Archive: Year: 2012

Finally, a day before the first presidential debate, Yahoo! has pulled back the curtain on the Commission on Presidential Debates' "The Voice Of…" online dashboard. It offers three options: "explore the issues," "voice your view," and "watch the debates." Of these, obviously the second one has the potential to be the most interesting. After you sign in, you are offered the opportunity to take a short series of multiple choice questions and share where you on topics like health care, energy, regulation, education, foreign affairs, terrorism jobs, taxes and federal spending. Then the app plugs your data into a bunch of bubbles, so you can see how you compare to other participants in the aggregate. A dynamic counter also...

The American presidential debates are one of the last great institutions of the era of broadcast politics, and arguably the one that has changed the least since the rise of the Internet, despite public demands for greater participation and transparency. With the first head-to-head appearance of President Obama and Governor Romney coming this Wednesday night in Denver, here's what you need to know about the debates and the web. First, the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) — the private organization that was set up by the Democratic and Republican parties in 1987 to take control of the debates from the League of Women Voters and keep them safely under bipartisan sponsorship — is deeply committed to making sure that the people...

In 2008, people watched videos about the Obama or McCain campaigns 1.5 billion times; just ten percent of those views were garnered by videos made directly by the campaigns. So far in 2012, according to a recent report by YouTube, there have been nearly 2 billion views of videos about the presidential candidates, with just five percent of those being official campaign videos. In other words, if you work in politics, you're swimming in a sea of social media. The content you make aimed at influencing the public--press releases, reports, events, infographics, videos--is all just a tributary in a much larger flood of civic chatter. Messages you want to spread sometimes catch a wave, but more often than not you are...

We're looking forward to this Monday night's conversation on "The Rise of the 'Peer Progressive'" with author Steven Johnson that we're hosting along with NY Law School's Institute of Information Law & Policy. We'll be joined by Beth Noveck, Tina Rosenberg and Clay Shirky, who each have carved their own pathbreaking expertise on the power of open networks to produce better outcomes. Tickets are going fast for what I suspect will be a seminal event. To whet your appetite for the conversation, check out this new video from Johnson where he describes the key ideas in his new book, "Future, Perfect": Also, check out this review of Future, Perfect that just ran in the Wall Street Journal....

Last winter, networked citizens, organizations and internet platform providers used the power of the web to engage their members and organize their users around their concerns over the proposed Stop Online Piracy and Protect IP Acts. Millions of people responded by calling, faxing and emailing their representatives in Congress and the bills were dropped. Now all kinds of groups are working to use the power of the Internet to help Americans register and turn out to vote this November. As part of that effort, Personal Democracy Media is pleased to be partnering with Fight for the Future, with the support of the Ford Foundation, on a nonpartisan initiative called "The Internet Votes" that will use social media and open data to...

I've been to a lot of conferences over the years: PopTech, PCForum, eTech, Web 2.0, Government 2.0, South by Southwest, Transparency Camp, Netroots Nation, RightRoots, Politics Online, MESH, the International Journalism Festival, Guardian Activate, and re:Publica all come to mind. Many of these more than once. And of course, since 2004 I've curated twelve Personal Democracy Forum conferences, nine in NY and three overseas, with the help of my partner-in-crime Andrew Rasiej and our hardworking and devoted staff. But I've never experienced anything as soul-, heart- AND brain-satisfying as Web of Change (WoC). I just got back from six days in British Columbia, four of which I spent at Hollyhock, the wilderness retreat on Cortes Island in the Discovery Island...

Political scientists and organizers have known for years that most effective way to get someone to vote was through personal contact: a knock on the door from a canvasser, or even better, a nudge from a friend. Now a new study by researchers led by U.C. San Diego that is being published tomorrow in the journal Nature offers detailed evidence that a non-partisan get-out-the-vote reminder on Facebook can also increase voter turnout--especially if they come with evidence that your real friends are also voting. As first reported in the U-T San Diego News, "about 340,000 more people turned out to the polls two years ago because of a single Facebook message posted" on Election Day. Political science professor James Fowler, the...

Is there a new political philosophy emerging from things like open source software development; massive community sharing hubs like Wikipedia, Kickstarter, and Reddit; peer-to-peer social networking; experiments in "Liquid Democracy," and the rapid spread of resource sharing tools like ZipCar, AirBnb and Car2go? Is it time to start talking about replacing the "welfare state" with the "partner state"? On Monday, Sept. 24, at 7:30 p.m. at the New York Law School, I'm looking forward to exploring all those questions and more with noted author Steven Johnson, whose new book "Future, Perfect" is must-reading for people who believe in the power of open, collaborative peer-to-peer networking to achieve real social progress. Johnson argues for a new breed of political beast: the "peer progressive."...

So far, President Obama has answered several user-submitted questions posed to him in the last 45 minutes on Reddit. Supporters of Internet Freedom, the space program and campaign finance reform should like what he's said. English grammar teachers, not so much. Apparently he doesn't like capitalization. To a question asking for the White House's homemade beer recipe, he wrote: "It will be out soon! I can tell from first hand experience, it is tasty." To a question about his position on Internet Freedom, posed by David Weinberger (the author of several seminal books on the Internet, who goes by davidjoho on Reddit), he wrote: Internet freedom is something I know you all care passionately about; I do too. We will fight hard...

On the troubled northern border of Georgia, next to the disputed territory of South Ossetia, where two wars have been fought in the last two decades, an NGO has been quietly pioneering a new kind of distributed reporting system, one that uses SMS text messaging and the web to combine the data-rich mapping of Ushahidi with the meticulous requirements of human-rights researchers. The project has been in quiet development for two years, as a partnership between some intrepid developers and two NGOs, the Caucasus Research Resource Centers and a London-based conflict-transformation organization called Saferworld that is active in 17 countries around the world. Now, for the first time, they are going public with their Elva platform. Elva, which means "lightning"...