wrong, but just read this site and you can see how many people agree with me. It’s been interesting to see that materialize over four years, and see how the legislators read our site to see the pulse of the Progressive community. It’s clearly on both sides, because even the Republicans are wavering on certain key issues like vouchers, because they see that there’s just no support for it. So that’s been I think the most interesting thing that we’ve seen happen from Burnt Orange Report and TexBlog PAC, and all these facilities of online Progressive politics.

You tread the line between journalist and Progressive, and I mean obviously your site has a point of view, you aren’t a neutral journalist. How are you received and treated when you go to the Capitol as a blogger, as a journalist, as a Progressive. What’s it like?

I tend to be a little bit more hard on myself than the press corps does. I think of ourselves as the Texas Observer, and The Nation. I think that we have journalistic standards because we implement a two source rule, we implement that we don’t go off of two anonymous sources. If we are talking to people and they won’t go on record, we don’t go with a story. We fact check as much as possible. If we can’t give the fact, we give the source of that fact, and say we’ve heard from so-and-so that this has happened. So I come from that journalism background, and the reason for that isn’t because we want to be taken real seriously, or because the site needs to have that integrity. It’s because we’ve spent five years making the site what it is, and it takes one day of really bad reporting and really bad storytelling to destroy our credibility. I think the press corps realizes that. Phil Martin does great analysis on everything from the Texas Speaker’s race to congressional races to what policies are moving and how they’re moving, and he spends a week or two weeks on most of his pieces. He goes through and reads the studies and makes sure that they’re sourced. Karl-Thomas Musselman, our publisher, writes really in-depth stuff on electoral politics and trend lines. And those, you know you’re lucky because you have the facts right there for you. But the second we start reporting the rumors, and we report rumors as fact, we’re in a bad spot. I mean, we’ve been lucky that we’ve been right more than we’ve been wrong, but the beauty of blogs, unlike traditional journalism, is that when we get it wrong we put it up on the front page of the site just as long as we’ve had the wrong facts up, and say we got this wrong, and here are the reasons why, and we won’t let it happen again. So I think that we’re taken pretty seriously, but there’s also some things we’ll never get. We’ll never get access to Tom Craddock’s office or Warren Chisholm’s office, and the really far right Republicans are never gonna talk to us. David Beckwith was outed on our site as being an anonymous blogger who was pushing his clients. We said look, David Bucksmith is David Beckwith. Read everything he’s writing with a grain of salt. And the Cornyn campaign said, “Oh, and I guess you’re gonna tell us that the Easter bunny and Santa Claus don’t exist either.” And that was the access we got. We got made fun of. We don’t think we’re ever gonna get any more than that from them; that’s fine. The traditional press can get that access and we’ll take the cues from them and continue to do what we do.

Let’s switch gears a little bit and talk about the mayoral campaign, specifically your involvement with the Lee Leffingwell campaign. you are…what’s your title now?

It’s very organic. New Media Director or Consultant for Social Media, whatever.

What does it mean to be a New Media Director for a mayoral campaign in Austin?

It’s a lot of building tools and a lot of reading, but not a lot of implementation. Because of my connection with Burnt Orange Report and that Progressive sphere it’s kind of a touch and go thing. I don’t want to put the site at risk, and I don’t want to put the campaign at risk, so I don’t implement any of the tools. But I do look at what is working and what is good for the campaign, and figure out things that they should try to increase the public sphere, the input, the way they reach out to voters from across the city.

So what’s working for you so far?

The two biggest ones have been YouTube and Twitter. We came up with an idea with our Twitter account that it would be disingenuous to say that TheLeeTeam was just Lee Leffingwell. And so @TheLeeTeam is actually the entire campaign, and as a super volunteer comes in, or a grassroots advocate comes in, or an endorsing group comes in, we just expand and expand and expand. So it’s me, our political director, our consultant, our campaign manager. And we all write with our initials so you know exactly who it is, and we really just say exactly what’s going on. Last weekend we went to Pease Park and planted a bunch of trees, and it was AE, and JD, and SS: “Planting trees at Pease Park, come check us out.” Because we want people to know what we’re doing, and we don’t want the campaign to be this weird thing that people are being talked at by. We want to have a conversation, and we do. And we simply reply to everybody, we respond to the direct messages, we want people engaged and seeing what we’re doing from database entry to planting trees in Pease Park. It’s been a fun way to play with Twitter in that new kind of campaign way.

I thought it was brilliant, and the reason why I wanted to interview you was specifically because of that Twitter account, because I hadn’t seen that done before. I’m not sure if you invented it or not, but I was really impressed to know who exactly it was who was speaking. Are you having conversations on that Twitter stream? Or is it really just little bulletins?

No, when people reply with us, or if people send a message, we try as hard as possible to respond as many times as we can, and keep those conversations going. The campaign really is about Austin, and about doing what’s good for Austin, and we’re in tough times, and no one denies that. The budget at the City Hall just shrunk by 20 million dollars. We don’t know where that money is going to be cut, we just know it’s not there anymore. So we want to hear from people. We want them to say, “Oh, you’re planting trees at Pease Park, if you do this again can you go to Waterloo Park.” “Oh, hey, don’t cut funding here, here, and here.” We want it to be a two-way stream, and we want people to know that there are real people on the other side of this Twitter account, it’s not some blog interface SMS update thing, as we update the website it automatically goes to Twitter. It’s not that. We have to remind ourselves that we need to tell people what’s going on. And what we’ve actually seen is that people will come into our office and say who’s AE, or who’s MG. We’ll have real life conversations based on the Twitter account, which is the coolest thing in the world. That’s been the neat thing for us. We’ll go to a Democratic club thing and someone will ask for us by initials, and say, why did you say that? Why are you so excited about this? And to me that’s like the TexBlog PAC. It’s taking offline actions and making them online so people can see them in a broader way; but the flip side, which is the more important, which is the online actions that seem to be in this non-public sphere, taking those offline and having that engagement in the community. It’s been so cool to see that.

Ultimately I think that’s what New Media is about, is enabling actual people to actually interact. Not to just create one gigantic network of people who only know each other through Twitter and blogs.

And that’s been the problem. Even in the blog community, there are people, you go to Netroots Nation and you know them as their handle or their email account, and it’s like wow, it’s so great to put a name and a face and a blog together. And that’s been the fun thing in the Progressive blog community over the past few years, because that’s really been happening in a rapid and organic way. But Twitter doesn’t do that. Because of this Texas Social Media Award I’ve got like 600 people following me on Twitter, and I’ve never met any of them except for the 120-200 people that I’m following. And it’s been really fun to see that growth, but at the same time I kind of want to send them all a message and say I don’t know you so let’s all get together and have a party.

Well that’s what a tweetup is.

And I’m going to start going to those. That’s been the fun thing about this, too, is that I’m now getting plugged into the Social Media Club and the tweetups and the twestivals. I haven’t been to any of these things, and now I’m becoming more engaged. And the campaign has shown that too. The more engaged you are in Social Media, the more engaged you are in the social aspect of it. There’s a direct correlation, and I think people forget that sometimes. You have to go offline with it. You have to see the human interactions and you have to meet these people, otherwise they’re a handle and a picture, and you never really fully appreciate what they’re writing.

We talked earlier, the last time we met, about transparency and your Twitter stream, but also just in general, transparency and openness in communication in the running of a campaign. Can you ever be too transparent? And how do you navigate those waters?

It’s funny, a week ago I was kind of like, yeah, you can get burned by it. I now fully embrace it. I think that there’s no bad thing about being totally transparent. I don’t think there’s a bad thing about being honest and open. I think that good government and good campaigns and good candidates come from being out there. I mean, one of the things we saw on the national level is that Barack Obama would stand up and say, you know, I got this wrong, and I’m sorry, and I’m not going to do it again, or I’ve learned from my mistake. If it’s good enough for the president, why is it not good enough for City Hall? And why is it not good enough for county commissioner, why is it not good enough for a state rep? I think that there might be some missteps along the way. You might share too much and your opposition might see too much. But the flip side of that is it also means that the average people that are engaged and watching and curious see the same thing. They see that you’re going to this club meeting tonight but not this one. They see why. They see the stream of consciousness in a good way. So, ask me that question a week ago, I was kind of on the fence. Now after conversations I’ve been having about just our Twitter stream, no, I think transparency is always good, I think openness is always good. I think there is no downside. And I think you can look at it from a political perspective and say, oh that’s scary, we’re giving so much out there. But clearly the people are responding to that. Since the last time we met we have 216 more people following us on Twitter, and all we did was be honest with them. Our email list is continuing to grow, our Facebook group is continuing to grow, and that’s only because we’re not regulating the information we give out. We’re giving out as much information as we can in the limited time we can do it. And I think it needs to go from campaign to City Hall. I think it should follow the candidate from candidate to elected official. Because if it’s this good for them as a candidate, it can only be good for us once they’re actually elected.

Let’s talk about YouTube, because you mentioned Twitter and YouTube as being the two most important tools for you right now. How are you using YouTube, and how is it working for you?

What we did first is a video montage of the campaign kick-off. In that you saw us tease a little bit about why people are supporting Lee Leffingwell for mayor. We had 230 people show up to this kickoff, it was huge. So we just started asking people, “Why are you here?” We didn’t give them any cues or anything. And we got some great stories. Stories about Waller Creek, stories about transportation, stories about the air, stories about their jobs, stories about their families, stories about health care. I mean, there were so many different reasons why these people were there that we are now going to go through the process of sharing those stories. And yeah, it’s going to say Lee Leffingwell in the background or in the foreground, or they might mention the name, but the reality of it is we’re taking those two hundred and something stories and we’re listening to them. I mean, after that we started really going aggressive on a project promotion called Austin Corps, which is about getting the community to volunteer for a year. Getting them in internships, like young high school and college kids, doing things for the music community here in town, to do stuff with the environmental community in town, to do volunteer service projects, and doing it in a way that benefits the city. We probably wouldn’t have done that as a hard campaign push if there hadn’t been so many projects that people were so passionate about. We’re going to put those stories up on YouTube, and we’re going to promote that. We’ve got a Flip camera. I follow the Council Member around as much as possible. We want raw, uncut footage of what he’s saying because people can’t be at all the events, they can’t be at all the club meetings, and we want people to hear from him, himself, without a filter, without a spokesperson, without the media. And if they agree with the Leffingwell campaign and Lee’s message, then great, and if they don’t then you know what, there’s other candidates, they can go vote for them. But it’s better for them to hear from the candidate’s own mouth than to hear the ten second soundbite that someone puts together for them.

It sounds very organic, much the way that you use your Twitter stream. You don’t have necessarily a schedule or a weekly speech, or anything like that, it’s really just more stuff as it comes up you post?

I think that’s the best way to do it. I think that’s the most honest way to do it. I can sit there and say 11 o’ clock, 1 o’ clock and 3 o’ clock I’m gonna tweet something, and we’re gonna do the same thing with the Leffingwell campaign. But the reality of it is I’m a fan of the Netroots Nation stuff, I’m on their advisory panel. We have 15, 20 tickets left at student prices for 50 dollars. It’s more important for me to get that out there, and not do it on my schedule, than it is for me to follow a schedule and follow some sort of pattern. I don’t think there’s any study that proves that it’s not worth getting the information out there faster instead of having a schedule. That’s a tension to me that I’ve never understood. And if someone wants to follow a schedule I’m not gonna knock ‘em, but that’s just not my style.

Matt, I want to thank you very much for coming by, and good luck to you and to Council Member Leffingwell and his campaign.

Thank you so much.

(note: this interview was conducted as part of a weekly series of blog posts I will be writing for the Austin Social Media Club. All posts will be cross-posted here as well.)