Archive: Year: 2008

Time for some editorial housekeeping. In our never-ending quest to cover how technology is changing politics and serve the growing community of activists, technologists, journalists, politicians, government workers, bloggers and plain old citizens who are engaged in making this change happen, we are pleased to announce two new additions to our editorial crew. Dave Witzel and Allison Fine are coming on board Personal Democracy Forum as senior editors who will help expand our coverage on PersonalDemocracy.com of how mass, networked participation in the public arena is affecting all the important arenas outside of electoral campaigns (which we cover obsessively at techPresident). In addition to blogging, Dave is going to start writing a weekly round-up on e-govt, collaborative governance and all...

About today's fundraising posts: I'm putting my faith in Peter Daou's word right now. As Marc Ambinder blogged earlier today, the only thing we have to go on when conveying information (can you call it reporting?) about the campaigns' online fundraising numbers is the word of a staffer who has been good to his word before. But given how funky this stuff is, I'm thinking that all of us should start referring to claims about money raised online with the word "alleged" as a modifier. As in, yesterday, Clinton "allegedly raised $10 million" and Obama "allegedly raised $XX." Or, the word "claimed" as in "the McCain campaign claimed to have raised $YY." Because we really don't know, and we...

So now the Clinton campaign is walking back has clarified its post-PA fundraising numbers (and I'm clarifying my post as well). As I noted yesterday, the campaign's finance co-chair Hassan Nemazee left the distinct impression with both the Washington Post and Business Week that the campaign had somehow pulled in more than $10 million "overnight" from Tuesday's Pennsylvania primary. Indeed, the Business Week story by Jane Sasseen puts this right in the lede: Just minutes into her victory speech in Philadelphia, Clinton made a plea to her supporters in the crowd—and the many more watching on TV—to head to her Web site and make a donation. "Tonight, more than ever, I need your help to continue this journey. We can only...

As I suspected, the "Hillary raised $10 million online overnight"...

The Clinton campaign says it raised $2.5 million online last night in the three hours after the Pennsylvania primary was called, and 80% of that came from new donors. Clinton herself made clear mention of her campaign's url, HillaryClinton.com, during her victory speech, and if you look closely you'll notice that her campaign placards also reinforce that. Anyone clicking there was taken straight to a donation page, as Marc Ambinder pointed out last night, where the campaign is asking for as little as $5 from potential donors. Clearly, small donations (those less than $200) are numerically dominating the Democratic contest and buoying both candidates. The nonpartisan Campaign Finance Institute reported yesterday that: The three remaining candidates raised nearly $78 million in March,...

Here are my notes for the talk I'm about to give at Politics Web 2.0 on "The Revolution Will Be Networked: How Open Source Politics is Emerging in America.” --What do I mean by “open source politics”? Back in 2004, I wrote a piece for The Nation called “The Rise of Open Source Politics” where I said: “The term "open source" specifically refers to allowing any software developer to see the underlying source code of a program, so that anyone can analyze it and improve it; better code trumps bad code, and programmers who have proven their smarts have greater credibility and status. Applied to political organizing, open source would mean opening up participation in planning and implementation to the community, letting...

I came in a few minutes late on Christian Vaccari's talk on candidate websites in the 2008 US presidential primaries. Vaccari is at the University of Bologna in Italy, and has been studying online politics for a while. He is explaining his research goals: -to assess how US presidential candidates adopted online communication during the primaries, looking at information vs participation and Rs v Ds. -and to test the "normalization of cyberspace" hypothesis that top-tier candidates will have better websites than lower-tier candidates. His methodology: a longitudinal analysis of candidate websites starting in March 2007. He coded sites by 87 variables, relating to leveraging the internet for information and participation. He also looked at the professional level of the websites, how well designed...

Here are my notes on a very interesting talk by Rachel Gibson of the University of Manchester, titled "Trickle-up Politics? the Impact of Web 2.0 technologies on citizen participation." I think you'll find her overview and characterizations of politics before and during the web to be very helpful. What is trickle-up politics? This isn't a new type of politics, but a new manner or mode of politics, and a wider space in which it is taking place. In the deregulated, decentralized political space that is the web, there is more space for users to do their own thing. Her talk is organized in four parts: 1. Politics before the web, until 1945. Politics was direct, localized and face-to-face. Townhall meetings, mass marches,...

I'm now at one of the afternoon panels, which has the rather bland title of "Parties, Elections and Campaigning II." But the papers look rather enticing: --Daniel Kreiss on "Taking Our Country Back: The New Left, Yippies, Deaniacs, and the Production of Contemporary American Politics." --G.R. Boynton on "Political Leadership in the Web 2.0 world." --Giovanni Navarria on "Howard Dean's 2004 presidential campaign, the Downing Street e-petitions road tax battle, and Beppegrillo.it: A comparative study." Kreiss leads off. The focus of his talk is to show the cultural antecedents of the Dean campaign in the old New Left and Yippie movements of the 1960s in America. I've read his paper on the plane over, and he has put his finger on some important connections. He...

I'm at the Politics Web 2.0 conference at the University of London, Royal Hollaway, and things have just kicked off. As always with my visits to conferences, I will try to blog that which I find interesting (I'm no Ethan Zuckerman) and all my renderings are not verbatim, but rough paraphrasing. Here are my notes on one of the first keynotes, which definitely held my attention. Helen Margetts, of the Oxford Internet Institute, is presenting on "Digital-era Governance: Peer production, Co-creation and the Future of Government." This is one area where the possible impact of the internet has been underestimated, especially within the community, she starts off. These technologies could have a huge meaning for government. Her talk starts with Digital Era...