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Is It Time for Transparency in Spain?

BY Antonella Napolitano | Monday, April 2 2012

Image: h de c / Flickr

The right-leaning government of Spain is working on the creation of a new transparency and information access law, for the first time in the history of the country. In the expectation that Spain will adopt the new law soon, two open government NGOs recently launched a new site, Tuderechoasaber.es (Your Right to Know). The site helps citizens find the right body to address a freedom of information request. Read More

In Spain it was Halloween time for Prime Minister candidates

BY Antonella Napolitano | Tuesday, November 1 2011

Websites hacked and Twitter pictures: even though it is not traditionally Spanish, Halloween has been celebrated by Spanish people. And somebody found the time to ask "trick or treat" to PM candidates. Well, sort ... Read More

The Europe Roundup: Open By Default

BY Antonella Napolitano | Tuesday, October 25 2011

Spain | Open By Default The Spanish Government has approved a Royal Decree that promotes openness and reuse of public data of the public sector, following a public consultation that happened at the end of last year. The ... Read More

Searches for "Revolution": Up in Egypt, Greece, Spain and the USA

BY Micah L. Sifry | Tuesday, October 18 2011

If Google search trends can predict where flu will break out in advance of actual reports of flu, can search trends also predict where revolutions are brewing? Judging from search trends in Egypt, Greece, Spain and the ... Read More

The Europe Roundup: How the Indignados Movement is Redefining Politics

BY Antonella Napolitano | Tuesday, October 18 2011

Spain | How the Indignados Movement is Redefining Politics  While the OccupyWallStreet protest spread around the world, it's time to rethink action and objectives for those who helped start this movement, the ... Read More

In Spain, 'Indignados' Continue to Make Demands

BY Nick Judd | Thursday, September 29 2011

Reading up on the doings of the "indignados," a group of Spanish protesters known first for a prolonged occupation of the square in Madrid's Puerta del Sol — in the style of the Jan. 25 protesters who occupied ... Read More

The Europe Roundup: Not only in crisis: making the most of crowdsourcing platforms

BY Antonella Napolitano | Friday, September 23 2011

Russia | Not only in crisis: making the most of crowdsourcing platforms In the summer of 2010, when fires spread across Russia, Internet activists got organized and created the Help Map, the first use of Ushahidi ... Read More

The Europe Roundup: Is a Twitter Interview Enough to Engage People?

BY Antonella Napolitano | Friday, July 29 2011

Spain | Spanish elections: is a Twitter interview enough to engage people? Earlier today Prime Minister Zapatero called early elections in Spain, which are now set for November 20th). The situation is troubled. The ... Read More

The Europe Roundup: Grass-Roots Party Sways Spanish Politics. From Protest to Engagement?

BY Antonella Napolitano | Wednesday, July 27 2011

In the past two months the main political news in Spain has not been "traditionally" political: the Indignados (indignants) movement has somewhat disrupted the political scene with a youth-led and peaceful protest in ... Read More

The Europe Roundup: Open Data in Progress

BY Antonella Napolitano | Tuesday, June 28 2011

France | Open data in progress The open data movement is making progress in France: while the government is working on a national open data initiative, a group of open data organisations have drafted a Declaration on ... Read More

News Briefs

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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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