Archive: Year: 2011

Remember when the White House thought the internet was cool, and made sure we all knew that President Obama was pressing government agencies to use the web to be more open, embracing social media (look, he's posted his first Tweet!), and fighting to keep his personal Blackberry from being taken away from him? Well, now they want us to know that he's opposed to "pointless waste and stupid spending that doesn't benefit anybody" and in particular, that he's committed to eliminating duplicate and unnecessary government websites. Indeed, he is promising to shut down half of the estimated 24,000 government sites and subsites, as part of a larger "Campaign to Cut Waste" that was announced on Monday, and he's frozen the...

James Kotecki, he of the funny-stick-figure-dorm-room-YouTube-interviews of 2008 presidential candidates, has a smart piece up on The New Republic's website parsing the current Republican field of declared presidential wannabes and how they're doing on YouTube. He reports that Tim Pawlenty appears to be doing the best of a relatively desultory bunch, and shrewdly also points to pizzaman Herman Cain's healthy numbers of views. One stat he didn't note, of equal importance to numbers of overall views and average views per video: how many subscribers each campaign has gotten to their channel (these are people who get updated whenever a campaign uploads a video to their channel). The answer for conventional candidates Pawlenty and Mitt Romney is painfully few: just 818...

Back in April, I remember reading this amazing blog post that was forwarded around on Twitter about how a gay woman in Syria had nearly been arrested in the middle of the night, but somehow her father bravely confronted the secret police thugs who came to their door and convinced them to walk away. "Wow, that's almost too good to be true," I thought to myself, and wondered how it could be possible that "My Father, the hero" hadn't been summarily arrested or executed, given the realities of the Syrian regime. I didn't blog or tweet the story, but plenty of well-meaning people did, sending the blog into orbit and nearly a million page views. Well, as NPR's Andy Carvin...

Veteran tech journalist Steven Levy has a useful backgrounder up on Wired.com on how Twitter's default settings for following and messaging other users tripped up congressman Anthony Weiner. Levy's key point: requiring you to follow other people--a public act--before you can direct message them privately meant that Weiner's penchant for flirting/sexting with some of his female followers was at least partially public. Weiner, of course, could have made his Twitter account private, but then that would have prevented him from converting his public fame into private games. One assumes that opposition researchers across the political spectrum have taken note, and will be zealously tracking whom politicians follow....

We're taking Friday off to recuperate from a long week of conferencing, and to console ourselves on Nancy Scola's leaving the nest. You'll have to content yourself with this: See you Monday!...

For some time now, those of us who work in networked politics have been arguing that it was time for the relationship between government officials and the public to change. The internet's economics of abundance--of time, information and connectivity--can enable a transformation from top-down communication and talking in sound-bites to something richer, more participatory, interactive and fundamentally more democratic. Politicians, we argued, had to give up some control over their "message," but in turn could forge more authentic connections with their publics. Of course, we didn't think that some of them were more interested in forging a more authentic connection with their pubic selves, but the Anthony Weiner mess offers this additional lesson about our hypernetworked times: the authentic truth that...

We're redesigning our website and launching a new subscription service for online politics and government professionals at all levels. What should we include? We'd love to hear your feedback. The world of technology and politics is changing every day -- and you don't have to wait till next June to stay on top of the game. In 2009, we launched the PdF Network to give tech-savvy (or tech-curious) campaigners, political and not, from all over the world a place to sharpen their skills and learn from the experts. Now in 2011, we're relaunching the network as Personal Democracy Plus, a subscription service designed as the source for timely expert premium content designed to help busy professionals sort out the signal...

This is my eighth Personal Democracy Forum, and the seventh that I've curated (not counting the three satellite events we've done in Europe and Latin America in the last two years). As we gear up for #PdF11, I thought I'd share some thoughts about this year's conference, not so much in the spirit of Tracy Russo's great post on "how to rock PdF" but with the goal of explaining more of the underlying choices and tweaks that got us to this year's program. As far as I know, there's nowhere you go to learn how to curate an event, though come to think of it there probably are places where you can study things like event management, theater management and...

We're pleased to announce this year's Personal Democracy Forum Google Fellows. Nine talented and experienced folks made the cut, out of what is always a very competitive pool of applicants. They are: Adam Black, founder of KeyWifi.com, a bootstrapped web company that enables the massive over supply of internet bandwidth to be redistributed, so enabling the costs of access to be reduced, allowing millions globally to cross the digital divide with significant democratic ramifications at home and for the developing world. Yahel Carmon, a web analytics architect for Blue State Digital, and builder of tools like Crowsdlistr, and an open source SMS app using Twilio and Google Election Center API to allow voters to text in their address and get back their...

Yes, it's true. Despite our best efforts to convince Nancy Scola, techPresident's associate editor for the last three years, that there was nothing better than lifetime employment with Personal Democracy Forum, she will be soon leaving us, as she explains here. Our loss is the world's gain. I'm going to save the encomium for her official last day, June 10th. But as Nancy knows full well, we are already anticipating missing her presence even as we know that she'll still be out there continuing to contribute to the roiling conversation about technology, politics, government and civic life in changing times that is the beating heart of PdF. And so today's news sparks an opportunity for those of you out there...