Archive: Author: The Management

Dear Friends: Ever since we launched Personal Democracy Forum in 2004, we've envisioned creating a hub for the growing community interested in understanding how technology is changing politics, government and civil society. In nearly eight years and with your help, we've built a vibrant annual conference in the US (along with satellite events overseas) and a lively daily news site where the reporting is serious, but at the same time spurs conversation that pulses with excitement about the possibilities to make the civic process more open and participatory, make the powerful more accountable, and make life better for all people. Now, in tandem with the redesign and relaunch of our websites, we're proud to announce that we are changing our name...

Someday we'll probably stop talking about bloggers, the same way that no one refers to people who use phones as "phoners." But blogging deserves its own category because the phenomenon so clearly illustrates how the old boundaries between professionals and amateurs have fallen in this age of hyper-connection and hyper-empowerment. Political bloggers in particular are of special interest because of their ability to nurture communities of readers, followers and participants. The rise of the political blogosphere has disrupted traditional politics and journalism, and also presents some complicated challenges for the law. Below, a selection of our best coverage on bloggers, blogging, bloggers rights and sometimes, their wrongs....

After the 2008 presidential election, the Obama for America political machine that carried Barack Obama to the White House went through its own transition, eventually emerging as a semi-independent arm of the Democratic National Committee called "Organizing for America." Many people thought OFA would be Obama's secret weapon, an internet-powered grassroots army that could push Members of Congress from below while Obama used the more traditional bully-pulpit powers of the presidency. The reality, as we all know now, was a lot more complicated....

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...