Archive: Year: 2013

A week ago, during a speech in Los Angeles, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton condemned NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden's "outrageous behavior" and criticized China for allowing him to leave Hong Kong. One wonders how she would square her remarks with her eloquent advocacy in the past of "internet freedom" and the "freedom to connect." In January 2010, in her first major speech on these topics, she said, "new technologies do not take sides in the struggle for freedom and progress, but the United States does. We stand for a single internet where all of humanity has equal access to knowledge and ideas." In that speech, she evoked Franklin Roosevelt's Four Freedoms: "freedom of expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom...

Monday morning, during the opening session of the MIT-Knight Civic Media conference, Sue Gardner, the outgoing executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, made a bold statement that quieted the room full of digerati. "We are not lost, but I think we are losing," she said. Taking the long view on the evolution of civic media since the rise of the Internet, she said, "We don't have the information sharing utopia that we imagined we'd have." Other than Wikipedia, which is the only nonprofit website in the top 25 most visited worldwide, the web is dominated by the platforms and the values of for-profit companies. "The insiders are winning," Gardner declared. For the health of society, she said, we need a...

This is my digital life, circa mid-2013. Your mileage may vary, but I bet only in degree. On June 3th, I sent 111 emails and received 474, according to Mailstrom, an email management tool that I recently started using. On June 4th, I sent 126 and received 476. On June 5th, I sent 103 and received 419. You think this is just what my Gmail account looked like on the days right before Personal Democracy Forum? On June 13th, a week after the conference, it was 43 out and 397 in. According to Google, I have received 8,952 emails from more than 1700 contacts in the last thirty days, and I sent 1,671 to more than 500 different people. No...

Did we "Think Bigger?" Yes! Beyond the many great individual talks and panels, I was struck to see several cross-cutting themes emerge over Personal Democracy Forum 2013's two days. 1. The power of emotion. For all the emphasis on "big data" and metrics as tools and practices changing the contours of politics, many of the most effective keynotes not only connected at the emotional level (think of Kimberly Bryant of Black Girls Code, or Nancy Lublin of DoSomething, or Shaka Senghor helping close out the second day) but also made the case that emotional intelligence is as important as data analysis. Sara Critchfield's talk in particular drove that point home, but so did Robin Chase's call for action on climate change...

Last year, with support from the Omidyar Network (ON), we launched a special new vertical called “WeGov,” offering original reporting on the many innovative ways people are using technology to increase government transparency, fight corruption, open data and hack on civic problems. This year, we’re proud to announce that in addition to a renewal of support from ON, we have also begun receiving support from the United Nations Foundation to expand WeGov to cover how tech is being used in innovative ways to strengthen economic development, address environmental problems, improve public health and education, and advance the conditions of women and children all over the developing world. In tandem with our renewed support from ON, we're happy to announce that...

We're almost done nailing down the schedule for Personal Democracy Forum 2013, just a little less than three weeks away. In addition to our main hall keynotes, we're pleased to be offering more than 20 in-depth breakout sessions featuring an amazing array of 90 expert speakers. Our breakout sessions take place each day of the conference after lunch, on the eighth and ninth floors of the Kimmel Center at NYU, adjoining the Skirball Center where we hold the plenaries. Online registration is still open. This year we've developed several core tracks for the breakouts: Net-powered organizing, the growing civic stack, tech policy, and the uses (and misuses) of political data. We also will be offering a few sponsored sessions with partners...

I'd like to take my hat off and give Toby Daniels and his team at Social Media Week (SMW) a salute for the email that just landed in my in-box. Titled "Gender 50/50: Help Us Address the Challenge of Gender Balance," (here's the accompanying blog post) it marks the start of the speaker and panel submission process for next September's international SMW with an admission and a commitment. The admission: "We have largely failed in our efforts in being balanced. We do not have fair representation, and we have not achieved a 50/50 balance in men and women participating in our events." The commitment: "My team and I are 100% committed towards making a fundamental change to how we approach...

We're thrilled to announce our next round of confirmed speakers for Personal Democracy Forum 2013, our tenth annual conference: -Kimberly Bryant, Founder of Black Girls Code; -Scott Chacon, CIO of Union Square Ventures; -Steve Grove, Head of Community Development, Google -Mark Kaigwa, Co-founder of Affrinnovator.com and Nairobi Ambassador for Sandbox Network; -Tracy Russo, Director of New Media, U.S. Justice Department; -Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, Founder of SumOfUs; -Berin Szoka, President of TechFreedom; -Mike Turk, President of Opinion Mover Strategies; -Dan Wagner, Chief Analytics Officer, Obama 2012 The full list of previously announced speakers is here. In the coming days, we'll have a lot more details on the program to share. But here's some highlights of what to expect in the main hall. As past attendees know, the conference is structured...

According to Evgeny Morozov, the world has gone crazy and he's one of the few sane people left. Zynga and Facebook, he writes, in his strange new book, "To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism," have "become models to think about civic engagement." Yelp and Amazon have "become models to think about criticism." People who believe the open Internet can be a tool for good and who worry about and try to oppose people who are using it to hurt others, actually treat the Internet like a "religion" and believe "it's the ultimate technology and the ultimate network." Like the proverbial engineer with a hammer, they see all of society's quirks, inefficiencies, waste, inequality, corruption and hypocrisy...

Back in late November 2011, I got an email from my friend Marko Rakar, the Croatian political blogger and transparency activist. "We have elections for the Parliament on Sunday. Do you have a contact at Facebook to someone who will put that warning sign on top of the page on Election Day?" he asked me. "What warning sign?" I replied. "On Election Day on the top of your Facebook wall they put a sign, 'there are elections today; have you voted yet?" he answered. I reached out to contacts at Facebook and got this reply: "Unfortunately our tool we use for elections is currently broken and being fixed.  Apologies and thanks for the email." Needless to say, the 1.6 million Facebook users in...