A panel session featuring three presentations from Kasia Odrozek & Stefan Baack (Mozilla Foundation, Germany); Mor Rubinstein (360Giving, UK) & Tim Davies (Practical Participation, UK); and Matt Stempeck & Micah L. Sifry (Civic Hall, US).
Talks & Videos
Here are a few of my favorite talks. Plus one Easter Egg from 1994!
Micah Sifry, the Visiting Murrow Lecturer of the Practice of Press and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School and co-founder of Personal Democracy Forum, speaks about the power and potential of the internet–both good and bad–for government and society.
Micah L. Sifry, “a leading participant in and observer of how the Internet is changing politics and society,” brings us a new book on what WikiLeaks means for the future — and present — of governmental and corporate transparency.
In 2008, Barack Obama rode a wave of mass political participation to become the first African-American President in the United States. His campaign was widely described as a model for integrating bottom-up grassroots support online and offline with traditional top-down marketing. And his administration promised to transform government by making it more open, participatory and collaborative. How much has Obama delivered on these promises? And how much did he really change American politics? In this talk, Micah Sifry, co-founder of the Personal Democracy Forum and editor of techPresident.com will look at the myths, and realities, of Obama the candidate and president.
Author Micah Sifry discusses his book, Spoiling for a Fight: Third-Party Politics in America, published by Routledge. In it, the author documents the history of third-party politics in American history, with particular attention paid to Ralph Nader’s 2000 Presidential Campaign. The author calls the existing U.S. political system a duopoly, which prevents the smaller third-parties from any successful runs for office. After the presentation the author answered questions from members of the audience.
Back in pre-Internet times, while I was a young editor at The Nation, I started and ran a quarterly newsletter called The Perot Periodical. You can find traces of it here, on the Internet Archive (and if you are truly interested in back copies of the print edition, contact me). Here’s a video of me at Harvard’s Kennedy School forum, asking Perot a question based on a terrific article written for the periodical’s first issue by Bob Fitch. Oh, and yes, back then everyone had more hair.