Posts by Antonella Napolitano

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Ukrainian Civic Movement Unveils Online Tool to Monitor Parliament Members

BY Antonella Napolitano | Monday, July 30 2012

A new tool for monitoring parliament members' activity is now available online, the Kyiv Post reports. The tool has been created by Chesno (“honest”), a civic movement founded a year ago by a group of civil society organizations with the aim of empowering citizens with information tools and improving their knowledge and political choices. Read More

The Pirate Party Has A Brazilian Chapter

BY Antonella Napolitano | Monday, July 30 2012

Last Friday, Rick Falkvinge, founder of the Pirate Party, announced the birth of the Brazilian chapter of the movement. The “Partido Pirata do Brasil” may have soon the chance of raising its voice, as Brazil is also in the process of discussing an advanced law on net neutrality and Internet access, Falkvinge added. Read More

Iceland MP Jónsdóttir Is Creating a Pirate Party Chapter in Her Own Country

BY Antonella Napolitano | Wednesday, July 18 2012

Iceland's MP Birgitta Jónsdóttir is planning to form a chapter of the Pirate Party in her own country, the Reykjavík Grapevine reports. Jónsdóttir, a poet and an activist, has been the most visible Iceland's MP in these last years, mainly involved in all the initiatives to foster citizens' participation in the democracy process. Read More

European Parliament Rejects Controversial Anti-Piracy Agreement

BY Antonella Napolitano | Wednesday, July 4 2012

MEPs holding signs against ACTA. Photo: © European Union 2012 - European Parliament

Earlier today, the European Parliament rejected a controversial intellectual property framework, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, by a tally of 478 votes to 39 with 165 abstentions. The agreement would have allowed European Union member states to join an intellectual property and anti-piracy regime that sets strict rules for how to handle anything from the downloading of copyrighted material to the sale of counterfeit pharmaceuticals. Read More

Personal Democracy Media at the State of the Net conference, Italy

BY Antonella Napolitano | Thursday, June 21 2012

The State of the Net conference, taking place tomorrow and Saturday in the historic city of Trieste, aims at describing the state of the art of the Internet in Italy and the challenges that the country is facing in a global perspective. Personal Democracy Media is partnering with the conference and curating the transparency section, happening this Saturday. Read More

Catching Up With Personal Democracy Forum Brussels 2012

BY Antonella Napolitano | Friday, June 1 2012

PDF Europe editor Antonella Napolitano writes: "Our first conference took place yesterday at the Brussels Press Club and featured MEPs, journalists, EU communications officials, diplomats, bloggers. If you could not attend, you can catch up thanks to this Storify created by Aurélie Valtat." Read More

Announcing PdF Brussels, May 31st!

BY Antonella Napolitano | Monday, May 7 2012

This month, PDF finally comes to Brussels! Over the years, we have covered many issues related to techpolitics within the EU institutions. So, for us, it just felt natural to organize a PDF event in Brussels, where most of these decisions are made. The next European elections are less than two years away; the economic crisis has left many countries across the continent in a similar situation; unemployment is rising, political extremism is rising, digital media is the norm: is a European public sphere also being formed online? Read More

Still a Long Way to Go for Spain's First Transparency Law

BY Antonella Napolitano | Monday, April 23 2012

Helen Darbishire presents the Access Info and Avaaz petition. Photo by Tuderechoasaber

Last Wednesday, the Spanish government presented a draft freedom of information law at the Open Government Partnership conference in Brasilia, but faced strong criticism coming from civil society and NGOs. For the first time in Spain, the law will create specific rules for information access and transparency. Activists, though, argue that the draft is not strong enough and does not meet international standards, as it fails to recognize access as a fundamental right and gives a restrictive definition of the information that can be accessed. Read More

ACTA Rapporteur Says He'll Recommend Against the Treaty

BY Antonella Napolitano | Tuesday, April 17 2012

MEP David Martin during a debate on ACTA. Photo by European Parliament

British MEP David Martin, responsible for providing guidance to European Parliament on the controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, will recommend the rejection of the treaty, he announced on April 12. Martin will submit his final report to the International Trade Committee, the main parliamentary committee involved in the ACTA debate, later this month. Read More

Is It Time for Transparency in Spain?

BY Antonella Napolitano | Monday, April 2 2012

Image: h de c / Flickr

The right-leaning government of Spain is working on the creation of a new transparency and information access law, for the first time in the history of the country. In the expectation that Spain will adopt the new law soon, two open government NGOs recently launched a new site, Tuderechoasaber.es (Your Right to Know). The site helps citizens find the right body to address a freedom of information request. Read More

News Briefs

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Cory Booker Hires Democratic Organizing Veteran Addisu Demissie To Manage Senate Run

Newark Mayor Cory Booker has hired a veteran of the Democratic organizing world Addisu Demissie to manage his run to succeed the late New Jersey Democratic Senator Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey. GO

ShareProgress Debuts Social Sharing Optimization Tools

ShareProgress, a left-leaning tech startup in downtown San Francisco, launched its social sharing optimization platform Tuesday after several months of testing with the progressive advocacy group CREDO Action. GO

New Organizing Institute to Move from Collecting Election Data to Organizing Election Officials

The New Organizing Institute, a progressive nonprofit that trains campaigners and is no led by former Obama for America data director Ethan Roeder, is launching a new initiative next week aiming to "fix that" for local elections. NOI will announce a national network where local election administration officials can congregate to share solutions to common issues. It's a transition for a team at NOI that had previously been managing the Voting Information Project, which collects data on polling places, election districts and voter registration deadlines and prepares it for third parties in machine-readable format. In the 2012 election cycle, backed by the Pew Charitable Trusts and partnered with Google, VIP made information available in all 50 states. GO

Russian SOPA Passed First Reading

A first draft of a law nicknamed “Russian SOPA” was approved by the Russian parliament last Friday, June 14. Like the original Stop Online Piracy Act, the bill will establish penalties and procedures for online copyright violations.

monday >

Czech Prime Minister Resigns Following Corruption and Surveillance Scandal

The prime minister of the Czech Republic resigned yesterday, irreparably damaged by a corruption scandal and the possibility of impropriety in his personal life. According to the Czech constitution, his entire government will also have to relinquish office.

friday >

Mayors of New York City and San Francisco Announce "Digital Cities" Summit

The Mayors of New York City and San Francisco announced Friday that they're co-hosting meetings in the Fall and early next year to examine the "best practices" that lead to tech-enabled economic growth. The meetings are follow-ups to the initial Bloomberg Technology Summit held last year in New York City. This year's summit in New York ... GO

New York State Joins GitHub to Get Feedback on Open Data Policy

New York is the first state to publish an initial draft of its open data guidelines on GitHub to seek feedback from the public, Governor Andrew Cuomo announced in a press release Thursday. GO

Brazilians Protest Forced Evictions on YouTube and in Mock World Cup

Tomorrow Brazilians who have been forced out of their housing in advance of the 2014 World Cup will stage their own “People's Cup” in Rio de Janeiro to draw awareness to forced evictions.

A “Fix-Rate” for Corruption: Integrity Action Wins the Google Global Impact Award

“From wanachi (“citizen”) to up there,” Emmanuel Dzombo explains with an upward sweep of his hand, is how Integrity Action has begun to reverse the bureaucratic top-down approach that has often blocked development work in Kenya. Dzombo is a local leader in Chengoni, Kenya, a country that ranks towards the very bottom of Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index – at 139. The organization believes it could do more, and Google.org seems to agree. The Google Impact Challenge will provide the charity with £500,000 that will allow it to develop a mobile application for tracking and collecting data from citizens. GO

Crowdsourced "Danger Maps" Track Air, Soil and Water Pollution in China

Chinese citizens are exposing sources of pollution and other environmental problems by contributing to the partially crowdsourced website 'Danger Maps'. So far, the Chinese government is letting them get away with it.

thursday >

U.S. Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board To Meet Next Wednesday

A long dormant independent agency that was at least nominally supposed to exercise a modicum of oversight over the booming intelligence-industrial complex is scrambling to meet up next Wednesday, but the public will still be none the wiser about what it plans to do, since it is a closed door meeting. The only indication that the toothless ... GO

Despite Software Problems, Civic Hackers are Pedaling Bike Share Data

Reporters are shoaling around the news that New York City's new bike sharing system, Citi Bike, is benighted with problems stemming from its high-tech software. But that's not putting the brakes on plans to explore what programmers might do with data generated by the system by hosting a Citi Bike Civic Hack Night later this month. GO

Grassroots Republicans Are Not Waiting for the RNC To Revamp Their Digital Strategy

Several members of the Republican Party rank and file aren't waiting around for the GOP to reinvent itself on the technological front. They're organizing events themselves to explore what a tech-enabled GOP might look like for the 2014 cycle. GO

wednesday >

New Russian Law Makes Publication of Information on Gay Rights Illegal

On June 11 the Russian parliament passed a bill against “homosexual propaganda” that effectively outlaws gay rights rallies and bans informational or pro-gay rights material from publication in the media or on the Internet. Violators of the law will risk heavy fines and censorship and, in the case of a media outlet, risk being shut down. It had near unanimous support, passing in a 436-to-0 vote, with only one abstention.

Macedonia Draft Law to Regulate and Restrict the "Last Arena for Freedom of Speech"

The draft of a media regulation law in Macedonia has journalists and press freedom watchdogs up in arms. The proposed Law on Media and Audiovisual Media Services was written by the government behind closed doors and without input from the media or NGOs. It has been interpreted as a decisive move on the part of the government to limit speech online in a country where press freedoms are already limited. Until now, Internet-based news sites were not regulated like print media.

Trying to Prosecute Online Piracy in Canada? Good Luck!

A private firm that is monitoring Canadians who download pirated content online has found itself at the center of a legal battle. GO

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