Qik Takes From the Road: Hamsher, Crawford, Greenwald, Zandt, Newmark and Steinberg
BY Micah L. Sifry | Saturday, June 7 2008
I've been on the road since Thursday, first at a working meeting of the Sunlight Foundation in DC with people working on collaborative governance web designing, and then yesterday in Minneapolis at the National Conference on Media Reform (NCMR), where I moderated a panel on the same topic, and today in Houston at a miniconference at the Baker Institute on the internet and politics. A couple of times over the last two days, I managed to pull out the N95 and shot a couple of fun, Qik videos with some of the folks I bumped into at NCMR. (Unfortunately, I can't get online with the N95 here in Houston.)
Here's Jane Hamsher, the founder of FireDogLake, one of the newer powerhouses of the netroots-sphere. Jane and I shared the flight from Minneapolis down to Houston, and one of the fun things I learned about her was how she named her blog. Turns out "FireDogLake" was the name of her previous company, which came from the fact that she liked sitting by the fire with her dogs watching the Lakers play. Go figure.
Here's Susan Crawford, the founder of One Web Day. Susan is a dynamo activist, who teaches law and sits on the ICANN board, and three years ago she started OWD because she believes passionately in the importance of the internet and thought that one way to elevate it was by creating an "Earth Day" for the internet. The idea is that every September 22, we take a moment to show its importance by doing something in the physical world to illustrate its value. Andrew and I have volunteered to be Ambassadors for One Web Day, so you'll be hearing more about it from us in the days ahead.
Here's media activist Robert Greenwald of Brave New Films, along with his colleague Leighton Woodhouse and Craig Aaron of Free Press, the organization behind NCMR. In this video, Robert spills the beans about his plans to bird-dog the Fox TV team that had come to NCMR to make trouble. More details here.
Here's Lawrence Lessig at NCMR, just after he gave a rousing keynote address on the need to fix America's operation system. As I say on the video to Larry, I've now heard three versions of his "Change Congress" speech, and each time it gets better and better. If you're coming to PdF2008, you'll see for yourself soon, as he'll be keynoting for us too.
Here's "Techgrrl" Deanna Zandt and customer service representative Craig Newmark, also at NCMR, getting acquainted.
And back in DC, here's Tom Steinberg of mySociety.org, one of the most amazing citizen-led e-democracy collectives in the world, describing their newest project. They're taking video from the BBC of House of Parliament sessions, and text from the Hansard (the official written record of Parliament) and they've set up a tool for the public to help match the video segments to the appropriate text. In just one week, nearly 1/3 of the 34,000 videos have been timestamped by citizen volunteers. Amazing!