Archive: Author: The Management

The Wall Street Journal published an essay by me this weekend in their Review section, where I try to look at the big picture of what internet-powered mass participation is doing to politics and governance in America. And it's kind of nice to see some of the points I was trying to make echoed by none other than Jon Stewart in the closing remarks that he made at the end of his semi-satirical Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear in Washington on Saturday. Here's Stewart: The country's 24-hour, political pundit perpetual panic conflictinator did not cause our problems, but its existence makes solving them that much harder. The press can hold its magnifying glass up to our problems, bringing them into focus,...

10Questions is a project of Personal Democracy Forum We're entering the final stretch of 10Questions.com, where the public gets to evaluate the answers posted by participating candidates and vote on whether they've actually answered the question. Arguably, this is the most powerful piece of 10Questions, because we're creating a transparent feed-back loop. All too often, candidates for elective office dodge answering questions from reporters and the general public. That's politics in a scarcity-of-media environment. You have to stay "on-message" and speak in sound-bites if the only avenue you have of reaching the public is broadcast media, where air-time is scarce. And when candidates avoid answering the question, the public usually lacks any way of changing their behavior. But right now, you...

Nothing like promising to be interactive and then trying to stage-manage a TV show. A blogger on Americablog, Nick Seaver, says he put in his name to participate in this afternoon's "youth town hall" being put on by MTV, CMT and BET with President Obama, and that he was called back for a second round of "casting" (as he notes, their word, not his). What happened next is sadly reminiscent of past episodes with MTV: After asking what topics I was personally interested in, they asked what question I'd want to ask President Obama if I were in a room with him. I gave a sample question to give them a sense of where I'd go, but not anything specific (something...

Sunday New York Times columnist Frank Rich had a curmudgeonly column this week entitled "Facebook Politicians Are Not Your Friends" arguing that the Internet has failed to deliver more political transparency, and decrying politicians and groups that use social media to serve up a false front to the public. Then he picked on the punching-bag-du-jour of the analog class, Twitter: The more recent miracle of Twitter theoretically encourages real-time interconnection between elected officials and the citizenry. But it too has been easily corrupted by politicians whose 140-character effusions are often ghost-written by hired 20-somethings, just like those produced for pop stars like 50 Cent and Britney Spears. Or, Rich might have added, the 140-character effusions generated by unpaid bots working for 20th-century...

If you're like me and you're on President Obama's Organizing for America e-mail list, you've probably noticed a marked increase in the number of messages piling up into your in-box in the last few weeks. "Watch the President Tonight," says Jeremy Bird. "Bronx house party with the President." "Philadelphia rally with the president." "Micah, I need you in the game," says Barack Obama. Obviously with this fall's congressional elections looking like a tipping point in the Obama presidency, it's no surprise that OFA is pulling out all the stops. The question is whether they are having success in closing the enthusiasm gap. A few clues can be gleaned from the online data trail their efforts are generating: 1. As of today,...

We opened the PdF Europe conference with this video: Why? Well, this video evokes the right associations for us. It's a wonderful piece of user-generated content, a mashup made by five young office workers who had a stroke of genius. With nothing more than the speakers and web-cams on their office laptops, and no rehearsal, they share a moment of beauty and joy, a break from the alienation and drudgery of office life. This is the spirit of the age; personal democracy in action. You can make your own story come alive today in ways that, only a few years ago, were only for Hollywood production houses and Madison Avenue ad agencies. If it's compelling, the network--not the Network--will spread it for...

Former chief Obama campaign blogger Sam Graham-Felsen has a nice post up on Huffington Post today that's worth a read. It's notable especially because it validates a very tough criticism of Obama's political strategy that a number of us have been saying for a while, but coming from Obama's top blogger perhaps may resonate further. In the post, Sam argues that Malcolm Gladwell should have looked more closely at the Obama campaign's massive organizing push, which merged online enthusiasm for the candidate with on-land actions with real consequences (ones that might have made those kids sitting in at those lunch counters proud, by the way): "...

Photo credit: Sebastian R. We're pleased to announce that Personal Democracy Forum will be producing a one-day "Tech Camp" on November 20 in Santiago, Chile, for the U.S. State Department. This is the first time we're working directly for a government entity, and since PdF's blog techPresident also covers the U.S. government's use of technology, we want to be fully transparent about this relationship. First, our work for the State is specifically with the Tech@State team. The State Department is covering the the costs of convening some 50-75 participants from around the Americas, plus a few poli-tech, and social media experts from the U.S. The selection of those participants and details of the program are being done jointly. We are...

It's interesting that just days after I started asking questions about the Tea Party Patriots hyper-inflated claim that they had "15 million" associates or adherents spread across some 2800 affiliates, the language on "About Us" page on their website has been scrubbed. It now reads: Tea Party Patriots is a national grassroot organization that provides logistical, educational, networking and other types of support to over 1000 community based tea party groups around the country. Tea Party Patriots national coordinators understand that we are mere servants to the grassroot groups. We understand that we do not set the course for our member groups, as they have developed their own vision and plan for how to address the local and national challenges that...

This is the most ridiculous URL I've ever seen. And yes, it's from a government website. http://www.usda.gov/wps/portal/usda/!ut/p/c5/lZC9DoJQDIUfqb1w4eKoFwIEEAZ-hMWgQUJAcCAY3l6MgyzG0i5N-vX0tFDAkn05NXU5NkNfdnCCQj9HRpCmfqwyPMQMXRk4zDRNJiOE7D2xJhJrIbyIC9c2ET3x6eOP2CMcneFeQQ6F-KrYwpfLHsvfhWGsYKhB3lV1eZ0h6f-gOhnldFVb0FG6Kuf0szagdK8GHeX0v-pIN7BBVVmjj7a9SbWb_CozRu0yr8rnC5jKQRk!/dl3/d3/L0lJSklna2tra0EhIS9JTmpBQU15QUJFUkNKS28hLzRGR2dzbzBWdnphOTJBZyEvN19QOE1WVkxUMzFHN0xDMElDRUw5T09UMjBPNS9zYS5yZXRyaWV2ZWNvbnRlbnQ!/?PC_7_P8MVVLT31G7LC0ICEL9OOT20O5005915_contentid=2010%2f09%2f0490.xml&PC_7_P8MVVLT31G7LC0ICEL9OOT20O5005915_parentnav=LATEST_RELEASES&PC_7_P8MVVLT31G7LC0ICEL9OOT20O5005915_navid=NEWS_RELEASE I cut and paste that monstrosity out of my browser. It's a link to "Release No. 0490.10" which is actually the announcement of something cool: the winners of the Apps for Healthy Kids competition, a $60,000 contest that has been the flagship of the new Challenge.gov platform. According to the release, "In four months, students, hobbyists, developers, and corporations submitted 95 eligible games and apps. More than 40,000 people signed on as supports of the challenge through the website and more than 20,000 votes were cast to select the Popular Choice winner." A somewhat clunky to navigate list of the winners is here. Next up, a...