Archive: Year: 2010

I'm in Krems, Austria for the two-day eDemocracy2010 conference (hashtag #eDem10), where I'll be giving a keynote talk tomorrow on "The Promise and Contradictions of e-Democracy, Obama-Style." The conference brings together about a hundred people from mostly Europe, with a smattering from Asia and Australia, as best as I can tell. Most are academic researchers of the topic, with a smattering of practitioners and activists. While it never hurts to spend a few days among academics studying politics and technology, the last time I did this (at the Politics Web 2.0 conference in England two years ago), I was struck and dismayed by how little academics actually used the tools they were discussing. This time, there are a number of...

Something hit me very hard once, thinking about what one little man could do. Think of the Queen Mary -- the whole ship goes by and then comes the rudder. And there's a tiny thing at the edge of the rudder called a trim tab. It's a miniature rudder. Just moving the little trim tab builds a low pressure that pulls the rudder around. Takes almost no effort at all. So I said that the little individual can be a trim tab. Society thinks it's going right by you, that it's left you altogether. But if you're doing dynamic things mentally, the fact is that you can just put your foot out like that and the whole big ship of state...

At first glance, this is a surprisingly good mashup comparing Conservative candidate David Cameron to former Labour PM Tony Blair: But any American political junkie worth their salt will notice the rip-off of Hugh Atkin's original "Changes" video: (h/t to Dominic Campbell's Twitter followers)...

Social media reflect the intensity of conversation around current events. So, how much is British Prime Minister Gordon Brown's comment, caught on tape, that an older Labour supporter named Gillian Duffy who he had an extended conversation with on the street was a "bigoted woman", reverberating online? Trendistic, which tracks word frequency on Twitter, shows that Brown's gaffe has been getting a lot of attention--a little less than half the mentions that the British PM candidates got last week around their second TV debate. That can't be good for him. Likewise, a streamgraph looking at the last 1000 tweets using the tag #ge2010 (General Election 2010), also shows a lot of conversation about Brown, and what some are calling #bigotgate. And...

We have an amazing array of keynote talks planned for Personal Democracy Forum this year. While we're still tinkering with the exact schedule, here's an advance look at what to expect on each day of the event. This isn't the final schedule--we have a few surprise guests still in the wings--but as you make your plans this should give you a solid guide of how the plenary sessions of this year's conference will run. If you haven't registered yet, don't wait til the last minute: we fully expect to sell out. Register here. Thursday, June 3 -- Day One Can the Internet fix politics? That's the question we'll be wrestling with all through the first day of keynote talks and conversations....

"The more we can enlist the American people to pay attention and be involved, that's the only way we are going move an agenda forward. That's how we are going to counteract the special interests." --Barack Obama, speaking to a campaign audience in Indianapolis, April 30, 2008 The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project has just released a meaty new study called “Government Online,” looking at how Americans access public information and interact with government using the internet. The report is chock full of interesting data about Americans usage of government websites, and much of what it details isn’t that surprising: nearly half of all online adults went to government sites to look up information in the past...

Something very interesting is unfolding in Great Britain as the country nears the general election of May 6. The two-party duopoly that has dominated British politics ever since the end of World War II is facing a serious challenge, and a major new political party, the Liberal Democrats, is now matching Labour and the Conservatives in the polls. The latest polling shows an almost three-way heat, with the Conservatives at 34%, Labour at 28%, and the Lib-Dems--who have been surging ever since the first televised national debate a week ago--at 30%. Listen to how Anthony Painter, a pro-Labour blogger who reminds me a lot of Nate Silver with his daily tracking of how each party may do in the parliamentary...

Technology is changing politics the world over, and right now one epicenter for that transformation is Great Britain, where the May 6 elections have become a fascinating free-for-all among three major parties, the Conservatives, Labour, and the Liberal-Democrats, and where the campaigns, the media, party activists, independent bloggers and ordinary voters are all rapidly engaging with each other online. With those changes in mind, we're pleased to announce "General Election 2010: Action Replay," a formal review of the Britain's first digital election, on May 13 from 6:00-10:00pm at the RSA in London. The free event, hosted in conjunction with the RSA, Onalytica and We Are Social and organized with the help of Steve Moore, will bring together more than 200 people who...

With the seventh annual Personal Democracy Forum conference just over six weeks away, here’s an update on some exciting new keynoters and panels. We’re still juggling some speakers and breakout sessions, and I’ll have more details to share soon. But hopefully this will get your juices flowing. First, we’re pleased to announce several exciting new keynote speakers, starting with Julian Assange of Wikileaks.org, which has been much in the news of late. This will be Julian’s second PdF appearance, after coming to our inaugural PdF Europe conference in Barcelona last year. He’ll be joining a keynote session that we’re calling “In Search of a Theory of Change: The Internet and Democratization,” along with previously announced speakers Evgeny Morozov, Ethan Zuckerman and...

Sixty years ago, on May 10, 1940, Germany invaded Belgium, France, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. My mother, who was just shy of six years old, traveled with her parents and older brother and sister from Antwerp to the coastal port of Ostend, hoping to get a boat to England. Alas, the Nazis were faster. She and her family had to walk back from the coast, dodging bombardments along the way. Less than three weeks later, Belgium capitulated. She and her family went into hiding, sheltered by the resistance throughout the war. Speaking to my mother by Skype this afternoon as I sat in a hotel room in Zurich, three days into my own odyssey being stranded in Europe by the Icelandic...