Communities in India, Fighting for Rights, Solve a First Problem: Proving They Exist
Wednesday, January 9 2013
Transparent Chennai works to empower city residents by providing them with data and information about the city, where at least 20 percent of the population lives in unrecognized slums. But while e-mapping brings the message home to outside observers, community workers find that other tools are more important for effecting change.
Read MoreOne Person, One Vote? Here's How Many Voters Each "Representative" Really Represents
BY Micah L. Sifry | Wednesday, January 9 2013
For all the chatter about how many Facebook likes or Twitter followers politicians have, I've never seen a news organization or website pay any attention to how many voters each Member of the House of Representatives has. It turns out that some Members are much more popular than others, based on their actual vote totals in 2012. Read More
First POST: Duck, Duck, President
BY Miranda Neubauer | Wednesday, January 9 2013
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
Personal Democracy Forum Poland-CEE, February 1-2 in Warsaw
BY Antonella Napolitano | Monday, January 7 2013
Personal Democracy Forum is back in Europe and is going east! After our events in Barcelona, Oslo, Paris and Brussels, we are happy to announce our first conference focused on Central and Eastern Europe, happening this ... Read More
Israeli Transparency NGO Shows Voters How to Cast Informed Ballots
BY Lisa Goldman | Thursday, January 3 2013
As Israelis prepare to cast their ballots in national elections on January 22, the country's only transparency NGO has launched a campaign to encourage voters to educate themselves by consulting their Open Knesset website, where they can find previously unavailable information about how their legislators are doing their jobs and whether they are representing their constituents as they would wish to be represented. Read More
What Technology Can and Cannot Do In the Fight Against Corruption
BY David Eaves | Thursday, January 3 2013
There are a slew of newly organized and emergent efforts to tackle various forms of corruption, particularly by using new technology, from the global — such as the Open Government Partnership, the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative and Transparency International — to the very local — such as ipaidabribe and its various clones. These efforts have also benefited from a number of traditional players, like state and independent regulators, apparently becoming more aggressive in enforcing laws. There's a lot to celebrate. But there are a few words of caution I would like to add to the conversation. Read More
Democratic Politics and The Innovator's Dilemma
BY Nick Judd | Wednesday, January 2 2013
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
The Top Tech-Politics Developments of 2012
BY Micah L. Sifry | Monday, December 31 2012
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
Questions of Privacy, Politics and Murder in Lebanon Text-Message Row
BY Lisa Goldman | Wednesday, December 19 2012
In the wake of a high-profile car-bombing in Lebanon, text messages might finger the killers — or they might just be a useful diversion. Read More
How One Women's Rights Group Is Betting On Facebook in 2013
BY Sarah Lai Stirland | Wednesday, December 19 2012
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
Online, Shaping a Narrow Debate After Newtown Shooting
BY Nick Judd | Tuesday, December 18 2012
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.
Read MoreThawing Relations Between Transparency Activists and Government in Russia Yield Results
BY David Eaves | Monday, December 17 2012
The Russian transparency environment is not without both opportunities and innovations. Legally, there are requirements for government transparency encoded in Russian law — they are however infrequently adhered to. But this does give advocates some legal ground to stand on. And politically, there is opportunity as well. The government is talking more and more about fighting corruption, creating room for both advocates and government officials to talk about how transparency could play a role in addressing this issue. Read More
After Shooting in Newtown, An Immediate Outcry Online: "Today is the Day"
BY Sarah Lai Stirland | Friday, December 14 2012
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
[BackChannel] Prediction for 2013: Keep an Eye on Identity
BY Gadi Ben-Yehuda | Friday, December 14 2012
![](https://webarchive.library.unt.edu/web/20130110131605im_/http://techpresident.com/files/images/backchannel%20logo.png)
For Internet Freedom Activists, Dubai is a Warning: Finally Live Up to the "Inclusive" Label, Or Else
BY Nick Judd | Friday, December 14 2012
Internet freedom advocates: Internet regulation coming before the ITU signals a failure of current online governance. Photo: ITU
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
Despite Some Glitches, Ghana's New Biometric Voting System Widely Viewed as a Success
BY Gabriela Barnuevo | Thursday, December 13 2012
Technology dominated Ghana's recent presidential elections, with candidates using popular social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook to spread their messages. But it was the introduction of a biometric voter identification system that captured the most attention. Read More
Technologists Have Standards: What the Internet Can Teach Us About Making Elections Better
BY Nick Judd | Thursday, December 13 2012
The people involved in running American elections say it's sometimes surprising that the U.S. system is as well-regarded as it is. Elections officials in attendance at a Pew event earlier this week called for reforms to American elections because, as Missouri Secretary of State Robin Carnahan observed, voting in one can be a wildly different experience for people in different counties or even different states.
Technologists might find this situation vaguely familiar. There's another system that asks large numbers of independent actors to all pass interchangeable atomic units of data back and forth in the service of rapid and accurate communication: The Internet. Read More
For Afghan Women, Bright Screens and Uncertain Futures in Mobile Learning Effort
BY Naheed Mustafa | Wednesday, December 12 2012
Mobile phones are in the hands of about 15 million Afghans and some 85 percent of the population lives in a part of the country with network coverage. Given high mobile penetration and low literacy levels for women, the Paiwastoon Networking Services recently developed the Ustad Mobil literacy program using $80, 000 in U.S. aid money. But while the project's initiators are no doubt well intentioned, they have not taken into account obstacles resulting from local culture and custom. Read More
Some Cities Hope Crowdfunding Will Help Them Stop Sweating the Small Stuff
BY Sam Roudman | Monday, December 10 2012
As crowdfunding platforms finish their first experiments, some best practices begin to sprout. Photo: Alex Indigo / Flickr
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
In Canada, Online Campaign to Protest Gov't's Digital 'Snooping Bill' Turns Nasty
BY Elisabeth Fraser | Wednesday, December 5 2012
In Canada the issue of online privacy has become contentious, with experts, law enforcement officials, and legislators sharply divided. Bill C-30, formally called the Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act, was tabled in the House of Commons in February. The bill proposes expanding police powers so that telecoms and Internet Service Providers would be required to turn over subscriber data without a warrant. The opposition responded with a furious online campaign that took a bizarre turn into the realm of personal attacks. Read More
Jeremy Bird on the Future of Organizing for America, 2012 and Beyond
BY Micah L. Sifry | Wednesday, December 5 2012
"We weren't quick enough out of the gate," four years ago, says Jeremy Bird, the national field director of President Obama's re-election campaign. "We will be quicker this time." He's not talking about the race just concluded. He's talking about how Organizing for America, the president's political organization, operated in the days and months after Obama's first election in 2008, compared to what is coming now. Read More
MoveOn Bets Its Future On Volunteered Ideas
BY Sarah Lai Stirland | Wednesday, December 5 2012
Onward, Little Toasters: MoveOn.org — founded in 1997 by a husband-and-wife team famous for the "flying toasters" screen saver — is betting on fewer staffers and more smart ideas from its millions of volunteer activists. Will it be enough to keep MoveOn relevant as multi-million-dollar outside groups learn how to use the web?
Read MoreAs Countries Meet Over New Telco Regulations, Worry Grows Among Internet Activists
BY Nick Judd and Miranda Neubauer | Monday, December 3 2012
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
In Egypt, Digital Maps Start a Conversation About Harassment that Continues In the Street
BY Lisa Goldman | Friday, November 30 2012
Several months before the Egyptian revolution, a group of Cairo-based volunteers launched Harassmap, an Ushahidi-based interactive map that provides a visualization of reported sexual harassment incidents. Two years later, the organization has grown and secured its funding. But what role has mapping played in their community outreach work? Read More
On Insurance Exchanges, States Have a Choice: Hurry Up, or Lose Out
BY Bailey McCann | Tuesday, December 4 2012
States can get federal help to create an insurance exchange - if they do it soon. Photo: Quinn Dombrowski / Flickr
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
Personal Democracy Forum France event: “From Hope to Forward”
BY Personal Democracy Media | Thursday, November 29 2012
Last year, the inaugural PDF France explored the potential of the web to facilitate innovation in the public debate surrounding the French presidential campaigns, viewed through the lens if the 2008 US elections. A year later, and a month after the reelection of Barack Obama, a special event in Paris will explore how the Obama campaign has approached digital campaigning in 2012 with key staff from the campaign. We'll explore the how technology aided collaboration within the campaign, field organizing, and data collection, among other topics. Read More
Was Twitter the TV of 2012? How Barack Obama Tracked Your Tweets
BY Sarah Lai Stirland | Monday, December 3 2012
Obama 2012's Michelangelo D'Agostino explained how the Obama campaign monitored Twitter at NOI's Rootscamp last Friday
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
What Will Campaigns of the Future Do With Their Data? Before Rootscamp, Some Hints
BY Nick Judd | Thursday, November 29 2012
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
Dashboard Government: The Politics of Measurement
BY David Eaves | Wednesday, November 28 2012
The other week I was informed that the city of Edmonton, Alberta, published an online dashboard of various metrics that it hopes will both educate residents about the city's services. As more and more of what governments do — from running buses to fixing potholes to processing paper — is managed by computers, there is an ever-increasing capacity to measure, and make public, the results of any given activity. The opportunity to create more accountable systems and governments is real. If we are going to end up with government dashboards all over the place — and frankly, I hope we do — dashboard-makers had better do a bunch of things right. Read More
After Obama 3.0, What Will 4.0 Look Like? TheAction.org Isn't Waiting for the Answer
BY Micah L. Sifry | Wednesday, November 21 2012
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
Black Friday Protests Against Wal-Mart Will Test A New Kind of Networked Organizing For Labor
BY Sarah Lai Stirland | Wednesday, November 21 2012
Labor organizers are trying to encourage widespread protests against Walmart by providing workers and the public with new tools
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
The Curious Case of CREDO's Corporate, Democratic, Data-Driven Super PAC and "The Tea Party 10"
BY Sarah Lai Stirland | Monday, November 26 2012
CREDO Super PAC's 3,000 volunteers made thousands of calls and door-knocks to unseat Tea Party Republicans
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 Obama Campaign's Legacy: Listen, Experiment, and Analyze Everything
BY Nick Judd and Micah L. Sifry | Wednesday, November 21 2012
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
The Geopolitics of the Open Government Partnership in Action
BY David Eaves | Wednesday, November 21 2012
While in Burma, President Barack Obama welcomed the country into the Open Government Partnership — an example of the OGP as part of a global U.S. strategy to forge a set of alliances with key partners around the world. It may also advance transparency and anticorruption through collaboration and new technology — but there are other chess games in progress, too. Read More
In Allen West Loss, Progressive Groups See a Model for Victory
BY Matt Taylor | Tuesday, November 20 2012
Exclusively for Personal Democracy Plus subscribers: Having decided early on to target Rep. Allen West with special attention, progressive groups, including a super PAC fueled by small-dollar donors rather than billionaires, are declaring victory in the wake of his concession Tuesday. They knocked on tens of thousands of doors in the district and secured pledges from hundreds of sympathetic voters, leaving them confident that extensive field and online efforts made all the difference in this ideologically charged bloodbath of a House race, which was the most expensive in America. Read More
How Obama for America Made Its Facebook Friends Into Effective Advocates
BY Nick Judd | Monday, November 19 2012
During the summer, OfA chief data scientist Rayid Ghani and analyst Matt Rattigan brought the technology team a prototype piece of software. More a simple script, really, the prototype took a given supporter's Facebook ID, scanned the supporter's Facebook friends, checked what the campaign knew about those friends and returned content the campaign might want to put in front of them. By midsummer, they had a tool to spread content for the campaign that staff say was more than twice as effective as a traditional banner ad. Read More
After Sandy, Are FEMA and the Red Cross Helpmates to Neighborhood Volunteers, Not Their Leaders?
BY Joe Maniscalco | Friday, November 16 2012
The Internet didn't create the outpouring of citizen-to-citizen care that has so often beaten traditional relief agencies like the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Red Cross to Hurricane Sandy-ravaged communities all over the tri-state area - but it certainly helped to channel it. The rise of grassroots organizing channeled through online resources in times of crisis has been so profound that FEMA and the Red Cross aren't even pretending they can do a better job than web-adept citizens groups like Occupy Sandy when it comes to immediately moving people or supplies - or even that they are supposed to. Read More
Republican Digerati to the Party Establishment: "There You Go Again"
BY Sarah Lai Stirland | Wednesday, November 14 2012
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
In Red Hook, Mesh Network Connects Sandy Survivors Still Without Power
BY Becky Kazansky | Monday, November 12 2012
A Red Hook Houses resident accesses mesh network-provided wifi using a smartphone. Photo: Becky Kazansky / techPresident
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
For Romney's Digital Campaign, a Second-Place Finish
BY Nick Judd | Wednesday, November 7 2012
At every phase of the campaign, Mitt Romney's digital operation was half a step behind the technological savvy of Barack Obama's online team — at several moments, announcing features or ideas hours, days or months after the Obama campaign had already rolled them out. Read More
The Rise and Fall of Social Media in American Politics (And How it May Rise Again)
BY Micah L. Sifry | Tuesday, November 6 2012
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
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