online politics | TechPresident

Blue State's Lauren Miller Moving to Elizabeth Warren's Campaign

BY Nick Judd | Friday, January 6 2012

Blue State Digital's director of online communications, Lauren Miller, announced yesterday that she is leaving the left-leaning software giant to join U.S. Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren's campaign as new media director. Miller starts working for Warren in about two weeks. Read More

Obama for America's 50-State Strategy Shows Up Online

BY Nick Judd | Friday, October 28 2011

In 2008, Obama for America's 50-state strategy contributed to his election. Now it looks like his campaign isn't just adopting it again on the ground — his campaign is rounding up ground troops online as well. ... Read More

'Gaming' the Ames Straw Poll

BY Nick Judd | Friday, August 12 2011

ClickZ's Kate Kaye has a great look at how campaigns are going digital in their quest to win the Ames Straw Poll. Here's her describing how Republican political consulting firm Engage built a platform for former ... Read More

What Do Michele Bachmann and Ozzy Osbourne Have In Common?

BY Nick Judd | Wednesday, July 20 2011

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) and Ozzy Osbourne are both riding the crazy train straight to the bank, political science professor Justin Buchler suggests in a new article in "The Forum," a Berkeley Electronic Press ... Read More

Online Consultant Says 'Web Guys' Need to Put Fundraising First

BY Nick Judd | Thursday, June 23 2011

Justin Hart, who was California U.S. Senate candidate Chuck DeVore's new media director, says online consultants should focus on fundraising to stay relevant to their campaigns: Make it about fundraising; pay your own ... Read More

Facebook Users are More Politically Active, Pew Says

BY Nick Judd | Friday, June 17 2011

A study released yesterday by the Pew Internet & American Life Project finds Facebook users are far more likely to be politically engaged: Our survey was conducted over the November 2010 elections. At that time, 10% ... Read More

Cato's George Scoville Leaving for CRAFT Media/Digital

BY Nick Judd | Tuesday, May 31 2011

Scoville, Cato's new media manager, makes his move next month. (See also Ben Smith) Update: And also Scoville, himself. Read More

Define "Guru": Selling the Obama '08 Online Campaign Abroad

BY Nancy Scola | Monday, April 25 2011

It's a perfectly normal course of events for political operatives to wrangle over who deserves what credit for a campaign's successes (or failures, for that matter). But letting yourself be billed as the Obama campaign's ... Read More

Question: Does Quora Do Politics? Answer:...

BY Nancy Scola | Thursday, March 17 2011

Photo by Jason Tester

Questions and answers, is there anything simpler in life? Perhaps not, but a humble Q&A platform called Quora is capturing the attention of technologists in a way that makes worth asking, what happens when their political counterparts start working with it?

Crowdsourcing the Apocalypse

BY Nancy Scola | Tuesday, November 16 2010

You know what Howard Dean and Sarah Palin have in common? Both, finds the New York Times Magazine's Matt Bai, are crowd-sourced candidates who, finding themselves "buffeted in a digital storm of emotion," ... Read More

News Briefs

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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.

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.

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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.

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

wednesday >

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.

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.

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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