Communities in India, Fighting for Rights, Solve a First Problem: Proving They Exist

Exclusively for Personal Democracy Plus subscribers: Revisiting the president's visit to Reddit; the ongoing debate over gun-ownership data; and more in today's roundup of news about technology in politics from around the web. Read More

In a recent blog post, progressive technologists Jim Pugh and Nathan Woodhull argue that Democrats should institutionalize the software development that came out of the second Obama campaign. This sets up the same innovator's dilemma faced by major players in other industries: Democrats can allow competition internally, potentially creating greater innovation but putting their control at risk, or they can focus on consolidating their advantage. What decision they make will say much about what the Democratic Party will become. Read More

Here's our subjective list of the top events and developments in the world of technology and politics in 2012. It's drawn from our just updated "Politics and the Internet" Timeline, and is built on the work of techPresident's editors and writers along with suggestions from an array of friends. We've added about 35 new items to the overall timeline, by the way. If you think we've left something out, or want to suggest a change to an existing item in the timeline, use this form to let us know. Read More

Unless you’re a woman who’s experienced reproductive health issues, you’d probably never heard of the term “transvaginal ultrasound” until last February, when Virginia’s lawmakers considered enacting a rule that would have made them mandatory for women who had decided to terminate their pregnancies. The National Women's Law Center hopes to change that. Using a social media-centric strategy, the 40-year-old advocacy organization plans to build a network of state-level activists by reaching out to young women who might not be aware of what they call a nationwide effort to chip away at support for women's health and reproductive rights. Read More

When President Barack Obama spoke Sunday at Newtown High School in Newtown, Conn, he promised to take action to fix what's broken in an American society that could not protect 20 young children and seven adults from death at the hands of a single disturbed person, and could not protect that killer from himself.

"We can't tolerate this anymore," he said. "These tragedies must end. And to end them, we must change. We will be told that the causes of such violence are complex, and that is true. No single law -- no set of laws can eliminate evil from the world, or prevent every senseless act of violence in our society."

But he was really just setting the table for a narrower conversation about gun control.

Most people, or anyway, most people on Twitter, seem to have got that point.

As people all over the United States struggle to understand the aftermath of a horrific shooting Friday that left 27 dead, including 20 children, calls emerged online for more gun control and new attention to mental health programs.
A lone gunman entered Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., Friday morning and opened fire, becoming responsible for the death of 27 people, 20 of them children, according to reports. The gunman is also dead, officials say. Read More

Ongoing in Dubai and expected to end Friday, the World Conference on International Telecommunications has been causing a lot of heartburn for Internet freedom advocates who say that it is the wrong forum to talk about the future of the Internet. WCIT-12 is a treaty-making conference for members of the International Telecommunications Union, an agency of the United Nations, and that, they say, is no replacement for the "inclusive and transparent" "multistakeholder" network that runs the Internet today. There's just one problem. While Internet freedom activists say their "multistakeholder" model is open and inclusive, photograph any meeting of any of the organizations within it and a certain kind of face will appear far more often than any of the others: the white, Western male. Read More

Exclusively for Personal Democracy Plus subscribers: Crowdfunding platforms in some cities are far enough along that officials there are starting to see when they do and don't work. Here are experiments that seek to fund civic projects through small online donations, and when are or aren't successful. 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

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

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

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