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For Tea Party Groups, That "Digital Gap" With Democrats Doesn't Seem As Wide

BY Matt Taylor | Tuesday, January 29 2013

Tea Party groups used their own software to support Republican Sen. Ted Cruz's primary campaign in Texas. Photo: Gage Skidmore

Given FreedomWorks chairman Dick Armey's tumultuous exit from the organization he helped found, a Republican Party now casting about for solutions to its electoral troubles could be forgiven for passing over Tea Party advice on organizational structure. But if grassroots conservatives have technology tips to share, GOP insiders looking for an upgrade might want to lend an ear. Read More

Hidden in Plain View: Obama 2012's Organizing Blueprint

BY Micah L. Sifry | Tuesday, July 3 2012

Image from "Campaigning to Engage and Win: A Guide to Leading Electoral Campaigns."

Yesterday, the New Organizing Institute, a progressive training center, published a 210-page manual titled, "Campaigning to Engage and Win: A Guide to Leading Electoral Campaigns." Written by and for campaigners at every level of politics, it is also the Obama 2012 field strategy, hidden in plain view. It is also an argument for a different way of campaigning than the traditional reliance on fundraising and TV ads, one that calls for starting earlier and engaging supporters more deeply in all aspects of a campaign's life, and one that builds on the one thing that may make campaigns in the digital age different: thanks to technology, it makes sense to involve more people. Indeed, it may be the best way to win. Read More

Grassroots vs Grassrootsy: How to Parse Technology's Role in Politics

BY Micah L. Sifry | Monday, July 18 2011

For a whole bunch of reasons, we should be on guard against claims that money given online, as well as tallies of small donations versus large donors, or other newer metrics of public participation like Twitter retweets ... Read More

In a Year of Local Labor Battles Nationwide, A Major Union Doubles Down Online

BY Nick Judd | Friday, July 15 2011

Union protesters rally against Ohio Senate Bill 5 in March. Union staffers nationwide say their members have moved increasingly online throughout this year's fights over state budgets and collective bargaining rights. ... Read More

Russian Writer's 'Bloggers Against Garbage' Initiative Picks Up Steam

BY Nick Judd | Tuesday, July 12 2011

France 24 International News carries this item from late last week about "Bloggers Against Garbage," an initiative founded by Sergey Dolya that seeks to use the power of social networks to mobilize clean-ups in parks and ... Read More

Who Organized Tunisia's Revolution?

BY Micah L. Sifry | Saturday, January 15 2011

I'm trying to finish my Qwikileaks book, but events in Tunisia and the commentary around them spurs this quick comment: Read More

Whither Obama & Co.'s Organizing Might?

BY Nancy Scola | Friday, October 30 2009

Writing for the New Republic, Lydia DePillis investigates the Obama operation'spost-campaign organizing might, now institutionalized in the Organizing for America branch of the Democratic National Committee. Read More

News Briefs

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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

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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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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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