Archive: Year: 2010

At first glance, yesterday was a big day for open government in Washington, DC. Responding to the White House's Open Government Directive of last December, 29 departments and agencies published detailed plans describing how they are going to make themselves more transparent, participatory and collaborative. The "flagship initiatives" highlighted by the White House include: -Involving the public in developing the Forest Service's new forest planning rule; -An interactive dashboard for visualizing and understanding Medicare spending; -A new legal framework to allow NASA to accept open source software from non-NASA developers -A bunch of new data hubs in development by the Departments of Education (ED Data Express), HUD (tracking and predicting homelessness), Justice (FOIA Dashboard) and State (HumanRights.gov), to point to the ones that most...

Our friend Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist, has a longish (for him) post up on his blog discussing how trust and reputation systems may be redistributing power and influence. He writes: People use social networking tools to figure out who they can trust and rely on for decision making. By the end of this decade, power and influence will shift largely to those people with the best reputations and trust networks, from people with money and nominal power. That is, peer networks will confer legitimacy on people emerging from the grassroots. This shift is already happening, gradually creating a new power and influence equilibrium with new checks and balances. It will seem dramatic when its tipping point occurs, even though we're...

With this year's Personal Democracy Forum just two months from now, we're pleased to announce the following keynote presentations: Clay Shirky will be speaking on ""Building Your Personal Brand Metrics Using Facebook and Twitter." John Perry Barlow will be speaking on "Hyper-charging Your FriendFeed Using Mesh Networks." Aneesh Chopra will talk on "From iPhone to iPad to YellowPad: How Government Is Using Carbon-Graphite Technology to Store and Access Vital Public Data." Ory Okolloh will talk on "Ushahidi, Ubuntu, Ubetcha: The Emerging Market for Swahili Domain Names." Evgeny Morozov will talk on "How Dictatorships Optimize the Social Graph." Scott Heiferman will talk on "How Organ Organizers are Organically Organizing Without Organizations." Chris DiBona will talk on "Removing Wiki Warts, Mobilenecking, Apptosterone and How to Make TwitStops...

Oh, and one other thing about that PBS NewsHour story on the Wired White House. That bit of b-roll that they showed of me while describing techPresident.com is, alas, not a look at the Personal Democracy Forum offices, where techPresident is based. That's the Sunlight Foundation's conference room, during the inaugural run of "Sunlight Live," which was a live-blog data-mashup experiment done around the White House health care summit on Feb. 25:...

A couple of weeks ago, February 25th to be exact, a producer from the PBS NewsHour interviewed me for a story they were working on looking at how the White House and the Democratic National Committee are using new media. That story finally aired last night (with an accompanying piece on how Republicans are using new media said to be coming soon). You can watch it here: The story gives a good overview of the many ways the White House is using new communications technologies to get its message out and, to some modest degree, engage with the public. White House new media director Macon Phillips and Organizing for America new media director Natalie Foster are featured describing how they...

If you're a typical online political activist, you probably are on a fair number of email lists, a member of a number of advocacy organizations, and maybe send dues to a few. But how often do you get asked by any of them what you think the organization should be focusing on next week? Indeed, how often do those organizations even ask you basic questions like: what's important to you right now and how are we doing? One organization that has long prided itself on listening to its members and being guided by their concerns is the online behemoth, MoveOn.org. Now at somewhere around five million members, the progressive powerhouse is engaged in multiple campaigns, from fighting for health care reform...

While we're on the topic of tracking the online reverberations of the health care bill's passage, take a look at this new Facebook group: "10,000,000 Strong to Repeal Obamacare." Started just three days ago, it's grown to nearly 97,000 members as of this writing. (By comparison, Facebook groups calling for the repeal of the California ban on marriage equality, and for the repeal of Proposition 8, each have about 260,000 members.) The group's creator is listed as 25 year-old Johanan Raatz, who describes himself as a "Straussian Neoconservative" with "Christian - Protestant [religious views] with some neoplatonism thrown in (think C.S. Lewis)." Meanwhile, the "No we can't" video I noted this morning, making fun of Rep. John Boehner, is up to about...

There haven't been too many viral videos on hot political subjects of late; certainly not as many as during the 2008 campaign, when millions of people were deeply engaged in the day-to-day ups and downs of the election. But we're keeping an eye on this one, a mashup of the famous "Yes We Can" video with House Minority Leader John Boehner's "Hell no you can't" speech on the eve of the climactic floor vote in Congress....

With the year-long debate over health care reform now entering its denouement (or a new chapter), how do you think the internet affected the course of the political battle? That's the question I just sent to several dozen longtime friends, colleagues, fellow-travelers, and participants at the frontlines of the intersection of technology and politics. Over the next hours and days, I'll share their answers. But here's a stab at starting the discussion. First, a little black-and-white oversimplification. In 1993-4, as now, Democrats controlled all three branches. They had the White House, a 56-44 majority in the Senate and a 259-176 majority in the House. Then, as now, tens of millions of Americans lacked health insurance (roughly 40 million then, roughly 50 million...

Ben Smith of Politico has a good point about the role of Organizing for America in the fight over Obama's health care reform. He writes: "Obama hasn't, as some hoped and feared, transformed the political landscape and changed the way politics is done. But within the legislative trench warfare that has defined this year, his campaign organization was a serious asset." Indeed, the sheer numbers of actions tallied by OFA in the last ten days are impressive: · Made nearly 500,000 real-people calls to Congress. · Sent 324,000 letters to Congress. · Held nearly 1,200 health care-related events with more than 10,000 attendees. · Sent nearly 1 million localized text messages. · Called nearly 120,000 supporters using OFA’s Neighbor-to-Neighbor tool online. Leaving aside all the "what-ifs"...