Archive: Year: 2012

A year ago, Microsoft mega-billionaire Bill Gates gave a talk at TED about state budgets and education funding, entitled "How state budgets are breaking US schools." It was an attack on state budgeting practices. All but one of the fifty states are supposed to balance their budget, but Gates argued that most states used gimmicks "that would make Enron blush" such as borrowing money, selling off state assets, deferring payments to schools, tapping tobacco settlement payouts early, and abusing workers' withholding taxes to cover cash flow needs. He also pointed out that states faced a growing generational divide, with increasing pension obligations and health care costs destined to shift spending towards the old and away from the young. At one...

The mainstream media has spent much of the last year looking for the next tool or app that is supposedly going to change the election of 2012 — "It's the Twitter Election! It's the Facebook Election! It's the Tumblr Election!" While it's certainly worth noting how the campaigns are using these sites — playing elite spin games in public on Twitter, mining voters' social data on Facebook, and charming the cool kids on Tumblr — none of them are really changing the role of activists or ordinary voters all that much, the way that newly emergent online platforms disrupted politics as usual in 2007-08. In the meantime, Change.org, a social action site built around the oldest and arguably least sexy tool in...

As David Karpf wrote here ten days ago, the Americans Elect third-party experiment of 2012 looks like it has hit a dead end. No declared candidate is anywhere close to hitting the group's requirement of earning 10,000 supporters across at least ten states, with at least 1,000 from each state. Former Louisiana governor Buddy Roemer the closest at just 5,840. He has less than 600 from California. As Jonathan Tilove points out in his story in the Times-Picayune, that means Roemer has more followers on Twitter than he has supporters who actually want him on AE's presidential ballot line. Americans Elect had an ambitious plan to hold several rounds of online voting to winnow down what its leaders had hoped would...

Remember: as the date for a national election approaches, the probability of a comments thread degenerating into a political back-and-forth regurgitating the same tired talking points approaches one. — "PubliustheLesser," From a comment thread at The Atlantic....

We all know how the Internet is enhancing the power of citizens to band together to take action around common causes. And these days you can hardly spend more than a few minutes online before you bump into some campaign led by consumers taking on a company, demanding changes and often getting them. But what if while all this is going on, a deeper power shift is under way that is quietly tilting the playing field towards anyone with the money and motive to manipulate web users by collecting all kinds of data about them and then assiduously targeting people in ways they're barely aware of? That's just one of the big questions I'm looking forward to covering on this Thursday's...

Last weekend in Washington DC, about five hundred intrepid reporters, influential insiders, bloggers, media mavens, and a handful of glitterati came together to swap tales of their bouts with the powerful, impress each other with their savvy, trade gossip, and have a good time. No, I'm not talking about the annual White House Correspondents Association shindig, which has grown from a fancy dinner into an all-out onslaught of glittery parties, complete with Hollywood celebrities and too much elated self-congratulation by a media industry that seems to be less-and-less about anything other than itself. I'm talking about Transparency Camp, the Sunlight Foundation's annual two-day unconference for open government. (Full disclosure: Along with Andrew Rasiej, I helped set up the Sunlight Foundation and...

Tomorrow, the Federal Communications Commission is scheduled to vote on a proposed rule that would require broadcasters to post online their "public file," a list of all the political ads that run on their channels, who bought them, and what they paid. The rule would also enable the agency to build a central website compiling all the data in an easy-to-search portal. Right now you have to literally visit each TV station in person to access the paper records. As ProPublica's Daniel Victor has pointed out, this would be a "transparency gold mine" that would allow the public to see much more easily who is trying to influence elections. Making this kind of public data available online is especially valuable at...

“If Chris Soghoian points out a technology-related privacy problem, then it should probably be taken seriously,” Marcia Hofmann, a senior staff attorney at San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, recently told Wired magazine. “Nobody else is doing what Chris does—at least not at his level.” Indeed, that's why this Thursday's PD+ call with Chris Soghoian on how to protect your privacy online should be really eye-opening. As Wired noted last fall, Soghoian--a journalist and PhD candidate in computer science at Indiana University Bloomington--has a knack for spotting serious privacy holes in all kinds of web services, doing the technical digging to document the problem, and has often pushed companies into making significant changes in response. Now armed with a grant from the...

"October Surprise is from another age. We have an 'October Surprise' every ten minutes. You can't hold anything any more." — ABC's Jake Tapper speaking at Harvard Kennedy School today, on the speed of news....

Welcome to WeGov, the newest experiment at Personal Democracy Media and a special new section of techPresident that we are launching today with the financial support of the Omidyar Network. This new section of techPresident has a simple but ambitious goal: To report on the stories of efforts around the world to reshape politics and governance using technology, and to assess the impact of those efforts. We live in a time when any civic activist with a good idea about how to make government and society work better needs little more than basic computer skills to launch their project into the public arena. It is also a time when government agencies and private companies alike are exploring open platforms that offer new...