Archive: Year: 2013

We're looking for an enterprising and well-organized assistant editor to join our existing (and illustrious, hardworking and spunky) team in tracking and reporting on how technology is changing politics, government and civic life. The assistant editor will work on the WeGov international section of techPresident, under the guidance of the site's editorial director and managing editor, and in tandem with other colleagues. This section is a hub of current international reporting and analysis on a wide range of topics. This editor will focus on covering government transparency, anti-corruption, open data, civic hacking, and what we often call “We-Government” projects. She or he will be responsible for story generation, finding and managing freelance reporters, tracking story development from assignment to delivery, doing...

IsRandPaulStillTalking? No. But ICYMI Politico rounds up the tweets from politicians and pundits supportive of Sen. Paul's filibuster, and Patrick Ruffini charts them minute-by-minute. Also, The New Republic's Alec MacGillis says the Senator "has a point." All kinds of people, from Jon Stewart to the CATO Institute, agree. To be determined, will this White House petition take off? Holder on Swartz U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, responding to questions from Sen. John Cornyn, expresses his sympathy to Aaron Swartz's family and friends, but defends the handling of his case, calling it "a good use of prosecutorial discretion." Rush, Meet #TCOT According to Rush Limbaugh, "Twitter is thought to be made of just average Americans tweeting their thoughts" creating "an impression of where the country is." And yesterday...

Last Friday, Organizing for Action, President Obama's controversial 501c4 continuation of his campaign apparatus, sent out a wave of emails asking supporters to step up their efforts in support of his push for a vote in Congress on gun control. Some people were asked to share or like a graphic on Facebook, to get their friends engaged; about 150,000 did so. That's a respectable number--if you divided it equally across every Congressional district, that's a few hundred people each. Some were also asked to reach out to their Members of Congress, and one of the options they were given was to tweet at them. Here at techPresident, we've long argued that Obama and OFA had the potential to alter the power...

Let's face it. After nearly fifty years of development and roughly twenty years of mass adoption, the Internet hasn't created many truly useful tools for groups. We may live in the age of "ridiculously easy group formation," but if you've spent any time as part of a group, you know that all the most popular internet tools --email, list-servs, blogs, chats, and wikis --basically suck at group coordination. None of these tools are built to make it easy for large groups to make decisions together. It's not a coincidence, I think, that most of us rarely, or never, experience working in a group where everyone actually gets a meaningful chance to participate in the decisions that group makes. Or, to...

Every year we choose a theme for Personal Democracy Forum, our annual conference on how technology is changing politics, government and civic life. This year, for our tenth annual gathering, the theme is going to be "Think Bigger." We've chosen it in part to honor our late friend Aaron Swartz, who used that phrase it in an email he wrote me, where he asked, "Why not harness the power of the Internet to work on the larger-scale problems?" Why not, indeed. Thinking bigger can also mean imagining how we can use the explosive growth in data and computing power, as well as the rapid spread of connection technologies into billions of hands, to approach problems in better ways. Bigger data...

Tonight during President Obama's State of the Union speech, Microsoft's Bing search platform will be offering users a potentially intriguing way to register their response to the President's words: a real-time sentiment tracker that will produce an aggregated trend line of people's reactions, called Bing Pulse. "It's almost like an online dial group," says Adam Sohn, Bing's general manager. "You'll be able to vote every couple of seconds, positive, neutral or negative. And we'll be showing that on a live ticker at bing.com/politics, alongside the speech." Obviously, if you've watched CNN during any big political speech or debate, this kind of live "dial-group" isn't all that new. But those are done with small, pre-selected samples of viewers sitting in a...

Department of Disclosure update: I'm pleased to announce that I've joined the volunteer board of the Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science. Founded in 2011 by a collective of seven, Public Lab, as it's known in short, is a community that develops and applies open-source tools to environmental exploration and investigation, like balloon mapping and kitchen-table spectrometers. By democratizing inexpensive and accessible “Do-It-Yourself” techniques, Public Laboratory is nurturing a collaborative network of practitioners who are actively re-imagining the human relationship with the environment. I first got turned on to Public Lab before it actually existed, when one of its co-founders, Jeff Warren, gave a thrilling talk at PDF 2010 about "Grassroots Mapping," a project he had started while a graduate...

The chattering class is starting to make up its mind: The White House's "We the People" e-petition site isn't for serious people. "The White House Knows Its Petition Site Has Become Ridiculous," chortled New York Magazine a few days ago. "Just about any silly petition can make a cameo" on this site, wrote Politico's Patrick Gavin. "Your Stupid White House Petition Now Requires 100,000 Signatures," taunted the headline in BetaBeat, reporting on the newly raised threshold for getting an official response. Even the normally counter-cultural small-d democratic magazine Mother Jones took a dump on the project, highlighting a blind quote from a cranky staffer somewhere in the West Wing: "'My God, What Have We Done'? White House Staffers React to...

Saturday at the Great Hall of Cooper Union, in the heart of New York City's Greenwich Village, friends of internet freedom and open democracy activist Aaron Swartz will gather for a two-hour memorial service. The event is open to the public and will be livestreamed online. The speakers will include Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, Aaron's partner, as well as Glenn Otis Brown, Tom Chiarella, Holden Karnofsky, Damien Kulash, David Isenberg, Quinn Norton, Doc Searls, David Segal, Roy Singham, Edward Tufte, Ben Wikler, and others. If you are planning to attend, tickets are not required, but the organizers have asked people to RSVP at aaronswnyc.eventbrite.com....

Aaron is dead. Wanderers in this crazy world, we have lost a mentor, a wise elder. Hackers for right, we are one down, we have lost one of our own. Nurtures, careers, listeners, feeders, parents all, we have lost a child. Let us all weep. --Sir Tim Berners Lee, January 11, 2013 Aaron Swartz, a leading activist for open information, internet freedom, and democracy, died at his own hand Friday January 11. He was 26 years old. There is no single comprehensive list of his good works, but here are some of them: At the age of 14 he co-authored the RSS 1.0 spec--taking brilliant advantage of the fact that internet working groups didn't care if someone was 14, they only cared if their code worked. Then he met Larry...