Archive: Category: TechPresident

If you want to follow along with the Personal Democracy Forum Europe conference live by audio, we're pleased to be partnering with Civico, an internet radio station based in Birmingham, England, which will be streaming all the sessions over the next two days at http://www.civicolive.com/pdfeu. All the plenary sessions will be aired live, along with the main hall breakout sessions. The other breakouts will also be recorded and played later each day. In addition, all the sessions will be archived for later playback. So, if you want to follow along, just check the schedule here--Friday/Saturday and tune in (don't forget to factor in the time difference as we're in Barcelona, Spain). The Twitter hashtag to follow or chime in with is...

Our friends at SeeClickFix have some cool news to share today: The do-it-yourself civic platform is going multilingual. Citizens will soon be able to report non-emergency issues in their community to those accountable for the public space in 83 languages anywhere in the world using SeeClickFix on their PC or mobile phone. (And just in time for PdF Europe!) Co-founder Ben Berkowitz says, "The vision for SeeClickFix has always been to be international and universally accessible. While always geographically accessible SeeClickFix now has the infrastructure to support a web site in 83 languages. This will allow citizens to communicate with their government in the country's native language as well as in the citizen's first language if different. For the latter feature...

Yesterday, at a townhall meeting with Chinese students in Shaghai, President Obama had much praise for the Internet and its role in democracy, politics and society. Unfortunately, he prefaced his remarks with this statement: "Let me say that I have never used Twitter. I noticed that young people -- they're very busy with all these electronics. My thumbs are too clumsy to type in things on the phone." Thumbs too clumsy to type in things on the phone? Say what? Here's the rest of his remarks on the topic of the internet, which are much harder to argue with: I am a big believer in technology and I'm a big believer in openness when it comes to the...

We've been doing some housekeeping on our charts, and wanted to alert you to a few things. First, we've started tracking former House Speaker Newt Gingrich on our Facebook chart looking at likely 2012 presidential candidates. (Any national Republican who felt he or she had to weigh in on last week's special election for that upstate New York seat in Congress is at least thinking about running, we figure.) Let us know if there's anyone else you think we should be tracking. Second, we had a little hiccup with the Facebook tracking data a few weeks ago, when Facebook changed how it displays friend stats. So that bump you see for everyone around early October isn't a sign of a sudden...

There was a time when Barack Obama was the number one most followed personage on Twitter, back during the campaign season, but after getting elected his staff seemingly let the account go fallow, to be overtaken by celebrities like Ashton Kutcher, Britney Spears and Ellen Degeneres. Over August for example, at the height of the townhall battles, the account was only updated 24 times, less than one tweet a day, according to the Twitterholic tracker, despite his having more than 2 million followers at the time. But in the last week, President Obama's new media minions at Organizing for America have punched out 24 tweets, more than three a day. Natalie Foster, OFA's new media director, confirms the shift. In...

Tomorrow afternoon at 3:00pm EST, Special Envoy Scott Gration and Samantha Power, NSC Senior Director for Multilateral Affairs, are going to sit down at the White House with the leaders of the largest, most vocal advocacy groups on Darfur issue, Jerry Fowler of Save Darfur, and Layla Amjadi, the student director of STAND (the student-led division of the Genocide Intervention Network). Ho-hum, you might say, yet another behind-the-scenes meeting between administration officials and NGOs, what's new about that? Well, two things. First, the meeting is going to be streamed live onto the web on not only the White House and State Department websites (in the latter case on their Facebook page, where viewers can comment along in real-time), but also on...

With the House about to vote on the Democratic health care bill tomorrow, I thought it would be interesting to check in on the pulse of the online debate over health care reform. This is of course an unscientific look at the public zeitgeist, but the popularity of certain key words on Twitter suggests that the tide has turned and anti-heath reform rhetoric has peaked, or at least isn't spreading. Take a look at this trendline from Trendistic, looking at three terms: "obamacare", "public option" and "hcr". The first is used often by opponents of the Democrats' plans; public option is the battle-cry of the progressive base; and "hcr" is a generic tag that is mostly used by supporters of...

Here's a rough draft of what I'm going to say at tonight's "Digital Democracy Debate" with author Matthew Hindman at Yale. Let me know in the comments if you think I've missed anything or gotten anything wrong. Hindman is the author of "The Myth of Digital Democracy," which argues that a) the internet is just reinforcing elite voices in politics rather than opening the process to more diverse voices, b) that we live in a "Googlearchy" ruled by search engines that concentrate attention on just a handful of "winner-take-all" sites, and c) that the idea that the internet is empowering more ordinary people to be active participants in the process is basically a myth. You can read shorter versions of...

We're pleased to announce the following twenty people have been selected to win a Google Fellowship to attend this month's Personal Democracy Forum Europe inaugural conference in Barcelona. The fellows were selected based on their work and initiative in the arenas of technology, politics and social entrepreneurship. -Liz Azyan, doctoral researcher, Royal Holloway, University of London and founder, Local Government Engagement Online Research, an e-government blog -Jeff Blasius, CTO and co-founder of SeeClickFix, a We.gov site -Yves Canavet, former project director of France's national insurance program Caiesse Nationale d'Assurance Maladie -Roberto Abdul-Hadi Casanova, co-founder, Asociacion Civil Sumate of Venezuela, a democracy-building site -Michael Friis, programmer, TEDbot, a reverse hack of the EU database of public procurement contracts, and Folkets Ting of Denmark, a transparency site -Jochum...

If you're anywhere in the vicinity of New Haven, CT, tomorrow night, you can come hear me and political scientist Matthew Hindman engage in a "Digital Democracy Debate" at Yale Law School. It's a special session of the Harvard-MIT-Yale Cyberscholar Working Group, from 6:00-8:30pm; details here. Hindman is the author of the 2009 book, "The Myth of Digital Democracy," which argues that "the internet has done little to broaden political discourse but in fact empowers a small set of elites--some new, but most familiar." I don't want to completely tip my hand (though if you've been reading this blog for any period of time, you know I disagree with this conclusion), but my general feeling is that while Hindman raises some...