Archive: Category: Civicist

The world of tech and politics lost one of its giants Friday when Jim Gilliam, the founder of the organizing platform NationBuilder, passed away after a long illness and many battles with cancer.Jim was probably best known for a talk he gave in 2011 at Personal Democracy Forum, which he titled "The Internet is My Religion." In it, he described growing up as a born-again Christian, while also discovering the emerging world of the internet, and then attending Jerry Falwell University, where he found his niche as one of the college's computer geeks—even fixing Rev. Falwell's computer. Then, while just 18, Jim was struck with non-Hodgkins lymphoma and his mother was also diagnosed with cancer. Her death shattered his world,...

This week, MoveOn members will send more than 20 million text message to targeted voters. That is, on its own, nearly as many voter contacts as the 2012 Obama re-election campaign made in the climactic last four days of that contest. As of the end of October, the Beto O'Rourke Senate campaign reported that its supporters alone had made 19 million phone calls to Texas voters, and that they were generating more than one million text messages a day to voters. With 435 House races, a third of the Senate, and thousands of local races being contested, there is clearly a huge wave of campaign and grassroots organizing underway to mobilize voters. While 2018 is not a presidential election year,...