Archive: Author: The Management

If you're anywhere in the vicinity of New Haven, CT, tomorrow night, you can come hear me and political scientist Matthew Hindman engage in a "Digital Democracy Debate" at Yale Law School. It's a special session of the Harvard-MIT-Yale Cyberscholar Working Group, from 6:00-8:30pm; details here. Hindman is the author of the 2009 book, "The Myth of Digital Democracy," which argues that "the internet has done little to broaden political discourse but in fact empowers a small set of elites--some new, but most familiar." I don't want to completely tip my hand (though if you've been reading this blog for any period of time, you know I disagree with this conclusion), but my general feeling is that while Hindman raises some...

We've just posted the hour-by-hour program schedule for Personal Democracy Forum Europe's inaugural conference in Barcelona, which is happening this November 20-21 at the beautiful Torre Agbar building. Just go to these pages: Day One, Day Two. A few new speakers who we're excited to announce will be joining us: -Richard Allan, Director of Policy, Facebook EU (UK) -Julian Assange, the co-founder of Wikileaks.org (Australia) -David Cierco, Director-General of the Information Society, Ministry of Industry, Tourism and Trade (Spain) -Tom Pursey, Product Marketing Manager, YouTube (UK) -Martin Varsavsky, Founder, Fon (Spain) (tentative) The schedule is still subject to change, so you'll want to check back to these two pages from time to time for the latest news. But we're 18 days from the conference and things are...

Today is the first day in the office for our new reporter/researcher, Nick Judd. He's going to be expanding our coverage of the nuts and bolts of tech-politics, starting with updating our consumer guide to companies that offer internet-politics services, and developing other premium content for PdF Network members. So if you get a phone call or email from Nick, be nice to him and answer his questions. Or else! Nick comes to PdF from The Riverdale Press, where he covered Bronx politics for about two years. He also interned at The Jersey Journal and City Limits, and did a brief stint as a research assistant for the public policy think tank Center for an Urban Future. A New York University...

Gerrymandering has long been one of the ugly little secrets of American politics, and absolutely one of the arenas where the role of technology has been to make politics worse, not better. Every ten years, after a new census is completed, state legislatures redraw district lines, using powerful computers that essentially enable them to pick their voters before the voters ever have a chance to pick them. Wonder why 94% to 98% of incumbent Members of the U.S. House of Representatives are have been re-elected every cycle since 1996? Or why so few House seats--generally only one-in-ten--are considered up for grabs each cycle? This has long been one of those problems mostly of interest to academics and good government groups,...

Could New Jersey independent gubernatorial candidate Chris Daggett pull off a Jesse Ventura in next week's election? That's the intriguing question posed by Mark Blumenthal over on his "Mystery Pollster" column at National Journal. I think the answer is that it's pretty unlikely--unless the Daggett campaign uses the internet in a way no campaign has ever done before. I'll explain how in a moment. But here's a hint: First some background. Blumenthal reports that the two most recent nonpartisan polls of the race show Daggett at 19 or 20 percent of the vote, with the two major party candidates, Democratic Governor Jon Corzine and Republican Chris Christie each at around 40 percent. Even though he lacks any party organization and...

Today, President Obama is doing something no sitting U.S. President has done before. He is using his massive network of grass-roots supporters, which has been undergoing a reboot since Election Day, to go between the legs of Members of Congress and generate pressure from below on them to pass health care reform. Today is a big test of Organizing for America (OFA), Obama's political arm at the Democratic National Committee. OFA's leaders are calling on its supporters to generate a massive wave of phone calls to Congressional offices and district offices--100,000 or more in one day. They've got a barometer up showing more than 1,100 2,468 28,000 calls so far. (It jumped 1,300 in the 15 minutes since I started...

Is political blogging no longer a place for the individual, crusading voice? Do you have to be part of a group blog, and ideally backed by a big media property, to flourish in the national political blogosphere in the U.S.? Two powerful indie-bloggers, the pseudonymous Digby and the once-pseudonymous Atrios (Duncan Black), posted links back to my Friday post about Technorati's new top blogs metric, that in essence expressed nostalgia for those good 'ol days when all it took was a PC and a strong point of view to make it in the Big Blogcity. Digby wrote: It would appear that the days of the single, old country blogger like myself are definitely on the wane. I would guess that within just...

This Thursday, the PdF Network conference call will feature an in-depth conversation with Jacob Colker on the topic of "Mobile Volunteers: How to Harness Microvolunteering for Your Cause." Click here to RSVP. Colker is the co-founder and CTO of the Extraordinaries, an amazing nonprofit start-up that is in the middle of building a dynamic platform that is enabling all kinds of good causes to tap into the unused free time of potential volunteers with mobile phones. This is the cutting edge of a larger trend that many people call "crowd-sourcing," but microvolunteering is more structured and aimed at producing social benefits. As I wrote a few weeks ago, While they're still mostly under the radar, there's enough going on now, in...

We're pleased to announce that renowned British author and thinker Charles Leadbeater is joining PdF Europe as a lead keynoter at our inaugural conference in Barcelona. We've also confirmed several other additions to our already exciting and diverse group of speakers (details below). As a result of this last minute news, we've decided to extend the conference early-bird registration discount through midnight tomorrow night (Tuesday, October 20th). You can still register now at the rate of 200 Euros (150 for students). After Tuesday, the registration fee will rise to 250 Euros (200 for students). Details and registration information here. Leadbeater was an adviser to British Prime Minister Tony Blair and has done extensive work on the rise of the knowledge driven...

Should a city manager be on Facebook? Social media goes local government. Is it time for a discussion of "The Shortfalls of Government 2.0"? Some Governingpeople think so, and they're planning a workshop for early next year. This is a big deal: mySociety.org partners with the Open Society Institute to launch a call for proposals for similar citizen-centric sites for Central and Eastern Europe. For geeks only: The technology behind the new GOP.com website. Key quote: "The site is dog slow." Takes 83 seconds to fully load, compared to the Democrats.org site's 4 seconds. Conservative YouTube star Joel Pollak, who challenged Rep. Barney Frank in public, is now hoping to join him in Congress. He might want to take a balloon ride first, to...