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Sean Parker: New Technology Can Diminish The Dominance Of Money In Politics

BY Sarah Lai Stirland | Tuesday, March 13 2012

Sean Parker's string of investments in the political technology space in recent years are rooted in the belief that lowering the cost of electioneering is the key to diminishing the corrupting influence of money in ... Read More

NationBuilder To Announce $6.25 Million In Silicon Valley Angel Funding

BY Nick Judd | Thursday, March 8 2012

NationBuilder founder Jim Gilliam, shown here at PdF 2011. Photo: Esty Stein / Personal Democracy Media

Silicon Valley venture capital is coming to political technology.

NationBuilder, which entered public beta almost exactly a year ago and was founded by Brave New Films organizer Jim Gilliam as a low-cost, web 2.0-style organizing platform for campaigns, will announce today that it is bringing Causes founder Joe Green on board as president and has secured $6.25 million in funding led by Andreessen Horowitz.

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Daily Digest: Digging Obama

BY Joshua Levy | Thursday, May 29 2008

A Digg-style site lets Obama supporters make suggestions to the campaign; a video of a Young Hillary Clinton; who, exactly, are these online Republicans we hear about?; Click 4 Obama makes a political FreeRice site; ... Read More

The Significance of the Facebook Causes Giving Challenge

BY Michael Connery | Monday, February 4 2008

With the close of its Facebook Causes Giving Challenge, The Case Foundation has begun to fulfill the original promise many saw in the Facebook "Causes" application. Read More

Read the Writing on the Wall

BY Greg Bloom | Monday, August 27 2007

When Howard Dean “friended” Micah Sifry on Facebook, Micah announced his skepticism about the meaning of this relationship: “What kind of “meeting” is taking place here, between a famous ... Read More

Causes for Politics on Facebook

BY Patrick Ruffini | Tuesday, July 24 2007

Project Agape has added Presidential candidate contributions to the mix of Causes it supports. You can now start raising money for any of the Presidential candidates through Facebook. Read More

News Briefs

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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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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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