Some Cities Hope Crowdfunding Will Help Them Stop Sweating the Small Stuff

Exclusively for Personal Democracy Plus subscribers: Obama for America asks its supporters to return to work; freedom of expression advocates breathe a sigh of relief after the latest news from Dubai; and more in today's roundup of news about technology in politics from around the web. Read More

While advocates paint WCIT as the potential death knell of Internet freedom, experts suggest the real conversation in Dubai will be about the possibility of a fee structure on international Internet traffic — which could be described as a global attack on net neutrality and worthy of serious debate all on its own. The advocates' pitch, then, might at first sound like some combination of the Agenda 21 conspiracy theorists and the beardo libertarian open-source crowd after a long night snorting bath salts. Fight for the Future's Tiffiniy Cheng says all the fuss is warranted because they're not attacking the ITU of today. Instead, they're trying to defend the Internet from the monster she says the U.N. regulatory agency could become. Read More

Exclusively for Personal Democracy Plus subscribers: While the subject matter may seem dull on its face, the Affordable Care Act calls on governments to launch large-scale, user-friendly clearinghouses of information about which insurance plans are available to customers. States are being asked to build something that is intuitive, efficient, and works at scale — three things government websites have not historically been known to do. And after a deadline extension in the wake of the November elections, governors have until Dec. 14 to indicate the direction their states will take. Read More

Exclusively for Personal Democracy Plus subscribers: How Chicago actually used Twitter in the 2012 presidential election, as told by an Obama for America senior analyst for digital analytics. Read More

Most people who volunteered through Dashboard, the Obama campaign's online organizing platform, went on to volunteer through a field office, Obama for America Director of Digital Organizing Betsy Hoover said today. Speaking with reporters at a lunch event organized by New Organizing Institute, Hoover explained — as has been previously reported but not quite put in such clear terms — that Dashboard was meant to be a place for field organizers to identify people who might be persuaded to take action offline as well as online. Her remarks come the morning after an email to supporters from Jeremy Bird, OfA's organizing director, that explained a majority of volunteers on the campaign chose to do so from a field office, while "many" used Dashboard or other online tools instead. Read More

What next for the millions of people, tens of thousands of volunteers and several thousand staff who came together to propel Barack Obama to re-election? Will there be a real "outside" Washington strategy to put pressure on recalcitrant Members of Congress? Will they use the massive lists and online presence that were built around the campaign? Organizers of TheAction.org say they aren't waiting for answers to these big questions, but they are mobilizing to tap Obama's post-election, online and off, to try to keep him from compromising on repealing the Bush tax cuts on the wealthiest Americans. Read More

Wal-Mart workers with the help of the labor movement are planning 1,000 protest events at stores in 43 states on Friday as part of a new strategy to advocate for better hours, wages, and working conditions at the nation's largest employer. Using decentralized, Internet-organized events, these workers hope to outpace the anti-organizing tactics of a company that has gone so far as to shut down a department that moved to unionize and even closed an entire store in Canada when employees there voted to join a union. Read More

Exclusively for Personal Democracy Plus subscribers: Looking ahead to future cycles, Democrats are becoming more comfortable with the idea of super PACs, which can raise and spend unlimited amounts of money in uncoordinated support or opposition of any candidate. CREDO's emerging model, which raised $3.5 million to fund a data-driven, field-oriented campaign in 11 House races — including five races where Tea Party Republicans were replaced with progressive-backed Democrats — may help to explain why. Read More

The big story of the 2012 Obama campaign was not just that staffers were able to weave together information about voters using data integration in ways that had bedeviled the campaign in 2008. Nor was it the campaign’s ability to test nearly every tactic, from email subject lines and landing pages to the scripts that volunteers read from as they went door to door. If any one engine powered the campaign down its road to victory, it was the system that turned every voter, field staffer and grassroots volunteer into a political signal — and the mix of technology and analysis that allowed Obama’s Chicago headquarters to find those signals among all the noise. Read More

With nearly one million people signing petitions on the White House's "We the People" e-petition site calling for their state to secede from the Union, it's tempting to dismiss the platform as a lightning rod for the most disaffected Americans. But people petitioning the government could also be invited into a new kind of civic dialogue, one that might build on what "We the People" already promises: an official reply from the powers-that-be. Freed from the demands of another election and blessed with some of the smartest technologists in the country, the Obama Administration could use "We the People" to begin the work of constructing a real digital public square, not just another e-Potemkin village. Will they? Read More

Today's social media environment is full of opportunities to reach the public in new ways and challenges on how to do it right. But across government and advocacy organizations, to use social media effectively, you need two things: something worth saying and the ability to say it well. How do you know what your agency should talk about? How do you know what the public expects from you? How do you train the people writing for your agency on what to say and how they should sound? The goal of this short guide, written by social media expert Jed Sundwall, is to teach you how to use guidelines to help your agency serve the public through a clear social media voice. Guidelines can help your agency sound more human. They can help you develop a strong, appropriate, and memorable voice for your agency. Ultimately, they can help you develop an enduring 21st century communications operation. Read More

An offshoot of Occupy called Strike Debt is going to kick off a new initiative, called Rolling Jubilee, dedicated to raising money online and then spending it on troubled debt offered by its owners for pennies on the dollar — medical debt, to start. Where other purchasers of bad debt might hire a collection agency in an attempt to collect some or all of what's owed, Strike Debt will forgive the debt. To get things going, Rolling Jubilee will host a live-streamed fundraising event at the tony New York venue Le Poisson Rouge, featuring comedian Janeane Garofalo, Daily Show co-creator Lizz Winstead and others. Read More

Exclusively for Personal Democracy Plus subscribers: For several digital strategists in the Republican party, 2012 is a haunting replay of 2008: As they ponder the magnitude of their party’s losses up and down the ballot, they’re casting around looking for leaders outside of the traditional party structure, which has failed them, in their eyes, two presidential election cycles in a row. The problems, they say, are both technological and organizational, the result of a failure to adjust the party platform for a changing America and to adapt an approach to the web for changing times. Veterans among the party's digerati hear the young Republicans who want to seize the levers of power and overhaul their political machine singing a tune that sounds depressingly familiar. Read More

DailyKos.com, the Grand Central Station of the online Democratic left, had a record-breaking year, the site's founder Markos Moulitsas announced last Friday. For the last thirty days before Election Day, the site garnered more than 4 million unique visitors, according to its Quantcast stats. That's up from 1.8 million uniques for the month of January, or 2.3 million that it garnered during the height of the Occupy Wall Street movement in October 2011. Here's why. Read More

The 2012 election proved that women going online to advocate for issues they care about have emerged as a force to be reckoned with in American politics. Tom Watson explores a gap between what he calls "networked feminism" and female candidates. Read More

Offered through Personal Democracy Plus: A mesh networking experiment in Brooklyn turned into an exercise in 21st-century disaster relief this weekend when an innovation fellow with the Federal Emergency Management Agency teamed up with neighborhood activists and tech volunteers to bring Internet access back to Red Hook Houses after Hurricane Sandy. Read More

Exclusively for Personal Democracy Plus subscribers: The Obama campaign wasn't the only center of data-driven, technology-enabled field work on the left. Groups like MoveOn and the AFL-CIO's super PAC, Worker's Voice, also used the Internet to leverage their understanding of behavioral psychology and user-generated content into a massively scaled persuasion and get-out-the-vote effort. Read More

Four years ago for us here techPresident, Election Day was a moment to reflect on the Internet's impact on the campaign, and in particular how so many voters had ventured onto the playing field of politics by using new interactive media, self-publishing tools like blogs and YouTube, and nascent social networks like Facebook. But if you've spent any time reading techPresident this cycle, you've noticed that we've more or less stopped paying close attention to social media metrics. The reason is, they didn't make a difference to the race. The question is why. Read More

The idea that new tools could make voting social has taken off among high-level campaigns that understand the power of one-to-one connections online. But at the grassroots, where Votizen's co-founders hope to grow most of their clients, this seed of an idea has yet to sprout. Read More

A group of people from the Occupy Wall Street movement is collaborating with the climate change advocacy group 350.org and a new online toolkit for disaster recovery, recovers.org, to organize a grassroots relief effort in New York City. Using Recovers.org, a web-based platform for organizing disaster response, Occupy volunteers are processing incoming offers of help and requests for aid, said Justin Wedes, a longtime occupier who 350.org put me in touch with when I contacted them about this project. Read More

Among the tools campaigns are deploying this year are a number of technological innovations that lean on "social pressure" to get out the vote. These can include messages that use a voter's voting history in an attempt to "shame" them into voting in November or asking supporters to try and talk their friends into casting a ballot. This year, your political leanings are more public than ever. Is that a good thing? Read More