Archive: Category: TechPresident

Times Square, Occupy Wall Street rally, Saturday, October 15, 2011. Photo by Micah L. Sifry Here's a question to ponder: Did Occupy Wall Street succeed simply because it was non-hierarchical in method, had smart framing in tune with public anger about the economy and Wall Street, and made really effective use of social media? If that was all it took to ignite a self-organizing movement for economic justice, then why didn't a very similar effort, called "The Other 98%," take off last year? Why didn't the US Uncut movement, a spin-off of an ongoing street protest movement in England, take off here this past winter? Why didn't Van Jones' new "Rebuild the Dream" movement, which was launched this summer with the...

Bertellsman "Future Challenges" blogger Ulrike Reinhard came by the PdF office yesterday and recorded this conversation with me about the Occupy Wall Street movement. Consider it a record of my thoughts in progress. There's at least one error in my remarks, where I say that the largest Tea Party rally was 100,000 by their claims--I believe the Tea Party movement claims that they had more than a million at one rally in DC. Also, to my friends on the right, when I refer to Obama negotiating with the "terrorist" wing of the Republican party, I am obviously speaking metaphorically. Sorry if the term gives you indigestion....

If Google search trends can predict where flu will break out in advance of actual reports of flu, can search trends also predict where revolutions are brewing? Judging from search trends in Egypt, Greece, Spain and the United States, it appears that all you need to know which way the wind is blowing is a good search tool. Here's how searches for the word "revolution" have been trending in the U.S. over the last twelve months: Note the big jump in early August, after the climax of the debt ceiling extension fight in Congress. This coincides with a dramatic drop in public support for the entire political establishment, according to pollster Bill McInturff. "The perception of how Washington handled the debt ceiling...

Of the various finalists at this year's World e-Gov Forum, the one that most impressed me (and apparently also the judges, as it was a winner of the pan-Europe e-democracy award) was Citizens.is, the Citizens Foundation of Iceland. Born in 2008 in the wake of Iceland's economic collapse and the sudden loss of trust in the island nation's political class, the Citizens Foundation is a group of civic hackers who stepped in to help meet the demand for greater citizen participation in governance. Their key offering is an "Open Active Democracy" platform that they've built over the last three years and keep developing, which is designed to help citizens debate and prioritize issues. It's been used in various settings to valuable...

Last Saturday was "National Call Day" for Mitt Romney's presidential campaign, an all-hands-on-deck effort to rally volunteers to make calls from their homes "to share Mitt's pro-growth message and build support for the campaign," as one of their many emails to supporters put it. Well, judging from the number of people who clicked through on the link provided by all of those emails -- http://mi.tt/americas-calling -- less than 3,000 folks bothered to join in. How do we know this? Because the Romney tech team, in an admirable commitment to campaign transparency, is using the bit.ly link shortener to produce that nifty mi.tt url, and bit.ly makes it easy for anyone to look up the info about a link (just add a...

Obviously, all those emails worked! The Obama campaign is touting that it is close to reaching one million individual donors to the president's re-election effort. More precisely, they've reported garnering 766,000 donations from 606,000 people in the July-September fundraising quarter, which is on top of 680,000 donations that they received from 552,000 people in the April-June quarter. Some people who gave in that earlier period obviously have given again in this quarter, which explains why they haven't topped a million unique individuals yet. These numbers are certainly impressive, and they exceed by several multiples the number of donors and donations amassed by each of the Republican presidential candidates so far. Not surprisingly, the Obama campaign is also trying to emphasize how...

Eight days ago, our dataset of "Occupy" Facebook groups tallied 480,000 "likes" of a core group of 200 that we had initially identified at the beginning of October, and nearly 643,000 in all when we include a larger set of another 280 Facebook groups. Today, those two cohorts have basically doubled in size, to 897,000 and 1,233,000, according to our friends at CollectiveDisorder.com. I am sure the actual total is much higher, as the overall number of Facebook groups associated with the "Occupy Wall Street" movement is certainly much larger. But just using the nearly 500 Facebook books that we've been tracking as a baseline, it's clear that the movement's growth rate has moderated. Going back over my posts on the topic,...

Here at techWallStreet, I mean techPresident, we've been keeping a close eye on how the #OccupyWallStreet movement is growing virally online, and today we can report that the overall total number of "likes" accumulated by the more than 460 Occupy groups on Facebook that we've been tracking stands at 746,936, or almost three-quarters of a million people. That's up 18% since yesterday. The smaller group that we identified at first, of 201 groups, has also grown at the same rate, to 563,195. The details are all on CollectiveDisorder.com and will continue to be updated every four hours if you want to keep track. This pace is lower than the 25% daily rate we've seen since last Saturday but still on...

However we slice the data, the #OccupyWallStreet movement is still growing incredibly fast online. Of the original 201 "Occupy X" Facebook groups that we had identified as of 4pm EST Tuesday October 4, two days ago, the number of people signed up has vaulted from 384,889 to 480,079 as of 6am this morning. That's a 25% growth rate, matching what we've seen since we starting monitoring the explosion of Facebook groups last Saturday. Our larger dataset of 461 groups (which leaves out any group with less than 6 members) shows 633,606 "likes" in all, up about 20% from yesterday. On Meetup.com, where OccupyTogether has urged people to shift their organizing efforts, there are now 541 cities represented, double yesterday's number. It...

This morning, the #OccupyTogether.org site announced that it had decided to migrate over to Meetup.com, essentially because they couldn't keep up with the inflow of information coming their way, and, as they put it, "Who would have known there was a site out there that was made SPECIFICALLY for this kind of DIY, grassroots activity :)" Over at Meetup.com/OccupyTogether, you will find 288 Occupy communities listed. I'm not sure how the OccupyTogether folks expect the Meetup pages to populate, though. Right now, there are nearly 500 organic Facebook pages for Occupy X groups with just over 500,000 people signed up (though about 20% of those pages have a dozen or fewer members). We're tracking quite a "long tail" of activity on...