online organizing

Obama Rallies Grassroots Allies with Call to Root Out Rumors

BY Nancy Scola | Friday, August 21 2009

White House Email Program Stumbles, and Conservatives Get in Their Kicks

BY Nancy Scola | Tuesday, August 18 2009

The chum was already in the water. The White House's call for "fishy" emails earlier this month had some on the right floating the idea that the Obama Administration was keeping tabs on its political opponents. ... Read More

Afghan Presidential Candidate Obama-izes His Campaign

BY Editors | Friday, July 17 2009

[GUEST POST] Mark Hanson is a UK-based social media strategist and blogger. He advises FTSE100 companies, Labour politicians and is an associate fellow at the progressive Institute of Public Policy Research. We're ... Read More

Scola's Ten Lessons from Iran, Some Big, Some Small

BY Nancy Scola | Friday, July 10 2009

At last week's Personal Democracy Forum I was lucky enough to sit on a lunch time panel on the intersection of recent events in Iran and social media alongside Mobile Active's Katrin Verclas, NPR's Davar Iran Ardalan, ... Read More

I Stand with Batwoman

BY Nancy Scola | Wednesday, July 8 2009

Deconstructing (Twitter) Vote Report: Lessons Learned and What's Next

BY Nancy Scola | Wednesday, July 8 2009

One of things that made the Twitter Vote Report project so darn exciting during the '08 U.S. election also, at times, threatened to pull the whole shebang under. The thing simply had dozens of moving parts. We had people ... Read More

Meet act.ly: Petitions Designed for Twitter

BY Jim Gilliam | Wednesday, June 24 2009

Jesse Haff and I were inspired by Clay Johnson's post last week about Twitter being the future of email marketing to figure out how Twitter could breathe new life into the boring old petition, the stalwart of email-based ... Read More

Iran Roundup: "It Is Your Duty to Report"

BY Nancy Scola | Monday, June 22 2009

Iran Roundup: Inside an Internet-Charged Resistance

BY Nancy Scola | Thursday, June 18 2009

A Look at Facebook in '08 House Races

BY Nancy Scola | Tuesday, June 16 2009

Bentley University professors Christine Williams and Jeff Gulati have been tracking politics and technology through a series of reports, are out with a new working paper on the use of Facebook in '08 House races that may ... Read More

News Briefs

RSS Feed wednesday >

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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