Archive: Category: TechPresident

In Australia, PdF friend Mark Pesce reports, there's been a fascinating confrontation between "ANONYMOUS" and the government over the issue of internet censorship. A week ago, hackers temporarily brought down the Prime Minister's website, along with that of the Australian Communications and Media Authority. They were apparently riled up over pending proposals by the government and its Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy, to introduce the mandatory filtering of the internet by all websites in Australia. Here's a snippet of their manifesto: Hello, Kevin Rudd. We are Anonymous. We have been watching you. It wasn't very long ago since you were elected, was it? The media hype surrounding your future government back in 2007 was incredible. Many of us Australians saw both you and...

Building on Nancy's post Wednesday about the interesting relationship (correlation is probably overstating the case) between the number of social media followers (Twitter + Facebook) tallied by some of the candidates running for various New York City offices and their showing in Tuesday's primary, I thought it might be interesting to ask Joe Fernandez, the founder of Klout, a start-up that analyzes people's Twitter profiles, to take a look at the two candidates in the run-off for the Public Advocate's office, Mark Green and Bill DeBlasio, and tell us who might be making better use of the platform. As Nancy noted, DeBlasio edged past Green Tuesday, surprising many observers who expected the better-known Green (who was Public Advocate a decade...

Got some spare time? Don't want to waste it playing Solitaire and instead put it to better use? If you're reading this blog post on an iPhone, or have one, stop right now and go download the Extraordinaries new app, "Be Extra." Or, check out this new (and very beta) web interface, which offers the same user experience (and will eventually be available as a customizable widget that can highlight specific groups). Either way, it's time to pay some fresh attention to this terrific project, which wowed me when I first heard about it (and led us to get Ben Rigby, one of the Extraordinaries three co-founders, to write a guest blog post for us back in February explaining the...

Bill Cosby has taken to Twitter, whre he has nearly 375,000 followers, and Facebook to join the growing national debate over health care reform, and specifically the degree to which racial animosity is driving opposition to President Obama. Interestingly, and to his credit, he isn't just using those platforms to broadcast his views; he's specifically pointing people to the discussion section of his Facebook page, where a respectful and wide-ranging debate is underway. Now, eat your jello pudding!...

PdF friend Seth Godin has a great post up today, which he calls "The Problem With Non." It's a cri-de-couer aimed at the people who create and run non-profit organizations, especially those who imagine that they are about making change: The problem facing your group, ironically, is the resistance to the very thing you are setting out to do. Non-profits, in my experience, abhor change. Take a look at the top 100 twitter users in terms of followers. Remember, this is a free tool, one that people use to focus attention and galvanize action. What? None of them are non-profits. Not one as far as I can tell. Is the work you're doing not important enough to follow, or is it (and...

It's Primary Day here in New York state, as well as various cities around the country, and while turnout is expected to be low (just 15% in NYC), we're going to keep our eyes on ways that candidates and/or activists are using social media to get out the vote. Here's a look at how the words "vote," "voted" and "vote today" are trending on Twitter, for starters. Various candidates are using their Twitter feeds to remind people to vote, including Democrats Bill Thompson, who is vying to be the Democratic nominee for Mayor; (715 followers) Public Advocate candidates Norman Siegel (476 followers), who released a letter to voters about his candidacy; and Mark Green (231 followers), who has been tweeting out 100...

After a refreshing summer break, we're pleased to be starting our biweekly series of PdF Network conference calls up next week with a good friend of PdF, Cheryl Contee, Partner at Fission Strategy & blogger at JackandJillPolitics.com. Her timely topic: "How to Harness the Changing Nature of African American Participation Online." "Is it premature to toll the bells for the death of the digital divide?" asks Contee. In July, a report from the Pew Internet and American Life Center found that African-Americans are not only the most active users of mobile Internet, they are also the fastest growing group to adopt the technology. This comes on top of earlier Pew research showing that one of beneficial effects of Barack Obama's campaign for...

There’s a very interesting confluence of conversations taking place at the moment on the topic of how technology is changing politics. One is on the idea of government 2.0, or government-as-a-platform. The second is on whether the net is better for campaigning than governing. And the third is on what happens when you open up the process with real-time transparency. Let me see if I can combine the threads. 1. Can we "co-create" government? First, the notion of “Government 2.0” is on the rise. In particular, thanks to the energetic efforts of Tim O’Reilly, the idea that we can perhaps improve on the current dynamics surrounding government-as-vending-machine (we put in money as taxpayers, we get out services, and when we’re unhappy with...

This morning, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown issued an official statement of apology to Alan Turing, a mathematician who led the WWII code-breaking effort that broke Germany's Enigma codes and did pioneering work in the development of computers. Turing, who was gay, was convicted of "gross indecency" in 1952 and sentenced to chemical castration. He committed suicide two years later. Notably, Brown's statement came in response to a petition posted on the Prime Minister's 10 Downing Street website, which had received thousands of signatures in recent months, as a number of prominent scientists led by computer scientist John Graham-Cumming and public figures like writer Ian McEwan stepped up to ask for the action. Thus, Brown's Turing statement should be seen as...

I'm attending the Gov 2.0 Summit today and tomorrow, and the program is thick with great speakers and topics. Posting may be in snippets. Here's my favorite from the first hour. Tom Steinberg, the intrepid guiding force behind Britain's invaluable MySociety group, which makes brilliant, easy-to-use and highly effective sites aimed at improving how government works like FixMyStreet and TheyWorkForYou*, gave us a powerful new way to argue for turning government websites into platforms for civic engagement. I'm paraphrasing slightly: "If the government said that people can't drive on the roads to go to a rally to protest something, because it would lead to bad press, everyone would protest. Yet when government says that it can't let people using government websites connect...