With the House about to vote on the Democratic health care bill tomorrow, I thought it would be interesting to check in on the pulse of the online debate over health care reform. This is of course an unscientific look at the public zeitgeist, but the popularity of certain key words on Twitter suggests that the tide has turned and anti-heath reform rhetoric has peaked, or at least isn't spreading. Take a look at this trendline from Trendistic, looking at three terms: "obamacare", "public option" and "hcr". The first is used often by opponents of the Democrats' plans; public option is the battle-cry of the progressive base; and "hcr" is a generic tag that is mostly used by supporters of...
Archive: Year: 2009
Here's a rough draft of what I'm going to say at tonight's "Digital Democracy Debate" with author Matthew Hindman at Yale. Let me know in the comments if you think I've missed anything or gotten anything wrong. Hindman is the author of "The Myth of Digital Democracy," which argues that a) the internet is just reinforcing elite voices in politics rather than opening the process to more diverse voices, b) that we live in a "Googlearchy" ruled by search engines that concentrate attention on just a handful of "winner-take-all" sites, and c) that the idea that the internet is empowering more ordinary people to be active participants in the process is basically a myth. You can read shorter versions of...
We're pleased to announce the following twenty people have been selected to win a Google Fellowship to attend this month's Personal Democracy Forum Europe inaugural conference in Barcelona. The fellows were selected based on their work and initiative in the arenas of technology, politics and social entrepreneurship. -Liz Azyan, doctoral researcher, Royal Holloway, University of London and founder, Local Government Engagement Online Research, an e-government blog -Jeff Blasius, CTO and co-founder of SeeClickFix, a We.gov site -Yves Canavet, former project director of France's national insurance program Caiesse Nationale d'Assurance Maladie -Roberto Abdul-Hadi Casanova, co-founder, Asociacion Civil Sumate of Venezuela, a democracy-building site -Michael Friis, programmer, TEDbot, a reverse hack of the EU database of public procurement contracts, and Folkets Ting of Denmark, a transparency site -Jochum...
If you're anywhere in the vicinity of New Haven, CT, tomorrow night, you can come hear me and political scientist Matthew Hindman engage in a "Digital Democracy Debate" at Yale Law School. It's a special session of the Harvard-MIT-Yale Cyberscholar Working Group, from 6:00-8:30pm; details here. Hindman is the author of the 2009 book, "The Myth of Digital Democracy," which argues that "the internet has done little to broaden political discourse but in fact empowers a small set of elites--some new, but most familiar." I don't want to completely tip my hand (though if you've been reading this blog for any period of time, you know I disagree with this conclusion), but my general feeling is that while Hindman raises some...
We've just posted the hour-by-hour program schedule for Personal Democracy Forum Europe's inaugural conference in Barcelona, which is happening this November 20-21 at the beautiful Torre Agbar building. Just go to these pages: Day One, Day Two. A few new speakers who we're excited to announce will be joining us: -Richard Allan, Director of Policy, Facebook EU (UK) -Julian Assange, the co-founder of Wikileaks.org (Australia) -David Cierco, Director-General of the Information Society, Ministry of Industry, Tourism and Trade (Spain) -Tom Pursey, Product Marketing Manager, YouTube (UK) -Martin Varsavsky, Founder, Fon (Spain) (tentative) The schedule is still subject to change, so you'll want to check back to these two pages from time to time for the latest news. But we're 18 days from the conference and things are...
Today is the first day in the office for our new reporter/researcher, Nick Judd. He's going to be expanding our coverage of the nuts and bolts of tech-politics, starting with updating our consumer guide to companies that offer internet-politics services, and developing other premium content for PdF Network members. So if you get a phone call or email from Nick, be nice to him and answer his questions. Or else! Nick comes to PdF from The Riverdale Press, where he covered Bronx politics for about two years. He also interned at The Jersey Journal and City Limits, and did a brief stint as a research assistant for the public policy think tank Center for an Urban Future. A New York University...
Gerrymandering has long been one of the ugly little secrets of American politics, and absolutely one of the arenas where the role of technology has been to make politics worse, not better. Every ten years, after a new census is completed, state legislatures redraw district lines, using powerful computers that essentially enable them to pick their voters before the voters ever have a chance to pick them. Wonder why 94% to 98% of incumbent Members of the U.S. House of Representatives are have been re-elected every cycle since 1996? Or why so few House seats--generally only one-in-ten--are considered up for grabs each cycle? This has long been one of those problems mostly of interest to academics and good government groups,...
Could New Jersey independent gubernatorial candidate Chris Daggett pull off a Jesse Ventura in next week's election? That's the intriguing question posed by Mark Blumenthal over on his "Mystery Pollster" column at National Journal. I think the answer is that it's pretty unlikely--unless the Daggett campaign uses the internet in a way no campaign has ever done before. I'll explain how in a moment. But here's a hint: First some background. Blumenthal reports that the two most recent nonpartisan polls of the race show Daggett at 19 or 20 percent of the vote, with the two major party candidates, Democratic Governor Jon Corzine and Republican Chris Christie each at around 40 percent. Even though he lacks any party organization and...
Today, President Obama is doing something no sitting U.S. President has done before. He is using his massive network of grass-roots supporters, which has been undergoing a reboot since Election Day, to go between the legs of Members of Congress and generate pressure from below on them to pass health care reform. Today is a big test of Organizing for America (OFA), Obama's political arm at the Democratic National Committee. OFA's leaders are calling on its supporters to generate a massive wave of phone calls to Congressional offices and district offices--100,000 or more in one day. They've got a barometer up showing more than 1,100 2,468 28,000 calls so far. (It jumped 1,300 in the 15 minutes since I started...
Is political blogging no longer a place for the individual, crusading voice? Do you have to be part of a group blog, and ideally backed by a big media property, to flourish in the national political blogosphere in the U.S.? Two powerful indie-bloggers, the pseudonymous Digby and the once-pseudonymous Atrios (Duncan Black), posted links back to my Friday post about Technorati's new top blogs metric, that in essence expressed nostalgia for those good 'ol days when all it took was a PC and a strong point of view to make it in the Big Blogcity. Digby wrote: It would appear that the days of the single, old country blogger like myself are definitely on the wane. I would guess that within just...