Massachusetts | TechPresident

Open Docket, an Open Government Tool for Small Towns and Cities

BY Sam Roudman | Monday, February 4 2013

In small towns, getting civic information can be a mess. Figuring out the history or status of a request for a new stop sign can require a slog through weeks or months of PDF files of meeting agendas, minutes, and reports. Is the information public? Yes. Is it accessible? No. Sean Roche lives in Newton, Mass., population 85,000, and he's hoping to solve that with Open Docket, an open-source project he's launched to provide a better way to track the lawmaking goings-on of small cities and towns.

Testing the SuperPAC-Free Massachusetts Senate Campaign

BY Nick Judd | Friday, March 9 2012

In an email to supporters, Massachusetts U.S. Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren just announced that after an online conversation with supporters, she's asked Sen. Scott Brown to donate money to the Autism Consortium, a network of medical and research institutions in the Boston and Worcester areas, in accordance with a pledge both contenders for the Senate reached in January.

An independent group placed an ad recently on Brown's behalf. Brown and Warren had pledged that should outside groups enter the race on one candidate's behalf, that candidate would donate to a charity of the other candidate's choice from its campaign funds — which would, in theory, negate the financial benefits of outside money entering the race.

Massachusetts Pol Grouponomizes Campaign Finance

BY Nick Judd | Friday, July 29 2011

Massachusetts state Rep. Dan Winslow. Groupon economics (Grouponomics?) has come to campaign finance. In June, Massachusetts state Rep. Dan Winslow sought approval for an effort to Grouponomize a campaign fund-raiser ... Read More

Massachusetts State Rep Offers a Social Deal ... On His Fund-Raiser

BY Nick Judd | Wednesday, June 22 2011

Massachusetts State Rep. Dan Winslow is seeking state approval for a scheme to offer a Groupon deal on a campaign fund-raiser: Winslow’s groundbreaking idea would allow supporters a chance to attend the $100 per ... Read More

Should You Bring Your iPad to the City Council Meeting?

BY Nick Judd | Thursday, May 19 2011

The Boston Globe's Kathy McCabe has a smartly done enterprise story today about the intersection of public meetings and "e-government." Popping around Massachusetts towns, she compiles a list of anecdotes that sum up the ... Read More

Trippi to Mass. and Massie

BY Nancy Scola | Tuesday, April 26 2011

Long-time strategist Joe Trippi has signed up with Democrat Bob Massie's campaign in Massachusetts to unseat Sen. Scott Brown, notes Ben Smith: Trippi, who notes that he began his career working for Ted Kennedy's 1980 ... Read More

Inside Brown's Online Ad Strategy

BY Nancy Scola | Tuesday, January 19 2010

ClickZ's Kate Kaye has a look at the Massachusetts Republican's online operation, with some good details on online ad strategy and insights from the campaign's new media staff and consultants: Read More

Massachusetts Special: The State of the Brown vs. Coakley (Online) Race

BY Nancy Scola | Tuesday, January 19 2010

As we reach the very end of the Massachusetts special election, we're seeing a ramping up of folks working to extract what the race means for the state of online politics. Read More

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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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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