In Year of Political "Big Data," NationBuilder Makes Voter Data Free

As management of the country's wireless spectrum becomes more important to business, it's becoming more important in policy as well. And it's attracting the interest of the growing political constituency inside Silicon Valley as efforts continue to change the policies that undergird the way we run our wireless networks to accommodate the explosion in wireless traffic.

Exclusively for Personal Democracy Plus subscribers: How events in the Middle East sparks conversations about American notions of free speech and Internet freedom; a step back from Internet censorship in Tunisia; how voter data is changing elections; and more in today's roundup of news about technology in politics from around the web. Read More

I've been to a lot of conferences over the years: PopTech, PCForum, eTech, Web 2.0, Government 2.0, South by Southwest, Transparency Camp, Netroots Nation, RightRoots, Politics Online, MESH, the International Journalism Festival, Guardian Activate, and re:Publica all come to mind. Many of these more than once. And of course, since 2004 I've curated twelve Personal Democracy Forum conferences, nine in NY and three overseas, with the help of my partner-in-crime Andrew Rasiej and our hardworking and devoted staff. But I've never experienced anything as soul-, heart- AND brain-satisfying as Web of Change (WoC). Here's why. Read More

A new study by researchers led by U.C. San Diego that is being published tomorrow in the journal Nature offers detailed evidence that a non-partisan get-out-the-vote reminder on Facebook can also increase voter turnout--especially if they come with evidence that your real friends are also voting. Read More

Exclusively for Personal Democracy Plus subscribers:Recent action at the Federal Election Commission could make collecting donations via text message a more realistic proposition for campaigns. The two presidential campaigns are already able to collect donations from clients of several cellphone carriers by having them text a shortcode put to use by their election effort. Now, new FEC opinions and requests for opinions seem to be paving the way for more campaigns to get in on the action. Read More

Exclusively for Personal Democracy Plus subscribers: What started out as a summer gag video by a few city lifeguards has turned into a controversy that's attracted international attention. Is the Southern California town of El Monte sticking to a policy that defends its reputation and prevents misuse of resources, or is it missing out on an opportunity by cracking down on a group of enthusiastic young employees? Read More

Is there a new political philosophy emerging from things like open source software development; massive community sharing hubs like Wikipedia, Kickstarter, and Reddit; peer-to-peer social networking; experiments in "Liquid Democracy," and the rapid spread of resource sharing tools like ZipCar, AirBnb and Car2go? Is it time to start talking about replacing the "welfare state" with the "partner state"?

On Monday, Sept. 24, at 7:30 p.m. at the New York Law School, I'm looking forward to exploring all those questions and more with noted author Steven Johnson, whose new book "Future, Perfect" is must-reading for people who believe in the power of open, collaborative peer-to-peer networking to achieve real social progress.

The Paul Ryan marathon story hits the trifecta of interests for me: politics, the Internet, and running. Appealing both to my academic interests and my personal obsession I have followed this story with perhaps at times too much focus, reading all the reactions, analysis, and even comment streams and discussion boards. But beyond the question of "what does it mean" that Ryan lied about (misremembered?) his marathon time is an important story about how politics changes with an Internet enabled public, and equally as important a lesson about both the potential and current limitations of this kind of Internet enabled political engagement. Read More

Code for America and Detroit enable real-time bus arrival information via text messaging. Read More

Under President Obama, 1.4 million people have been deported as of July, according to figures from Homeland Security's Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Obama has said that his administration is focused on deporting criminals and "dangerous" illegal immigrants. Obama also announced a new policy in June that defers deportation proceedings against undocumented immigrants who are under 31, came here before the age of 16, who have lived in the United States for at least five years, are in school (or have a certificate proving that they had a high school education) and don't have a criminal record. But even for those immigrants who arrived here while they were still children, the policy is a reprieve, not a pardon. Seizing on a wave of public support that seemed to begin to crest last year, when former Washington Post and Huffington Post journalist Jose Antonio Vargas announced that he was not in this country legally, immigrants without legal status here are using the Internet to assert an American identity anyway, and that the problem lies not with them but with United States policy on immigration and citizenship. Read More

Exclusively for Personal Democracy Plus subscribers: By the end of Monday Tampa, Fla., will be full up with Republicans planning to converge on its Tampa Bay Times Forum for their national convention. Among the scores of convention delegates, lobbyists, political operatives and campaigning candidates will be a host of digital campaigners — both longtime pros in the emerging field and up-and-comers hoping to ply their trade.

For Personal Democracy Plus subscribers, here's the beginning of what could be a far longer list of digital pros going to Tampa this week and worth seeking out for coffee or a beer — just a few of the names you might know, or should know, when it comes to the right's digital communications. We did our best to prime the pump with a mix of people who you might already know from CNN and people who have been working busily behind the scenes.

With the recent launch of RNCCTV, an HTML 5 map of a new network of surveillance cameras installed by Tampa's police in preparation for the Republican National Convention, city residents now have a slightly clearer picture of how (or at least where) they're being watched by law enforcement authorities.

RNCCTV uses scripts from Leaflet, data from Open Street Map and citizen reporting by Gales himself to reveal to the public where exactly the Tampa police have placed its $2 million network of security cameras. The site provides a bird's eye view of the location of the cameras in downtown Tampa, but with permission, it can use the location of smartphone owners in downtown Tampa to show them where the nearest camera is located.

The journo-political industrial complex is headed for the national party conventions this weekend, with more than 15,000 journalists along with thousands more Republican delegates, activists, party operatives and outside ... Read More

In January 25 they were the face of the Egyptian revolution. Young, tech savvy, fluent in English, Cairo-based activists tweeted constant updates from the streets of the Egyptian capital. Their photos, videos and live reporting catapulted many of them to celebrity, especially after Hosni Mubarak resigned. Where are they today? Read More

The folks at Amazon have just unveiled a seductive piece of eye-candy called the "Election Heat Map of 2012" that categorizes 500 top book titles as either "red" or "blue," and then breaks out current book-buying data state-by-state, offering a near-real-time look at which political books are more popular where. Right now, 56% of the political books being purchased are "red" and 44% are "blue"--and the accompanying map suggests that people in New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Maryland and Washington, DC are the only ones swimming against that trend, with Pennsylvania the only state with neutral reading interests. At the same time, Barack Obama's long-selling "The Audacity of Hope" is outselling Mitt Romney's "No Apology: The Case for American Greatness" by a margin of 2-1 in the last thirty days. The heat map is fun to look at, but has to be taken with a huge spoonful of salt. Read More

"I never tried to pretend that the original 'RMoney' image was real, and acknowledged that it was faked shortly after I posted it," said Dave Allsopp, co-founder of the liberal site Democratic Underground. "But I understand that since then people have been confused as to whether it is real or not. As I said, that's probably the main reason why it has spread so far."

According to data from The 4th Estate Project, produced by former Neiman Fellow Bryan Rich and software developer Michael Howe, seventeen percent of statements attributed to the Obama campaign or the White House in a campaign story come without a person's name attached. Likewise, nobody is named as responsible for twenty-one percent of Romney campaign statements. These exclude statements from the candidates themselves. These figures are released exclusively to techPresident as disappointment mounts among political observers at the focus in this presidential campaign on personal attacks and relatively narrow issues. Read More

Julian Assange is back in the news today because, after nearly two months of holding out in Ecuador's London embassy, he has been granted "political asylum" by the Ecuadorian government. The decision has set off a diplomatic stand-off, with the U.K. government threatening to revoke the embassy's diplomatic status, and Ecuador responding with anger. In this article, I argue that the cause of transparency is far, far bigger than the legal troubles of one brilliant, courageous but ultimately flawed individual. Unfortunately, he has turned into Wikileaks' single point of failure. Britain ought to let Assange to Ecuador, because there's little chance he can get a fair trial in either Sweden or the United States, but then let's be done with him. Those of us who want freedom of information to thrive should learn a key lesson from Assange's case. For information to flow freely, there can't be any single point of control. Read More