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Civic Hackers in the U.S. and Russia Asked to 'Code4Country'

BY Nick Judd | Friday, September 9 2011

In the past few years, groups of civic-minded programmers have shown that when they get together to write code, they can build things that change anything from the way people respond to natural disasters to how they ... Read More

Departures Continue Among White House Tech Staff

BY Nick Judd | Friday, July 8 2011

Politico notes the rising unease about the recent string of departures among the White House's tech staff. White House Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra will leave in August. Deputy chief technology officer Beth ... Read More

Civic Commons Gets Funding, Andrew McLaughlin

BY Nick Judd | Wednesday, June 1 2011

Andrew McLaughlin, Civic Commons' new executive director, in 2008. Photo: Joi Ito/Flickr The fledgling open-source-for-governments project Civic Commons will launch as a nonprofit with the help of a $250,000 grant from ... Read More

Lessig, Zittrain, McLaughlin, and Solomon Talk Internet Off Buttons

BY Nancy Scola | Friday, April 1 2011

Over on Al Jazeera, Larry Lessig, Jon Zittrain, Andrew McLaughlin, and Access's Brett Solomon discuss "the politics of the 'Internet Kill Switch,'" as in the idea that a society could have one or a few ... Read More

Deputy U.S. CTO McLaughlin Leaves White House Post

BY Nancy Scola | Thursday, December 23 2010

Photo credit: Elon University Read More

Consumer Watchdog Reacts to McLaughlin Reprimand

BY Nancy Scola | Thursday, May 20 2010

Consumer Watchdog's reaction to Deputy U.S. CTO Andrew McLaughlin's limited, though inappropriate, contact with his former colleagues at Google is to say that the McLaughlin's Google ties alone were never the problem. Read More

Google All the Way Down

BY Nancy Scola | Tuesday, May 18 2010

Ben Smith, as per usual, applies a refreshing, clarifying lens to the news of the day. It's the irony that I left out of yesterday's look at Deputy U.S. CTO Andrew McLaughlin's reprimand: that it involved a former Google ... Read More

White House Deputy CTO Andrew McLaughlin Slapped for Gmailing with Googlers

BY Nancy Scola | Monday, May 17 2010

A 2008 photo of Andrew McLaughlin taken by Joi Ito, used under a Creative Commons license. Read More

Deputy CTO's Buzz Contacts Set Off FOIA Request

BY Nancy Scola | Monday, April 12 2010

Today is "Better Know Your Social Media Settings" on the blog, it seems. Read More

White House Deputy CTO Challenges Republicans, Tea Party to Openness Competition

BY Micah L. Sifry | Monday, February 22 2010

A fast tip of the hat to White House deputy CTO Andrew McLaughlin, who had this to say Friday at a forum on open government: “I would be thrilled to make this a type of political competition ... to see who can be more ... Read More

News Briefs

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Summer Olympics to Stream Live From the UK — For Some

The BBC announced its plans yesterday to broadcast its live Olympics coverage of London's Summer games to PCs, mobile-devices and Internet-connected televisions, Reuters reported.

With a free Olympics application for Apple and Android phones, the BBC says it will be offering up to 24 live streams and video highlights clips, and plans for over 2,500 hours of live programming ... that is only available to viewers in the UK. NBC also plans to stream online, but the majority of free viewing of the Olympics will only be available to existing cable TV subscribers.

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CNN's "Erin Burnett OutFront" Will Have Some Tech-Politics Commentators

This should be interesting: CNN nightly news program Erin Burnett OutFront is out with its list of political commentators for the general election. Some of the names are familiar in Internet-politics-land. The gang includes Upworthy's Maegan Carberry, who was previously director of communications at Rock The Vote; Sasha Issenberg, who ventures into our corner of the political world frequently while documenting the new science of political campaigns for Slate; and Ben Smith, veteran political blogger turned BuzzFeed's top politics editor.

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Copyright Fights Heat Up Again Around Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) today re-released part of a previously leaked February 2011 draft of the U.S. proposal for the Trans-Pacific Partnership pact on his KeepTheWebOPEN website, as he joined calls by advocacy groups to make the currently ongoing deliberations about the treaty more open.

The United States, Australia, Brunei, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam are all involved in negotiating the agreement, which include provisions about intellectual property and copyright that will play a role in the developing global online economy. A 12th round of negotiations on the deal is now under way in Dallas, Texas. Issa is encouraging users to use his MADISON platform to comment on the document, which the website Knowledge Economy International obtained and released in March 2011.

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House Republicans Relaunch Speaker.gov

House Speaker John A. Boehner's office on Tuesday pulled the wraps off of the Speaker's overhauled web site just in time for a major policy speech about House Republicans' stance on any debt limit negotiations in the coming year. GO

We're All Journalists, Indeed: Obama Campaign Guests Checked Mobile Phones at the Door

Zeke Miller at Buzzfeed, studiously reading pool reports from President Barack Obama's recent campaign fundraisers, catches something: the Obama campaign, per Washington Post pooler David Nakamura, appears to be collecting mobile phones from event attendees at the door, and storing them in plastic bags. At least, that was the case at a Monday event in New York City.

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Americans Don't Elect to Use Americans Elect; 3rd Party Hits Wall?

Is Americans Elect, the third ballot line cum party that hoped to use the Internet to nominate a centrist ticket for president in 2012 dead? It certainly looks that way. But before anyone starts writing the post-mortem, remember that it has ballot lines in half the states--and those could be used by renegade factions in 2012, or possibly in 2014 to run candidates for Congress. GO

Lori Compas, Netroots Challenger to Wisconsin Senate Republican Scott Fitzgerald, Posts Irreverent YouTube Riposte, And It Takes Off

Lori Compas, a Democrat who's challenging Wisconsin state Senate Leader Scott Fitzgerald (R-Juneau) in the state's June 5 recall election, had a rather unusual Mother's Day this year: She spent at least part of the day making a YouTube video with her family. GO

Romney Campaign Targets Obama's Barnard Commencement Speech With Google Ads

New York City area web users looking for details about Barnard College's Commencement Ceremony, where President Barack Obama gave the Commencement Address earlier this afternoon, are also likely to have encountered a targeted ad calling out "Obama's Wasteful Spending" on Mitt Romney's website, as Emily Schultheis from Politico first reported. While she suggested it was targeted at only the zip code where the college is located on Manhattan's Upper West Side, it also showed up on a search for a zip code located in Queens, while accessing the Internet from Lower Manhattan. But it did not show up for an Internet user located outside the New York area. GO

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