Archive: Category: TechPresident

The Clinton campaign says it raised $2.5 million online last night in the three hours after the Pennsylvania primary was called, and 80% of that came from new donors. Clinton herself made clear mention of her campaign's url, HillaryClinton.com, during her victory speech, and if you look closely you'll notice that her campaign placards also reinforce that. Anyone clicking there was taken straight to a donation page, as Marc Ambinder pointed out last night, where the campaign is asking for as little as $5 from potential donors. Clearly, small donations (those less than $200) are numerically dominating the Democratic contest and buoying both candidates. The nonpartisan Campaign Finance Institute reported yesterday that: The three remaining candidates raised nearly $78 million in March,...

Here are my notes for the talk I'm about to give at Politics Web 2.0 on "The Revolution Will Be Networked: How Open Source Politics is Emerging in America.” --What do I mean by “open source politics”? Back in 2004, I wrote a piece for The Nation called “The Rise of Open Source Politics” where I said: “The term "open source" specifically refers to allowing any software developer to see the underlying source code of a program, so that anyone can analyze it and improve it; better code trumps bad code, and programmers who have proven their smarts have greater credibility and status. Applied to political organizing, open source would mean opening up participation in planning and implementation to the community, letting...

I came in a few minutes late on Christian Vaccari's talk on candidate websites in the 2008 US presidential primaries. Vaccari is at the University of Bologna in Italy, and has been studying online politics for a while. He is explaining his research goals: -to assess how US presidential candidates adopted online communication during the primaries, looking at information vs participation and Rs v Ds. -and to test the "normalization of cyberspace" hypothesis that top-tier candidates will have better websites than lower-tier candidates. His methodology: a longitudinal analysis of candidate websites starting in March 2007. He coded sites by 87 variables, relating to leveraging the internet for information and participation. He also looked at the professional level of the websites, how well designed...

Here are my notes on a very interesting talk by Rachel Gibson of the University of Manchester, titled "Trickle-up Politics? the Impact of Web 2.0 technologies on citizen participation." I think you'll find her overview and characterizations of politics before and during the web to be very helpful. What is trickle-up politics? This isn't a new type of politics, but a new manner or mode of politics, and a wider space in which it is taking place. In the deregulated, decentralized political space that is the web, there is more space for users to do their own thing. Her talk is organized in four parts: 1. Politics before the web, until 1945. Politics was direct, localized and face-to-face. Townhall meetings, mass marches,...

I'm now at one of the afternoon panels, which has the rather bland title of "Parties, Elections and Campaigning II." But the papers look rather enticing: --Daniel Kreiss on "Taking Our Country Back: The New Left, Yippies, Deaniacs, and the Production of Contemporary American Politics." --G.R. Boynton on "Political Leadership in the Web 2.0 world." --Giovanni Navarria on "Howard Dean's 2004 presidential campaign, the Downing Street e-petitions road tax battle, and Beppegrillo.it: A comparative study." Kreiss leads off. The focus of his talk is to show the cultural antecedents of the Dean campaign in the old New Left and Yippie movements of the 1960s in America. I've read his paper on the plane over, and he has put his finger on some important connections. He...

I'm at the Politics Web 2.0 conference at the University of London, Royal Hollaway, and things have just kicked off. As always with my visits to conferences, I will try to blog that which I find interesting (I'm no Ethan Zuckerman) and all my renderings are not verbatim, but rough paraphrasing. Here are my notes on one of the first keynotes, which definitely held my attention. Helen Margetts, of the Oxford Internet Institute, is presenting on "Digital-era Governance: Peer production, Co-creation and the Future of Government." This is one area where the possible impact of the internet has been underestimated, especially within the community, she starts off. These technologies could have a huge meaning for government. Her talk starts with Digital Era...

I'm taking off tomorrow morning for London, England, where I'll be speaking along with techPresident blogger Michael Turk at "Politics Web 2.0," a two-day international conference hosted by the University of London, Royal Halloway. The conference features 120 papers organised into 41 panels, with more than 180 participants drawn from over 30 countries, and is probably a bit more academic than most of the events I tend to go to these days. Nevertheless, I am really looking forward to the trip and expecting to pick up a lot of interesting insights into our internet-powered election, as well as those of other countries experiencing this transformation. Mike and I are keynoting one after the other on Friday, and we've talked in advance...

Could it be a "mega-trend"? Hillary Clinton's new lead campaign strategist, Geoff Garin, has sent out an email asking Clinton supporters not for their money (though there is a not-so-subtle reference to being outspent 3-1 by Obama and a big red contribute button at the bottom of the text) but for their input! "Tell me what you think" is the subject line. He writes: In the days and weeks (and hopefully months) ahead, I want to know what you think -- about the state of the race, our campaign strategy, or your ideas for doing things differently. You've made an investment in this campaign, and I want your input as we plan the days, weeks, and months to come. I can't promise...

"First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win." So said Gandhi. It looks like we're entering the "ridicule" phase on the rising movement for greater political transparency and interactivity. Not only are congressional staffers in revolt over the notion that their personal financial disclosure statements, which are required by law to be publicly available, are searchable online at Legistorm, now a former leader of the American League of Lobbyists is muttering darkly about the danger of letting the public help craft the text of legislation. Commenting on the Sunlight Foundation's innovative PublicMarkup.org site**, where the public has been invited to comment on and improve the text of a draft omnibus bill on government transparency, Paul...

Is a nationwide truckers' strike just over the horizon? As gasoline prices climb towards and past $4 a gallon, something is brewing that--with the help of the web--could very well upend the flatlining presidential primaries and force hard economic questions that none of the presidential candidates really want to wrestle with to the center of the national conversation. Lots of people are being hurt by the emerging recession--people whose homes are being foreclosed, people who are being laid off, people who can't find a job--but for the most part their pain is private, and their efforts to seek solutions or answers tend to also remain private, even in the age of what writer Clay Shirky has aptly called "ridiculously easy group...