Archive: Year: 2011

This past Wednesday afternoon, during a panel discussion on social media and the 2012 elections at The Century Foundation in New York City, Nicco Mele, a lecturer at Harvard University who was Howard Dean's webmaster and whose company, EchoDitto, worked on Barack Obama's web campaign for U.S. Senate, made a startling statement: it's not too late for a national Democrat to put together a 2012 primary challenge. Said Mele: "You could have a candidate announce in September and raise $30 million on the Internet to challenge Barack Obama in the Democratic primary." He argued that a "compelling platform" could be put together around the issues of the unfinished Afghan and Iraq wars, dissatisfaction with health care reform, and the bailouts...

Our friend Felipe Heusser writes with a breaking development from the streets of Chile: I am writing you guys from the streets of Santiago in the middle of a 150,000 students protest. We are live streaming from an iPhone using the balloon-mapping technique learned from our friends at the Public Laboratory. Signal is not that good, but please check it out now and tweet. Video clips at Ustream Public Laboratory, in case you need a reminder, has specialized in finding cool ways to cheaply map local areas using balloons and cameras. Now, in Chile, you can see how a similar citizen-led technique can be used to generate footage of political rallies. Add in...

If you haven't seen the new fundraising video from WikiLeaks, which plays off an old Mastercard commercial, don't miss it. It's smartly done, and doubly effective given that Mastercard is one of the companies that are refusing to process donations to the whistleblowing site. With more than 100,000 views on Vimeo since being posted a few days ago, you have to give Julian Assange credit for knowing how to make a viral video. What Does it Cost to Change the World? from WikiLeaks on Vimeo. And if you think Mastercard is likely to sue WikiLeaks for copyright infringement, leaving aside the perverse Streisand effect that would ensue, that story has already been written. Back in 2000, third-party candidate Ralph Nader made this...

Moments after the Republican-controlled New York State Senate voted in favor of same-sex marriage, here's what the Twittersphere is talking about:...

“Apps containing references or commentary about a religious, cultural or ethnic group that are defamatory, offensive, mean-spirited or likely to expose the targeted group to harm or violence will be rejected.” That's a quote from the guidelines for Apple's app store, and it was that rule that Apple spokesman Tom Neumayr cited when he told the Associated Press why the company had removed a pro-Palestinian app built in Bahrain called ThirdInfitada from the app store. The company had received a complaint from Israel's Minister of Public Affairs, Eli Edelstein, who wrote Steve Jobs demanding the app's "immediate removal" of the application, which he described as "an instrument for incitement to violence." "From browsing through the articles, stories and photographs that appear...

For a couple of years, our friend Scott Heiferman, the founder of Meetup.com, has been urging us to start holding Personal Democracy Forum local meetups in addition to our annual conference. A year ago, he announced the creation of Meetup Everywhere, a very cool free tool that is designed to enable anyone with a cause or common interest to spark simultaneous meetings around the world. Since then, we've been thinking, why not see what happens when people who are excited by PdF's focus on how technology is changing politics, government and civic life get together locally? So, after eight years of cultivating the field and building our core community, we've decided to take a leap of faith. The seeds are...

Are you a reporter? Do you know the difference between a server and a waiter? Do terms like CRM, microtargeting, retweets, Creative Commons, API, Anonymous and sock-puppet intrigue you? Are you fascinated by how technology is changing politics, government and civic life? If so, then maybe you should be writing for techPresident.com, Personal Democracy Forum's award-winning news site that tracks how politicians, campaigns and activists are using the web (and vice versa). We're looking for freelance writers with pitches for feature pieces, and we'll pay up to $500 per article. Lengths can vary from 750-2500 words. Send story proposals along with links to relevant writing by you. editors@personaldemocracy.com....

This video of President Obama taking a crying baby from First Lady Michele Obama while on a White House rope line, and then demonstrating some kind of presidential/parental magic touch, has earned more than half a million views in five days, no doubt in part due to thousands of upvotes on Reddit.com: By comparison, it's gotten just 17,000 views on the White House's WestWingWeek, where this snippet of footage originated (and is buried at the end of the 5 minute video). Lesson: Politicians, especially Presidents, being human = viral potential. Just ask this fly:...

The Right knows what it wants, but its base needs to learn how to better use technology. The Left knows how to use tech, but its base needs to figure out what it wants. Both can't help but be reactive to each other. And neither seems to have a fresh vision for America in the 21st century. Those are my conclusions from spending last Thursday thru Saturday in Minneapolis at the Netroots Nation Right Online convention. I mean, the two separate conventions of the online left and the online right, though they were so close to each other (even sharing a headquarters hotel, and sparring across Twitter and occasionally each other's hallways) that at times it did feel like one...

The scene at a Personal Democracy Forum 2011 cocktail party held in NYU's Kimmel Center. Photo: fabola / Flickr It's difficult to sum up a two-day conference like Personal Democracy Forum in one blog post. We had about one hundred speakers at PdF11 last week, including nearly fifty plenary presentations and more than twenty breakout sessions. And everyone's experience is of course different. We're still sifting all the tweets, blog posts, survey responses, email and word-of-mouth feedback, too. I'm also a little wary of writing a post that says: "These were our best talks--go watch them!" That's a little like telling someone who missed a baseball game that they can catch up on the whole experience by watching the highlight reel...