Archive: Year: 2011

Watch out. Just because a campaign is using social media or getting a lot of support online, doesn't mean it's really grassroots. Claims of money raised via the Internet, as well as tallies of small donations versus large donors, or other newer metrics of public participation like Twitter retweets or YouTube views, don't prove anything. Such signs offer hints that a candidate or movement is resonating with the public, nothing more. If anything, campaigns often want to encourage the appearance of being "grassroots" while obscuring where the real money and power resides. The political media needs to be skeptical of this have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too approach; too often what is said to be "grassroots" would be better described as "grassrootsy."...

For all the chatter about social media, social networking and the like, email is still the "killer app" for politics. A big list is an essential building block for all kinds of campaigns and causes. Behind the scenes, list-servs like Google Groups and Yahoo Mail still enable activists to coordinate in private what they later do in public. Getting people to open their emails and take action is vital. Who's doing it well? What new tricks are campaigns trying to get their list to respond? Below, some of our favorite posts on the workhorse of online politics, the email....

Russian democracy activist Maria Gaidar has launched a social media campaign in solidarity with the hundreds of people who have been arrested in the wake of post-election protests called ARRESTme2. On her LiveJournal blog, she calls on readers to declare their solidarity with people like blogger Alexei Navalny by tweeting using the #ARRESTme2 hashtag and by joining and spreading a Facebook group with the same goal. She writes (with lousy translation provided by Google Translate): The mass arrests that took place yesterday - this is a test for us all. Test on civic awareness, the ability to empathize and support each other. If we do not shall state their attitude towards what has happened, the next time the arrests may...

Today, government and public life is being reimagined and reconfigured by a new generation of civic engineers. Only instead of using concrete and steel, they're using data and code. Some come from inside government, where they're opening up public data to outsiders and inviting developers to work with them on new kinds of services and apps. Others aren't waiting for government to act, and they're hacking on the public space using data that they scrape from government sites along with bottom-up data that the public itself generates and shares. Together they're building new ways of identifying problems and solutions, connecting the public and government, and making things work better. Meet the civic hackers....

Egypt has been called the center of Arab civilization, and today it is the red hot center of the Arab Spring. What happens there is influencing the entire region, and creating ripples even in places like Madison, Wisconsin. Below, links to features covering some of the seminal leaders and moments in Egypt's struggle to create a more democratic future....

Monday night December 12, from 6:00-8:30pm at NYU, Personal Democracy Media will present a flash conference titled, "From the Tea Party to Occupy Wall Street and Beyond: The Future of Networked Democracy" with Ori Brafman, co-author, The Starfish and the Spider; Beka Economopolous, organizer, Occupy Wall Street; Marianne Manilov, co-founder, The Engage Network; Jenny Beth Martin, co-founder, Tea Party Patriots; Mark Meckler, co-founder, Tea Party Patriots; Clay Shirky, NYU, author, Here Comes Everybody; and Zeynep Tufekci, University of North Carolina. Across America and the world, millions of people are entering the public arena and, using social and collaborative media, forming powerful new networks for change. The result is a rising wave of challenges to the political order that are expanding the...

The 2012 presidential election just got a lot more interesting. Former Louisiana governor and long-shot Republican presidential candidate Buddy Roemer has announced that he will seek the nomination of the Americans Elect group, a budding third-party that says it will hold an online primary and convention late next spring to pick a ticket. According to Ballot Access News, Americans Elect currently has ballot status in seven states (Alaska, Arizona, Florida, Kansas, Michigan, New Hampshire and Ohio), has finished collecting signatures in five more (California, Colorado, Hawaii, Missouri, and Utah), and is busy circulating petitions in at least eleven others. AE's founders say they have raised more than $20 million in funding pledges and the group shows every sign of...

We're looking forward to our next Personal Democracy Plus conference call on Thursday December 8 at 1pm ET, which will be with longtime PdF friend and prolific blogger, author and journalism professor Jeff Jarvis. We'll be discussing his new book Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way We Work and Live. Some topics that just might come up: The Federal Trade Commission's just announced settlement with Facebook for its years of alleged privacy violations, and the company's efforts to turn "frictionless sharing" into an all-purpose enclosure of the Internet, which some are saying will "ruin" sharing; The differences between European and American attitudes towards sharing personal information online; The need for a new online "bill of rights" in...

The word "curator" comes from the Latin root "cura," which means "to care" or "to care for." Its classical usage is to describe someone who puts together a collection for a museum or exhibit, but more recently, it has also come to mean someone who collects and sifts information or ideas, or who nurtures a community or a conversation. Well, we're looking for someone who fits all of the above, to curate the next annual Personal Democracy Forum in New York June 11-12, 2012. It's a great, challenging and rewarding job, as I have written: you get to work closely with many of the most innovative people in the worlds of tech, politics, media and advocacy; you get to shape...

Two days ago, Marko Rakar, Croatia's leading transparency activist (and frequent PdF conference speaker), made front-page news there with a massive new data release: All the public procurement data for government spending since July 1, 2009, in easily searchable form. It's being called the "Croatian WikiLeaks." In all, there are about 58,000 individual contracts totally 80 billion Croatian kuna (or about $15-$16 billion) covering more than 13,000 companies in the database, which allows you to see which agency ordered what goods and services, and who received each contract. A search by contractors shows their overall procurement record (how many contracts, what type of contract, what amount of money is involved and to whom was sold goods and services). The database,...