Silicon Valley | TechPresident

What's Wrong with Silicon Valley?

BY Nick Judd | Friday, June 7 2013

After working in San Francisco first for Obama for America and then as part of Code for America, Catherine Bracy shares a political technologist's view of Silicon Valley's sometimes staggering inequality. Here's her talk from Personal Democracy Forum 2013, "What Techies Need to Know About Politics:"

What German Politicians Think of Google Glass

BY Miranda Neubauer | Tuesday, May 21 2013

Philipp Rösler. Screenshot via @KaiDiekmann on telly.com

The German government led by Chancellor Angela Merkel has not had the easiest relationship with Google. The company launched a public campaign against a law backed by her coalition that would require search engines to pay to show news articles in search results, with mixed results. What's more, Google has long had to navigate the privacy waters in Germany and throughout the European Union. But that has not stopped her federal minister for economics and technology, Philipp Rösler, from giving Google Glass an enthusiastic test run as he leads a delegation of German technology companies and politicians on a trip to Silicon Valley this week as part of German Valley Week. Read More

What The Other Silicon Valley Immigration Group Is Doing This Month

BY Sarah Lai Stirland | Thursday, May 16 2013

A bipartisan coalition of political advocacy, business and tech groups are moving ahead to launch a social media blitz next week designed to persuade members of the Senate to vote in favor of immigration reform ... Read More

In Google Hangout, Biden Confronts Critics, Coaches Silicon Valley on Gun Advocacy

BY Miranda Neubauer | Thursday, January 24 2013

Shades of Silicon Valley's nascent political activism and the White House's full-bore use of the Internet in its own public engagement efforts were on display Thursday in a "Fireside" Google hangout with Vice President Joe Biden, venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki, and PBS Newshour's Hari Sreenivasan. Read More

NationBuilder To Announce $6.25 Million In Silicon Valley Angel Funding

BY Nick Judd | Thursday, March 8 2012

NationBuilder founder Jim Gilliam, shown here at PdF 2011. Photo: Esty Stein / Personal Democracy Media

Silicon Valley venture capital is coming to political technology.

NationBuilder, which entered public beta almost exactly a year ago and was founded by Brave New Films organizer Jim Gilliam as a low-cost, web 2.0-style organizing platform for campaigns, will announce today that it is bringing Causes founder Joe Green on board as president and has secured $6.25 million in funding led by Andreessen Horowitz.

10 Things Cory Booker Has Done Thus Far on His Trip to Silicon Valley

BY Nancy Scola | Thursday, March 10 2011

Photo by Jason Pollock // caption: "Here's Mayor @CoryBooker doing an intv. for @PiersMorgan at @Twitter's HQ." Read More

Facebook Causes Does Pretty Well for Itself

BY Nancy Scola | Monday, October 18 2010

Justin Timberlake's -- ehem, excuse me, Sean Parker's Facebook Causes start-up, co-founded with partner Joe Green, has just wrapped a $9 million round of funding, reports Bloomberg News: Read More

The Power of eBay: Whitman's Search for Success Stories

BY Nancy Scola | Tuesday, October 12 2010

Photo credit: Erik Hersman Read More

Valley VC on the Closing of the Obama "Movement"

BY Nancy Scola | Tuesday, July 20 2010

Well-known Silicon Valley figure Chris Sacca sits down with Internet skeptic Andrew Keen to discuss technology, politics, and the future of innovation in both realms. Read More

Go West, Tech-Savvy Republican

BY Nancy Scola | Monday, August 24 2009

News Briefs

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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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