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Gov 2.0 Camp LA, Extended Remix

BY Sarah Granger | Tuesday, February 9 2010

Craig Newmark flew straight to Los Angeles from Dublin in order to share his thoughts on using technology and social media to improve government at the Gov 2.0 Camp LA this past weekend. Newmark, who writes frequently on ... Read More

Hollywood Fusion: Gov 2.0 Camp LA

BY Sarah Granger | Monday, February 8 2010

My trip to Gov 2.0 Camp LA commenced with a comedy of errors: lost luggage, a flooded hotel room and flooded streets due to the rains. After a night of little sleep, I arrived at the BlankSpaces co-working location to ... Read More

Twitterverse is Shocked, SHOCKED Obama Admitted to Never Using Twitter

BY Sarah Granger | Monday, November 16 2009

Those of us on the West Coast - or who stayed up extra late - were able to catch President Obama's town hall live on TV from China along with the accompanying Twitter chatter. There were some amazing nuggets from the ... Read More

Twitterverse is Shocked, SHOCKED Obama Admitted to Never Using Twitter

BY Sarah Granger | Monday, November 16 2009

Those of us on the West Coast - or who stayed up extra late - were able to catch President Obama's town hall live on TV from China along with the accompanying Twitter chatter. There were some amazing nuggets from the ... Read More

Open Data Goes Local with CA Data Camp and DataSF

BY Sarah Granger | Friday, November 13 2009

Almost three months ago, the City and County of San Francisco launched a site called DataSF where they publish data sets from a variety of city departments for public consumption and application development. The ... Read More

Survey Says: People Like Most U.S. Government Websites

BY Sarah Granger | Tuesday, October 27 2009

A survey released today by the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) shows that citizens' views of government websites are moving up to being on par with their opinions of private sector sites for the first time. ... Read More

Aneesh Chopra and Tim O'Reilly Talk Gov 2.0: Glass Half Full or Half Empty?

BY Sarah Granger | Thursday, October 22 2009

Wednesday Aneesh Chopra returned to San Francisco to meet with tech leaders and innovators about where we are re: national technology planning since he's now been CTO for several months. An eternal optimist, he spoke ... Read More

Call for Votes - techPresident South by Southwest Panel on Next Generation Politics

BY Sarah Granger | Wednesday, September 2 2009

In 2000, candidates used e-mail and websites to transmit their messages online. 2004 introduced political blogs, and in 2008, social media played a major role in the election. As the 2010 election approaches and we look ... Read More

USA CTO Aneesh Chopra's Visit to Silicon Valley

BY Sarah Granger | Monday, August 10 2009

Last week, the Silicon Valley technology community enjoyed a visit from the first national Chief Technology Officer, Aneesh Chopra. Aneesh spoke at the Computer History Museum for an event put on by the Churchill Club, ... Read More

Netroots Nation Warms up in San Francisco with Packed New Media Summit

BY Sarah Granger | Saturday, April 18 2009

Yesterday, in the city by the bay, Netroots Nation hosted an information and idea-packed New Media Summit in part to gather Bay Area locals and also to convene progressive activists in preparation for the Netroots Nation ... 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.

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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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