For a lazy summer weekend, the 404 561 local organizing events being advertised on Organizing for America's health-care action page look like a healthy (ahem) turnout for what some have called "President Obama's field operation." A little zooming around on Google Earth suggests that some states are well-represented, like California, Florida, and most of the midwest and northeast. Oddly, Oregon has no events listed, and South Carolina, an early hotbed of local Obama organizing, seems to have only three. Here's the text of the email sent out to Obama supporters calling on them to join in this weekend's health reform canvass, from OFA deputy director Jeremy Bird: These next few weeks will make the difference on health care reform. The President has said...
Archive: Year: 2009
I just finished a very interesting PdF Network call with Katrin Verclas of MobileActive.org, talking about the role of social media in the aftermath of the Iranian election, and Jim Gilliam of WhiteHouse2 and act.ly asked a really good question that deserves repeating and amplification. "What tools would be useful to you," he said to Katrin, "to help you with this work" of sifting and analyzing all the raw data coming out of Iran. Katrin, who has been in the thick of the #Iranelection media mix with her extensive retweeting of messages coming from inside Iran (the Web Ecology report on Twitter [.pdf link] in Iran ranks her as the 8th most prolific tweeter posting updates about the election), spoke...
U.S. bloggers like WhiteHouse.gov. A lot more than a year ago, Morningside Analytics shows (with pretty pictures, too). U.S. Senate to start posting their staff salaries, office expenses and the like online, catching up to the House. Now if only they'd post their campaign financing filings online, too! (Hello, Senator Roberts?) TechCrunch analyzes the potential for fundraising via Twitter. That is soooo last month. ProPublica's Amanda Michel is managing a reporting network of more than 1000 volunteers. Sarah Palin's Facebook page gains 30,000 followers in the wake of her announcement that she is resigning the office of Governor of Alaska. (Chart above.) (Nancy Scola is on vacation. We want her back.)...
During last year's election, candidate Barack Obama staked out an expansive position on the ways that technology and the internet could be harnessed to open up the political process to ordinary citizens. And so far his administration has been delivering on many of his promises, most notably with projects like Data.gov,...
Big news! Personal Democracy Forum Europe, our first conference overseas, is happening November 20-21 in Barcelona, at the Torre Agbar (pictured below). To get on the mailing list for more details, go to www.personaldemocracy.eu and sign up! And, for today and tomorrow only, we're making a special offer to PdF conference attendees and anyone else interested in attending next year's conference here in New York City, scheduled for June 21-22. If you purchase a ticket now, you can bring a friend for free. That's right, a two-for-one deal. Tickets are $495, or $395 if you are a government or nonprofit employee. This special offer is only good for today, June 29, and tomorrow, June 30. So, if you know you are...
Hey all PdF2009 attendees and virtual fellow travelers! If you want to access the conference schedule, speaker bios and tweets about the conference all in one fell swoop, check out our mobile app, built by PdF staffer Joshua Sherman. Here's a screenshot:...
Here's how Jim Walsh of Wired for Change, the sponsor of this session, describes its focus: "More and more candidates are taking their campaigns online, but technical and strategic know-how remain a major hurdle to turning online support into real world results. Join a conversation on the future of online campaigns at the local level, how using data effectively is key to winning, and how organizing tools are changing to reflect the new realities." This, of course, is the holy grail of internet politics, how to convert online support into on-the-ground action. And Jim's co-panelists--Patrick Ruffini (formerly of the RNC), Matt Compton of the DLCC, Clay Haynes of Catalist (the progressive data shop par excellence), and Colin Delany (of Epolitics)--are highly qualified...
What could a future White House 2.0 look like? How could millions of people collaborate to help govern the country? Jim Gilliam's web site, White House 2, is one possible answer, but there are many others. This session is going to start off with a presentation from Jim looking at the top challenges that came up when building the application, to see how his lessons learned might be applied on a larger scale. In an email note to his fellow panelists, Jim said he was going to focus on seven areas: -virtual ballot stuffing -how do you encourage good contributions? -how do you find the good contributions? -how do you build consensus with thousands of people involved? -how do you balance competing interests? -what about...
This session originated with a paper by Rasmus Kleis Nielsen that I saw him deliver more than a year ago at the Politics Web 2.0 held in England at the University of London, Royal Halloway. His paper was called "The Labors of Internet-Assisted Activism: Overcommunication, Miscommunication and Communicative Overload," and while he disguised his ethnographic field research somewhat in the paper, it was clear that he was describing the chaos of a presidential campaign in the final weeks before a big-state primary. Further discussion revealed that he was talking about the Obama campaign in New York, and in particular how its staff did (or didn't) deal with the overwhelming flood of volunteers and groups that sprung up in Manhattan to...
This session is about a different kind of health care reform that is underway, one that is led by people rather than government. In a word, the internet is fostering a big power shift at the consumer level. More and more, power is shifting to health consumers, or so-called "e-patients"--they are networking with each other and thus nibbling away at the power of doctors, hospitals, pharmaceuticals, insurers, etc. It may not be universal health care, of course, but it's a really interesting shift in the dynamics of how the system works. And it may have real political ramifications, as the trend accelerates. For some interesting background reading, check out: -"The Social Life of Health Information," a June 2009 report by Susannah Fox...