Archive: Category: TechPresident

Go read British Cabinet Officer Tom Watson's speech on the "Power of information" and imagine a Member of Congress making a similar speech on how technology can radically reinvent government. Imagine one of our presidential candidates making it (even Barack Obama, who has done the most thinking on this topic.) You can't. But maybe, if we pay more attention to our cousins across the pond, soon someone will. Five years ago, Watson was one of the first MPs to blog, and notes that even though it opened him up to daily abuse, "the blog broke down the walls between legislators and electors in a way that interested me. So I persevered." Now he says, "I believe in the power of mass...

Hugh Atkin is at it again. Here's his full-on mashup of Sarah Silverman's "I'm F---ing Matt Damon" repurposed for the Clinton-Obama battle. I'm looking forward to seeing how he tackles McCain....

I had the pleasure of sitting down with Joe Trippi a week ago, as we both were in DC for the launch of Larry Lessig's new Change-Congress project. (Joe is working with Larry on CC, and the Sunlight Foundation, which I consult for, was co-sponsoring Larry's speech). If you watch closely, you can see Larry in the background of the first video, in fact. In general, the lack of production values suggests I should stick to my day job, I know. The sound quality on the following videos could be a lot better (I was using a Flip video recorder, held by hand as you can tell, without the additional external mike). I apologize for that. Here were the highlights...

When we launched Personal Democracy Forum back in 2004, we posted a modest manifesto. It starts: Democracy in America is changing. A new force, rooted in new tools and practices built on and around the Internet, is rising alongside the old system of capital-intensive broadcast politics. Today, for almost no money, anyone can be a reporter, a community organizer, an ad-maker, a publisher, a money-raiser, or a leader. If what they have to say is compelling, it will spread. Well, one more piece of that vision has come to fruition. Now, thanks to a new nonpartisan service called VoterVoter, you can not only be an ad-maker who spreads your ideas on the net. You can get your ad on television, without...

Hugh Atkin is viderate. You and I are not (that is, unless you know how to use Final Cut Pro and have amassed an in-depth videobank of clips and allusions that you can manipulate as easily as typing this sentence). We've linked to his stuff before, but I'm writing this mash note because I think he deserves more attention here in the U.S. (his Australian countrymen already know how brilliant he can be). These are the best of times to be in the political video business. There are amusing one-offs popping up every day now, like "It's Raining McCain" and "Obama-sistible." Whole sites and business plans are being written around the genre. But there aren't many true artists of the political...

I'm at the National Press Club for the launch of Stanford Prof. Larry Lessig's new project, Change-Congress.org. He's here as part of Sunshine Week, and his speech is co-sponsored by the Sunlight Foundation (which I consult for) as well as the Omidyar Network. As you may know, last year, Lessig decided to shift his focus from the fight for free culture to the fight for a clean government. Here are my notes on his talk, paraphrasing as best as I can: I want to talk about truth, trust and Title VII, Lessig starts. Let's start with the easy policy cases that our government increasingly gets wrong. The consensus among policy-makers is that the only changes in copyright term should be prospectively,...

Here's Barack Obama's big speech on race, boiled down by TagCrowd.com to its 50 most frequently used words: Here's the editorial responses of the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and Wall Street Journal, mashed together and boiled down: It would be cool if someone felt moved to do the same with, say, the top 20 blogs commenting on the speech (drawn from Memeorandum?). At a first glance, it seems as if our editorial guides can't help but view the speech as a political ploy, first and foremost. Considering how rarely politicians choose to grapple in depth with hard and divisive issues like race, it's hard to see how that is the best frame through which to view it. But that...

I wondered what the presidential candidates and other politicians were saying about the Federal Reserve's unprecedented interventions in the financial sector, including today's provision of $30 billion to guarantee JP Morgan Chase against the risks it will incur as it takes over Bear Stearns for pennies on the dollar (and inherits its subprime portfolio). It's not that often, after all, that the government decides to socialize someone else's losses--I can't remember many manufacturing businesses or agricultural businesses that were deemed "too big to fail." So, while looking for their public statements from today, I also went online to follow the money trail a bit further. Here's what I've learned so far. First the candidate responses: "I'm not going to second-guess the Fed either...

Last week at ETech, one of my favorite tech conferences, three Brits convened a delightful panel on "moving theft-based activism to the global stage." The title actually made the discussion sound a bit illicit, when really all the three were talking about was how civic-minded hackers have being taking government data that ought to be in public view, and making it available to all--with transformative and beneficial effects. The question at hand was whether those of us who are doing this work at a country-level, like mySociety in the UK, or the network of folks around the Sunlight Foundation in the US (which, full disclosure, Andrew Rasiej and I consult for), might get engaged in a similar project around the...

It looks like the heightening divisions with the Democratic party over the Obama-Clinton contest are causing a split in the online progressive city known as DailyKos. Yesterday at 5pm PDT, a diarist who posts under the name Alegre put up an open letter titled "Writers Strike at DailyKos" and threw down the gauntlet: I’ve decided to go on "strike" and will refrain from posting here as long as the administrators allow the more disruptive members of our community to trash Hillary Clinton and distort her record without any fear of consequence or retribution. I will not be posting at DailyKos effective immediately. I will not help drive up traffic or page-hits as long as my candidate – a good...