Archive: Category: TechPresident

Aaron is dead. Wanderers in this crazy world, we have lost a mentor, a wise elder. Hackers for right, we are one down, we have lost one of our own. Nurtures, careers, listeners, feeders, parents all, we have lost a child. Let us all weep. --Sir Tim Berners Lee, January 11, 2013 Aaron Swartz, a leading activist for open information, internet freedom, and democracy, died at his own hand Friday January 11. He was 26 years old. There is no single comprehensive list of his good works, but here are some of them: At the age of 14 he co-authored the RSS 1.0 spec--taking brilliant advantage of the fact that internet working groups didn't care if someone was 14, they only cared if their code worked. Then he met Larry...

If Members of the House of Representatives were ranked by how many raw votes they got from people in their district last November, the top 14 would all be Democrats. The number one vote-getter in 2012 was Pennsylvania's Chaka Fattah, who won re-election with a whopping 318,176 votes--nearly ten times his challenger's total. Current apportionment rules hold that every Member of the House is supposed to represent roughly 700,000 constituents, as of the 2010 census, so Fattah's vote amounted to 45.4% of that total. That number, which we might call the "Representative Quotient" or RQ for short, varies widely across the people's house. Twenty-two Democrats, including Fattah, earned an RQ of 35% or higher in 2012. Only three Republicans got...

Technology is changing politics, government and civic life. We built this timeline to show the accelerating pace of change in the United States, in the international arena, and online. The initial research was done by Kristina Redgrave, Diane Chang, Becky Kazansky, Andrew Seo and Micah Sifry, and edited by Micah Sifry. It is a work-in-progress. To view the actual timeline, visit this page: www.techpresident.com/timeline. This topic page aggregates our ongoing updates to the timeline....

Here's our subjective list of the top events and developments in the world of technology and politics in 2012. It's drawn from our just updated "Politics and the Internet" Timeline, and is built on the work of techPresident's editors and writers along with suggestions from an array of friends. We've added about 35 new items to the overall timeline, by the way. If you think we've left something out, or want to suggest a change to an existing item in the timeline, use this form to let us know. January 18, 2012--SOPA/PIPA blackout day Wikipedia, Google and other large sites lead online campaign against the "Stop Online Privacy" and "Protect IP" Acts. In total over 150,000 websites participated in the January...

Since launching our "Politics and the Internet" Timeline last August, we've gotten dozens of suggestions for revisions and additions from all kinds of people. We made a few right off the bat, and then decided to let them accumulate and do updates on a more periodic basis. The winter holiday break also seemed like a perfect time to get some distance on events, in terms of deciding what to include or leave out from recent developments in our world. As I noted in the original post on the timeline, this isn't an "official" list, but rather just our subjective judgment of the most important and notable developments at the intersection of technology and politics in the United States, online, and...

It's Friday afternoon and some folks think the world is supposed to end today, so we thought, while we wait for the apocalypse, why not make it fun to relive the highlights of the last year? What really did or didn't happen in the world of tech-politics last year? This quiz covers the hard questions. So, for your pleasure and amusement, try to match your wits against ours. No cheating. Answers at the bottom of the post. 1. Which of these topics were not covered by Deanna Zandt and Baratunde Thurston on their NPR All Things Considered "Social Media Advice" chats? a) How to manage having two personalities on Twitter; b) How to not share naked photos of yourself on Facebook with...

The Obama political operation took a big step today, sending out an email to its millions of supporters asking them to call Members of the House of Representatives to pass a Senate-approved bill aimed at preventing the expiration of the Bush-era tax cuts on the bottom 98% of U.S. taxpayers. In some cases, recipients are being asked to call their own Member; in others, where their Member is already in favor of the Senate bill, Obama activists are being asked to call Obama supporters whose representatives may be a swing vote. In case there's any doubt, these emails are aimed at putting heat directly on Republican House members. "We know we can affect change in Washington when we raise our voices...

It's not too soon to register for Personal Democracy Forum 2013, which will be happening June 6-7 (exactly seven months from now) at New York University's Skirball and Kimmel Centers. If you act now, you'll lock in our lowest rate for tickets, and considering who we already have coming, you should have no worries that this will be our best event yet. This will be our tenth annual conference, and we're excited to announce our first wave of keynote speakers: Becky Bond, the President of CREDO SuperPAC and the political director of CREDO Mobile; Catherine Bracy, the co-director of the Obama 2012 Technology Field Office in San Francisco; Robin Chase, founder and CEO of Buzzcar.com and the founder and former CEO of Zipcar; Sasha Issenberg,...

"We weren't quick enough out of the gate," four years ago, says Jeremy Bird, the national field director of President Obama's re-election campaign. "We will be quicker this time." He's not talking about the race just concluded. He's talking about how Organizing for America, the president's political organization, operated in the days and months after Obama's first election in 2008, compared to what is coming now. Bird should know. A Harvard Divinity School graduate who studied organizing under Marshall Ganz, worked on Howard Dean's 2004 primary bid, and then went to work for the United Food and Commercial Worker's Wake-Up Wal-Mart campaign, he's been working for Obama since March 2007. He was the campaign's South Carolina field director during the primaries,...

While not all of the numbers are in yet, we thought it would be useful to put in one place all the relevant data currently available about online and offline engagement by the Barack Obama and Mitt Romney campaigns. Some of these factoids are essentially unverifiable, but represent the claims being made by the campaigns in press reports. Others are drawn from available social network profiles and/or contemporaneous Google searches. Number of Barack Obama Facebook friends on Election Day 2012: 32,313,965 Number as of November 26, 2012: 33,752,862 Net gain since Election Day: 1,438,897 Number of Barack Obama Facebook friends on Election Day 2008: 2,397,253 Number of Mitt Romney Facebook friends on Election Day 2012: 12,135,972 Number as of November 26, 2012: 11,906,351 Net decrease: 229,621 Number of...