Transitions

• How the McAuliffe campaign in Virginia used voter modeling to guide its field efforts and find persuadable voters all over the state. Blue Labs, an analytics shop born from the 2012 Obama campaign, did a lot of the heavy data lifting.

• Youth turnout was up in Virginia and flat in New Jersey, according to CIRCLE, the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement. This suggests that the McAuliffe field effort, which went after young women in particular, may have had an effect.

• Our Miranda Neubauer surveys how political technology firms did not only in Virginia, but also New York, New Jersey and the Boston mayoral race.

• Tech entrepreneur Jack Hidary, who ran for NYC Mayor as an independent and tried to draw attention to an innovation agenda, explains why he ran in Crains New York.

• New York State has published its "Open Data Handbook," laying out the procedures and guidelines state agencies will use to create Data.ny.gov.

Meanwhile, in other news around the web:

• Al Gore says Edward Snowden "has revealed evidence of what appears to be crimes against the Constitution of the United States."

• The British Government is claiming that Snowden's disclosures could make it easier for "pedophiles to cover their tracks online."

• Germany is seriously considering having Edward Snowden testify before its parliament on the "NSA affair."

• The New York Times reports that the CIA pays AT&T to look up phone metadata on overseas targets. Data on Americans that may surface in those searches is reportedly masked.

• HHS Secretary Kathleen Sibelius tells a congressional hearing the first month's enrollment figures for Obamacare will be "very low." Sen. Max Baucus, who helped delay the law's enactment for several months back in 2009, chided her, saying "It has been disappointing to see members of the administration say they didn't see the problems coming."

• Jacqueline Fuller, director of Google Giving, the company's charitable arm, explains some of the thinking that goes into their "moon shot" projects.

• Italy is becoming a "test lab for participatory democracy," writes Carola Frediani, with multiple experiments underway, using everything from the Pirate Party's Liquid Democracy to a home-grown parliamentary feedback tool Tu Parlamento to a new platform called Electronic Parliament that says its users' decisions will be binding on legislators.

• The TalkingTransitionNYC project is opening its doors with a tent downtown crammed with events from November 9-23rd, and one hundred multilingual paid canvassers criss-crossing the city surveying residents using interactive iPads. (You can also participate online here.) It is being funded by ten major city-based foundations.