Archive: Year: 2010

On April 20, the news broke of an explosion on BP's Deepwater Horizon drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico. Since then, public attention has steadily risen as the spill has spread, and people are definitely going online in rising numbers for more information on topics like "BP" and "oil spill." You would think that these would be banner days for America's big environmental organizations, notable the "Group of Ten" that have been around the longest and dominated public awareness for many years. But a look at web traffic going to the big enviro groups' websites is surprising. When you compare the number of unique visitors they got in April to the month of May--which has been soaked with headlines...

Depending on your perspective, the Gulf oil spill is many things: a reminder of human fallibility, an indictment of corporate greed, a painful example of government regulatory failure, a portrait of the power of big money in politics, a wake-up call about our continuing addiction to cheap oil. Arguably, it is proof that America has become very good at making what we once imagined as rare accidents, "black swans" in the parlance of Wall Street, into high probability events. Assuming you've been paying attention to the news, by now you probably think it is some combination of all of those things. But it is also a quintessentially 21st century spectacle, and the way we are experiencing it is yet another warning...

We're pleased to announce that Cory Booker, the mayor of Newark, New Jersey and probably the most net-savvy elected official in America, will be joining Personal Democracy Forum 2010 as a keynote speaker on the final plenary, June 4th. His fellow panelists are Arianna Huffington, GOP technology chair Saul Anuzis; Web 2.0 guru Tim O'Reilly, and New York Times technology columnist Nick Bilton. Why is Booker the most net-savvy politician in America? It's not just that he has more than one million followers on Twitter (1,065,044 to be exact). Nor is it because he probably has more local followers, per districta, than any other elected official (actually, no one really knows for sure, but he's got four times as many followers...

We're pleased to announced this year's group of Google Personal Democracy Forum Fellows, who will be attending the conference thanks to the support of Google. As with past years, there were many highly qualified applicants; all are doing amazing and innovative work at the intersection of politics, government, and technology: Mark Belinsky, Technical Director, Digital-Democracy.org; Catherine Calhoun, Blogger, Children's Rare Disease Network; Robert Cheetham, Founder, Azavea; Gina Cooper, Founder of Netroots Nation and TweetProgress.com; Remy DeCausemaker, President & Founder, CIVX.us; Natalia Fidel, Director of ePolitics Consulting of Argentina; Dean Haddock, Information Technology Manager, StoryCorps; Anne Jonas, Community Access Coordinator, Miro Community; Mary Joyce, Founder and Executive Director, The Meta-Activism Project; Wanjiru Kamau-Rutenberg, Blogger and Professor of African Politics at the University of San Francisco; Rob Macomber, Former Director of Dandidate &...

With challengers like Rand Paul, Joe Sestak and Bill Halter all beating candidates backed by the Washington establishment last night in primaries in Kentucky, Pennsylvania and Arkansas, John Harris and Jim Vandehei have a sharp piece in Politico today titled "Activists Seize Control of Politics" on what these results mean. They write: The old structures that protected incumbent power are weakening. New structures, from partisan news outlets to online social networks, are giving anti-establishment politicians access to two essential elements of effective campaigns: publicity and financial support. Markos Moulitsas, founder of DailyKos, the netroots hub, tells Harris and Vandehei: The old structures have been eroding, ever since we knocked Joe Lieberman out of the Democratic Party in 2006. We've only gotten more...

We're doing something new this year at...

We're pleased to announce that former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and America's most famous whistleblower, Daniel Ellsberg, the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers, will be keynoting at PdF 2010. Gingrich will be joining an illustrious multipartisan array of plenary speakers like Eli Pariser of MoveOn, John Perry Barlow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Todd Herman, RNC New Media Director, and Jane Hamsher of FireDogLake, in addressing the question: "Can the Internet fix politics?" the conference theme. Ellsberg will be doing a keynote conversation with Julian Assange, the cofounder of Wikileaks.org, on "Whistleblowing, Then and Now." This will be the first time that Ellsberg and Assange have ever spoken together. If you haven't registered yet, don't wait til the last minute. Space is...

Yesterday, President Obama gave a commencement address at Hampton University where he offered graduates some tempered thoughts about the ways that new technologies like the iPod and iPad were affecting the democratic discourse. Unfortunately, those remarks have been blown up, by selective quotation, by some on the Right, into assertions that Obama had "declared war on technology" (NY Post cover story today) or that he had asserted that "The iPad threatens democracy" (Patrick Ruffini). (To my regret, yesterday I retweeted Patrick's tweet without comment; when I went back to read the full text of Obama's speech, I realized my mistake.) Here's the gist of Leonard Greene's over-the-top report in the Post: BlackBerry buff President Obama declared war on technology yesterday — singling...

The netroots online fundraising platform ActBlue passed a big milestone today: it tallied the one-millionth contribution to flow through its system since being founded in 2004. The group's director of communications, Adrian Arroyo, sent out a celebratory email blast that touted "the structural advantage that we've bequeathed to Democrats across the country, ...

Last night I had dinner in Vienna with Marko Rakar, the founder of Pollitika.com and Croatia's leading political blogger. Less than a month ago, he was arrested and briefly detained by the police on suspicion of posting a secret list of 501,666 veterans from the 1991-1995 Balkan war. The site provoked an immediate uproar in the country, as millions of people went looking for the records of people they now as well as prominent national figures. The site exposed the fact that some public figures who had never served in the military were ostensibly receiving lucrative veterans benefits like premium health care and duty-free car imports, and that about 20,000 people had been registered as veterans despite serving 15 days...