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Beyond Bill Clinton's Internet Truth Squad Idea...

BY Nancy Scola | Monday, May 16 2011

Bill Clinton is getting attention for floating the idea that what the Internet might need is some sort of NGO dedicated to assessing its truthfulness: Well, I think it would be a legitimate thing to do. But if you wanted ... Read More

MoveOn Debuts SignOn, Its Petition Tool-Slash-Farm League

BY Nancy Scola | Monday, May 16 2011

SignOn's petition creation tool. MoveOn formally rolls out SignOn, a D.I.Y. petition hub we previewed back in April. As far as basic functionality goes, the site works much like fellow petition site Change.org. But ... Read More

When Rwanda's Kagame Says No One Has the Right to Criticize Him...

BY Nancy Scola | Monday, May 16 2011

He's willing to enforce it. Over on the Independent, Rob Hastings writes up this weekend's "Twitter spat" between Rwandan President Paul Kagame and former Independent deputy editor Ian Birrell. What set up the ... Read More

Toward a Digitally Literate America, Whatever That Might Mean

BY Nancy Scola | Monday, May 16 2011

New in the federal website family: DigitalLiteracy.gov, a place for people to "share and enhance the tools necessary to learn computer and Internet skills needed in today’s global work environment." (via ... Read More

U.S.'s Noveck to Help Open British Government

BY Nancy Scola | Monday, May 16 2011

Photo credit: Joi Ito Beth Noveck, until January the Obama administration's point person on open government, has been recruited to the British government to help in its "open-source policy making" efforts, ... Read More

Hitting Issa's Wall to Call for FCC Commish Investigation

BY Nancy Scola | Friday, May 13 2011

House oversight chief Darrell Issa is getting harangued on his Facebook wall over FCC Commissioner Meredith Attwell Baker's announcement that she's going to work at Comcast a few months after voting to approve the ... Read More

Gates: Sit Room Photo Fakes Gave Pause When It Came to Bin Laden Photo

BY Nancy Scola | Friday, May 13 2011

Defense Secretary Gates reluctance to support the release of photos of Osama Bin Laden was influenced by the altered photos of the Situation Room that were floating around the Internet, reports Politico's Josh Gerstein: ... Read More

How You Be Bin Laden and Still Email Folks

BY Nancy Scola | Friday, May 13 2011

The AP's Adam Goldman and Matt Apuzzo report: Holed up in his walled compound in northeast Pakistan with no phone or Internet capabilities, bin Laden would type a message on his computer without an Internet connection, ... Read More

The Sun Sets on Staged Presidential Photos

BY Nancy Scola | Friday, May 13 2011

White House photo by Chuck Kennedy Remember last week's mini-debate over whether the time had passed on the staging of presidential photos? The White House said it is ending its long-running practice of having ... Read More

NationalField: The Private Social Network That's Reinventing the Ground Game

BY Nancy Scola | Friday, May 13 2011

NationalField's Dupont Circle office in Washington DC; photo credit: NationalField

Our growing public interest in how technology is re-inventing modern politics threatens to obscure the fact that, in many ways, the stuff of campaigning is still the hard, often sweaty work of knocking on doors, cajoling neighbors, making phone calls, and wrangling volunteers. In 2008, the Obama campaign dabbled in using social data to upgrade political field organizing. In 2012, they're ready to see how far the practice can take them. 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.

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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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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.

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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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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

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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.

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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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