Online Politics: Milestones and Footnotes

Where does the time go? Ten years ago, thanks to some dumb luck, good help, and fortuitous timing, I helped to make Sen. Edward Kennedy the first member of Congress with a web site. The office had taken its first steps online more than a year previously, first on dial-up bulletin board systems, then an ftp directory, some usenet newsgroups, and eventually onto the Senate’s new gopher server. But 1994 was the year of the web. The letters WWW took on a whole new meaning, and thanks to the efforts of Eric Loeb and John Mallery at MIT, in May of 1994 Senator Kennedy became the first member of Congress with a home page on the World Wide Web.

Ten years later, that event is officially a milestone, and there’s even a new poster commemorating the events of The Digital Decade in politics to prove it.

They say that history belongs to those who write it, and so I did (you can even still buy it – used for 49¢!), more than once, but several times. And whether from my telling of that tale, or from bullet point milestones on posters such as this one, Kennedy’s role as a leader in helping bring politics online is well-established.

Recently Kennedy’s office and the University of Virginia’s Miller Center for Public Affairs announced the launch of a six-year oral history project to “create an archive of spoken recollections and reflections that illuminates Senator Kennedy’s public life, his vocation, the institution in which he has served and the political world in which he has moved.” In the big picture of his legislative career and continuing public service, Senator Kennedy’s leadership in bringing politics online will be just a footnote. But in my field of online politics, it’s a major milestone, and one that I remain very proud to have played a part in reaching.