What Twitter Won't Tell You About the Election
BY Nick Judd | Wednesday, February 8 2012
A new study released on Tuesday by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press on Tuesday offers the opportunity to get real about what the political conversation on Twitter and Facebook can — or can't — tell you about the progression of the 2012 political campaign. Pew has found that even among users of Twitter and Facebook, a paltry percentage of people use social networks to get news about politics: Only 24 percent of Twitter users in the sample and 25 percent of Facebook users said they "sometimes" got campaign news through that network, while a full 40 percent of Twitter users in the sample and 46 percent of other social media users reported "never" getting campaign news through either Twitter or Facebook. Read More
Navigating New York's "Road Map for the Digital City," One Year In
BY Nick Judd | Wednesday, February 8 2012
In May 2011, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg revealed a "Road Map for the Digital City," a plan to use technology to make city government more and participatory, and to leverage the city's tech sector for economic and civic gains.
New York City Chief Digital Officer Rachel Sterne will join our editorial director, Micah Sifry, on a conference call this Friday afternoon to discuss the progress on that road map so far. The call is free and open to anyone to join. You can sign up here.
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Commentary: Micah Altman on How Participatory Technology Is Changing Redistricting
BY Micah Altman | Wednesday, February 8 2012
Micah Altman, a principal investigator at the Public Mapping Project, responds to Nick Judd's article about the project's efforts to increase participation in redistricting around the country: "It's a good article, even if its titular conclusion, that we'll have to wait another 10 years for any of this to matter, is wrong." Well, then! Read on for more. Read More
Fidel Castro Loves the Internet
BY Raphael Majma | Tuesday, February 7 2012
“The Internet is a revolutionary instrument that permits the receiving and transmission of ideas, in both directions, that is something we should know how to use,” Fidel Castro told a crowd of supporters on Feb. 4, according to the state-owned Cuban newspaper Granma International. Castro, who made his first public appearance since April 2011, launched his two-volume memoir, “Guerilla of Time,” and took the opportunity to discuss issues of importance to him. Earlier this week, Miranda Neubauer reported that one of these topics was the need for the Internet. Castro has been a proponent of the Internet as a tool for the exchange of ideas since 2003, but the average Cuban citizen faces great difficulty getting online. Read More
This 1812 cartoon from the Boston Gazette is widely credited as the origin of the term "Gerrymander." Source: Wikimedia Commons
In Pursuit of a Tech Answer to Gerrymandering, Good-Government Groups Must Wait Another Ten Years
BY Nick Judd | Monday, February 6 2012
This year, advocates for more public inclusion in the redistricting process put an idea to the test: That open-source software and voter outreach efforts could make people more aware and more involved. The idea here was that new tools would make maps easier to draw and even easier to understand, creating, at worst, evidence that lawmakers involved in redistricting were not drawing the right maps, and, at best, alternatives. Read More
White House CTO Aneesh Chopra's Exit Interview
BY Nick Judd | Monday, February 6 2012
On his way out of the White House and back to Virginia, where he is expected to run for public office — but will neither confirm or deny that's the plan — Aneesh Chopra describes the shape of the post he pioneered as the country's first-ever chief technology officer.
As a result of Chopra's interview with The Atlantic's tech/politics correspondent, Nancy Scola, there's now a public record of what this first-ever CTO thinks the CTO's job actually is ("On any topic that is a priority for the president, my role is evaluate how technology, data, and innovation can advance, support, and improve upon those strategies," among other things) and how it might be improved.
Read MoreWith Pinterest and Twitter, Activists are Out to Punish Komen
BY Nick Judd | Friday, February 3 2012
Susan G. Komen for the Cure's decision Friday to reverse a rules change that would have cut off further funding to Planned Parenthood may not be enough to stem the outpouring of anger against the breast cancer research charity. Komen's grantmaking rules no longer oblige it to issue no new grants to Planned Parenthood, but online activists are hoping to channel continued anger at what they say is the politicization of women's health issues into a sustained campaign. Read More
Did Newt Gingrich Lose Florida for Want of a Better API?
BY Nick Judd | Thursday, February 2 2012
Slate's Sasha Issenberg has a great story outlining one narrative about Newt Gingrich's loss in Florida: He inspired a group of tech-savvy volunteers, but gave them no way to plug in to the campaign. Read More
Does a Google-World Bank Deal On Crowdsourcing Ask Too Much of the Crowd?
BY Nick Judd | Thursday, February 2 2012
A World Bank representative will meet with global transparency advocates and digital mapmakers to discuss a controversial geodata deal with Google it announced in mid-January, according to an official at the bank.
Read MoreHouse GOP Hosts Legislative Data and Transparency Conference
BY Nick Judd | Thursday, February 2 2012
Today, House Republicans are hosting a conference on legislative data and transparency. The goal, as it's been explained to me, is to set the table for a conversation between House leadership and open government/open data advocates about what the House could or should do next.
More information on the conference is here. It's being live streamed.
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