The same idea that revolutionized Barack Obama's 2012 presidential campaign is now being put to use in New York City government. Mayor Michael Bloomberg recently announced that Mike Flowers, director of analytics the mayor's Office of Policy and Strategic Planning, has a new title: chief analytics officer. In an interview, Flowers tells us the role change comes from the growing importance of cross-agency collaboration in the digital city. Read More

It's a little too soon to use search data to decide whether it's time to break out the hazmat suit. But Google data is becoming more and more useful to public health professionals — and someday soon, it might be a way to predict an outbreak long before other data becomes available to document the spread of disease. Read More

While Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight, math nerd and poll-meister supreme, has gotten a tremendous amount of attention of late for his confident prediction of an Obama victory in tomorrow's election, the largely unwritten story of 2012 includes a different group of math nerds who specialize in figuring out which voters might be persuaded to vote for their candidate and then making sure that they maximize the number of people who actually come out to vote that way. We know very little about their work for two big reasons. First, neither campaign has wanted to tip off their opponent to what they're doing, and second, with just a few rare exceptions, political reporters and their story-assignment editors aren't even looking to find out. But tomorrow is the biggest test yet for their analytic approach to targeting, persuading and turning out voters. Read More

In this article, we're going to look at Upwell, a nonprofit that describes itself as "a data-driven social media PR agency" with just one client, the ocean, and just one goal: more people talking about the ocean. What it's doing with "big listening" and "distributed campaigning" is pioneering a new kind of online political organizing. Read More

Big-money political donors often give to members of both parties, while small donors are more consistently partisan, according to new visualizations of campaign finance data.

Campaign-finance observers have known this for a while, but there's something more compelling about ... well, about seeing it. And the kind of person who has known for years about who gives and why is not the kind of person this project is trying to reach.

The team at NationBuilder announced Thursday that they were releasing API and limited bulk data access to a nationwide voter file with records on 170 million voters, for free.

"I'm a developer, I've wanted to build off of this data for like a decade and it's just completely impractical because it would just cost a ton of money to bring this together, a ton of time, you wouldn't get access through all the parties, the tools are all partisan," Gilliam said Thursday. "There's no ecosystem around it. And that's really stunted the innovation in the political tech world."

Today, Twitter announced the launch of the "Twitter Political Index" in partnership with the social data analysis firm Topsy and pollsters The Mellman Group and North Star Opinion Research, and the twittering class swooned. "Twitter Will Gauge Voter Sentiment in New Venture" was the headline at National Journal--never mind the fact that this is neither a measure of voters or of sentiment. Read More

If you're following the presidential campaign via Twitter, you know that each side is using the medium to strafe the other. But with the help of powerful network mapping tools, we discovered there's actually a lot more happening in the Twittersphere around those daily diversions. Thanks to connection technologies, people, events and ideas are coalescing in fascinating patterns online. There's a big "Tahrir Square" level of political demonstration underway, and with this post, we start mining the data to spot the communities among the crowds. Read More

UT-Dallas assistant professor David Parry argues that big data and message targeting endangers democracy. Read More