Archive: Year: 2011

"During movement times, the people involved have the same problems and can go from one communication to the next, start a conversation in one place and finish it in another. Now we're in what I call an organizational period, which has limited objectives, doesn't spread very rapidly and has a lot of paid people and bureaucracy. It's completely different from what takes place when there is a social movement." — Myles Horton, from his book "The Long Haul", talking about his work with two American social movements, the labor movement of the 1930s and the civil rights movement of the 1960s. From the streets of Tunisia to Wall Street, and online from the WikiLeaks wars to the early election skirmishes of 2012,...

Every four years, the America presidential primary process offers the voters a tempting illusion: anyone can be president. With enough hard work, volunteers, money, and just the right strategy, an outsider or a relative unknown can wow the early states, where all politics is local and hyper-personal, and then take the rest of the nation by surprise. There's just enough truth to this myth that it seemingly self-renews; after all, it worked for Jimmy Carter. And a number of other self-styled outsiders, from Jesse Jackson to Jerry Brown to Howard Dean on the Democratic side, to Patrick Buchanan on the Republican side, have shown that you can indeed ride the myth almost to glory. Now it looks like it might well...

Following in the footsteps of Yahoo and ABC News, who as I noted earlier gave viewers the opportunity to offer live feedback during last Saturday's Republican presidential debate, Fox News offered something similar during the Sioux Falls debate on December 15. "Weigh in! Are the candidates answering the questions?" Fox asked on its live page for the event. "During the debate, Tweet with the candidate name and either #answer or #dodge. And watch how the audience responds live." Twenty minutes into the event, moderator Bret Baier even mentioned this option on live TV, something that the ABC moderators failed to do until pretty late in the evening. While this produced tens of thousands of live tweets--at least 45,000 using one of...

As you settle in to watch tonight's episode of "Survivor: Republican Presidential Candidate Edition," which will be airing on Fox News at 9pm with the quaint-sounding title, "Iowa Debate," it's worth taking a look at one feature of last Saturday's episode of the series that didn't get much attention. That program, which was aired on ABC News, included an interactive real-time feedback feature produced by Yahoo News that -- for the first time, ever -- not only invited viewers to respond to the show while it was underway, but managed to push a smidgen of that audience feedback back into the live program, where it potentially could have influenced the conversation. That is, the people who used to be called the...

Juliana Rotich, the Executive Director of Ushahidi, blogs about a moment of "discovery and awe" that just happened at the Eye on Earth conference in Abu Dhabi. They got into a conversation about crowdsourcing with three participants from Afghanistan, and on the spot discovered--to everyone's surprise--a robust deployment of Ushahidi's Crowdmap tool being used by the Ministry of Agriculture, Irrigation and Livestock in Nangarhar Province. The site is chock-a-block with hundreds of reports of highly useful data, including such things as diesel prices--all available to mobile phone users. Stop and think of it: from a election-monitoring site launched barely four years ago, Ushahidi is helping Afghani farmers crowdsource their market conditions....

SocialFlow's Gilad Lotan has a data-rich post up looking at all the Twitter hashtags that people used in association with the GOP prez candidates over the last 3 weeks. The most interesting correlations for the two leading candidates? Mitt Romney: #gayrights, #lgbt, #jesus, #flipflop, #jobs, #economy. Newt Gingrich: #palestine, #OWS, #immigration, #abortion. That means those terms were more likely to be referenced in association with those particular candidates than on average across the whole pool. Ron Paul was most closely associated with #tlot, which is short for "top libertarians on Twitter." I'm not sure if there's really that much to be gleaned from this data visualization, other than confirming the obvious. Newt is pressing some hot buttons with his statements on...

Left meets right? A friend of PdM, Bari George, points out this PBS video by Walter Kirn, author of "Up in the Air," where he suggests the way to fix Washington is to make Congress virtual. The strength of America, he says, is in dispersed networks of knowledge, but Washington behaves like a "lump of concentrated power." The answer is to let Congress vote from home, which, intriguingly enough, is what conservative populist Ralph Benko has also been pushing....

Dear Friends: Ever since we launched Personal Democracy Forum in 2004, we've envisioned creating a hub for the growing community interested in understanding how technology is changing politics, government and civil society. In nearly eight years and with your help, we've built a vibrant annual conference in the US (along with satellite events overseas) and a lively daily news site where the reporting is serious, but at the same time spurs conversation that pulses with excitement about the possibilities to make the civic process more open and participatory, make the powerful more accountable, and make life better for all people. Now, in tandem with the redesign and relaunch of our websites, we're proud to announce that we are changing our name...

Someday we'll probably stop talking about bloggers, the same way that no one refers to people who use phones as "phoners." But blogging deserves its own category because the phenomenon so clearly illustrates how the old boundaries between professionals and amateurs have fallen in this age of hyper-connection and hyper-empowerment. Political bloggers in particular are of special interest because of their ability to nurture communities of readers, followers and participants. The rise of the political blogosphere has disrupted traditional politics and journalism, and also presents some complicated challenges for the law. Below, a selection of our best coverage on bloggers, blogging, bloggers rights and sometimes, their wrongs....

After the 2008 presidential election, the Obama for America political machine that carried Barack Obama to the White House went through its own transition, eventually emerging as a semi-independent arm of the Democratic National Committee called "Organizing for America." Many people thought OFA would be Obama's secret weapon, an internet-powered grassroots army that could push Members of Congress from below while Obama used the more traditional bully-pulpit powers of the presidency. The reality, as we all know now, was a lot more complicated....