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The State of Digital Political Satire

BY Nancy Scola | Wednesday, May 18 2011

Politico's Byron Tau reports on how online shenanigans -- like snatching up ExploreNewt2012.com, and pointing it to, say, Buddy Roemer's exploratory site, or that fake Jane Corwin campaign site -- are shaping up for ... Read More

Secret Service Questions WA Boy about Obama Facebook Post

BY Nancy Scola | Wednesday, May 18 2011

The U.S. Secret Service questioned a 13-year old Tacoma boy after he posted on Facebook a note that referenced Osama Bin Laden's death, Barack Obama, and suicide bombers. The boy's mom is upset that law enforcement ... Read More

"YouTube Town Hall" Launches for Congressional Clips

BY Nancy Scola | Wednesday, May 18 2011

The company's new head-to-head video platform officially rolls out this morning, via Morning Tech: YouTube Town Hall is an online platform for members of Congress to debate and discuss the most important issues of the ... Read More

"We Will Use the Technology that Kaczynski Railed Against"

BY Nancy Scola | Tuesday, May 17 2011

The U.S. Marshal Service has posted a Flickr photo set showing some of the Unabomber's effects that will be auctioned online this week; slidshow created with Flickr Slideshow by Softsea. Starting tomorrow, the U.S. ... Read More

The Petering Out of Apps Contests

BY Nancy Scola | Tuesday, May 17 2011

Looking at civic apps that haven't gone much of anywhere, Government Technology's Andy Opsahl asks what the future holds for "Apps for X" contests that were, until recently, all the rage. He interviews some of ... Read More

Where Gingrich is on Health Care Reform, the Movie(s)

BY Nancy Scola | Tuesday, May 17 2011

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A Fiery Twitter Debate About Race, Obama, Bin Laden, Gingrich, and Salon. Umm, Right?

BY Nancy Scola | Tuesday, May 17 2011

Reading Kevin Drum, one learns that Salon's Glenn Greenwald all worked up about the supposed "about 30 obsessive, truly unstable Obama cultists who sit on Twitter all day, literally, smearing with vile, rancid ... Read More

On Twitter, We're All Don Rumsfeld. And Vice Versa.

BY Nancy Scola | Tuesday, May 17 2011

James Fallows considers the career path that led Donald Rumsfeld from member of Congress to White House chief of staff to Secretary of Defense -- twice --to now being the guy who tweets out updates on how many people ... Read More

Washington Times Not Pleased President is on the Phone

BY Nancy Scola | Monday, May 16 2011

The paper's editorial board makes the argument you knew was coming: the new mobile presidential push-notification alert system represents "Obama's 300 million new Twitter followers." Read More

Data.gov, Now More Social

BY Nancy Scola | Monday, May 16 2011

O'Reilly's Alex Howard points us to the news that there's a "next generation" Data.gov on the way, one designed to make it easier for people to stumble upon and explore data. Socrata, the social data platform ... Read More

News Briefs

RSS Feed wednesday >

Please Stop Selling MOOCs As a Cure-All for Higher Education

Massive open online courses, or MOOCs, promise to provide cheap or free college courses to any student with a Wi-Fi connection, but that's about it. Funny, then, that someone would suggest otherwise. Funnier still, because that someone is Anant Agarwal, the president of edX, in a recent piece that appeared on the Guardian's website. GO

Brazil's Middle Class Protestors Take the Struggle Online, With Mixed Results

Protestors in Brazil have made their war cry heard all over social media and as a result, have received quite a bit of attention from the international community with popular hashtags such as #itsnotabout20cents and #ChangeBrazil. But while they have used tools like Facebook to organize and rally, the effectiveness of their Twitter use is harder to gauge. GO

The Thicker China's "Great Firewall" Becomes, the Subtler the Doors to Sneak Through

As China announces it will tighten restrictions on access to the Internet, Chinese citizens show that they've developed new ways around them. GO

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.

GO

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.

GO

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

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