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Jimmy Wales launches campaigns wiki site

BY Christian Crumlish | Wednesday, July 5 2006

Techno-activist Gabe Wachob alerted me to Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales' announcement of campaigns.wikia.com. His mission statement includes the following: I am launching today a new Wikia website aimed at being a ... Read More

Trippi asks 'Can YouTube swing an election?'

BY Christian Crumlish | Monday, June 5 2006

As a close personal friend of Joe Trippi (OK, as someone who has exchanged email with him at some time in the past), I just received this interesting message: An interesting use of the internet as a way to communicate ... Read More

CitizenSpeak receives recognition from the Webbies

BY Christian Crumlish | Monday, April 17 2006

Jo Lee from CitizenSpeak writes that the Webby Awards dubbed CitizenSpeak as an Official Honoree, "a distinction awarded to sites for their excellence, vision and superior quality." This is something of a consolation ... Read More

Candidate campaigns on MySpace

BY Christian Crumlish | Friday, April 14 2006

Will MySpace be to 2008 what MTV was to 2000? Via Thomas Vander Wal I read that Senate candidate Allan Lichtman has taken his campaign to MySpace: I got a new and different request today in a social site, a request to ... Read More

Mark Green, blogger

BY Christian Crumlish | Saturday, January 21 2006

Just noticed that perennial New York candidate Mark Green (currently running for Attorney General) has launched a blog. His most recent post at the moment is a comment on Hillary's "Plantation" remark and how it's been ... Read More

A 'Microsoft Moment' for political e-mailers?

BY Christian Crumlish | Sunday, January 8 2006

When Microsoft was being subjected to antitrust scrutiny by the US Department of Justice, the companies deep, accumulated e-mail archives proved to be an achilles heel, yielding one incriminating message after another, ... Read More

eBlock addresses the 'bowling alone' problem

BY Christian Crumlish | Wednesday, December 28 2005

eBlock is a website that provides community web services at the neighborhood level. According to eBlock foundd Vivek Hutheesing: eBlock began with a commercial impulse. A few years ago, I connected all of the homes in my ... Read More

GoodStorm.com launches commerce service for nonprofits

BY Christian Crumlish | Wednesday, December 21 2005

Andrew Hoppin announced the launch of GoodStorm.com with a big party in San Francisco last week. GoodStorm is built on the CivicSpace platform and incorporates a number of newly developed e-commerce modules. The goal of ... Read More

Sam Hamm: Blogs influenced 'Homecoming'

BY Christian Crumlish | Monday, December 5 2005

Joe Dante's Showtime political-horror parable "Homecoming" showed war veteran zombies rising from the grave to vote against the president who sent them to die for a lie, while, according to Variety, "a Karl Rove-like ... Read More

CitizenSpeak demoing module for Civicspace

BY Christian Crumlish | Monday, August 29 2005

I know this makes me a geek that I think it's exciting that open source developers have come up with an open source CitizenSpeak module that plugs into CivicSpace. The module adds email advocacy functioanlity to ... Read More

News Briefs

RSS Feed tuesday >

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.

GO

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.

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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.

GO

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.

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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.

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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.

GO

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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