Did Newt Gingrich Lose Florida for Want of a Better API?
BY Nick Judd | Thursday, February 2 2012
Slate's Sasha Issenberg has a great story outlining one narrative about Newt Gingrich's loss in Florida: He inspired a group of tech-savvy volunteers, but gave them no way to plug in to the campaign. Read More
The Data Wars Go Local
BY Nick Judd | Monday, December 19 2011
Minnesotans United for All Families, a state-level group fighting for same-sex marriage rights, just put out a job posting for a "data manager." The responsibilities are a little more robust than what you'd find at a campaign just trying to cut turf for volunteers. They indicate a desire to use data to identify like-minded supporters, then connect them to one another and to voters — a kind of social-network-aware organizing approach that's been on the rise this year. Read More
The Political Right is Looking to Reclaim Data Superiority
BY Nick Judd | Wednesday, November 9 2011
On Monday, the Guardian's Ed Pilkington hinted at the creation of a new database — either a "voter file" or "a database connecting millions of Americans" — to support the political causes and campaigns backed ... Read More
How Campaigns Use of Facebook Data Might Change the 2012 Election
BY Nick Judd | Monday, October 10 2011
More than in any other race to date, Americans may experience the 2012 presidential election through precisely targeted phone calls, visits, tweets and Facebook posts — messages not from the candidates themselves, ... Read More
From Political Clout to Political Klout: Social Media Data Shaping Up to be Big in 2012
BY Nick Judd | Thursday, September 22 2011
Writing Monday for GigaOm, Derrick Harris speculates about the importance of data for Obama 2012: Those large follower counts are why social media data could be such a game-changer for Obama 2012; their sheer scale is ... Read More
Reading Your Inbox for Political Dollars
BY Nancy Scola | Tuesday, June 7 2011
You know how Rapportive can serve up social data keyed off your Gmail inbox? Meet Inbox Influence. It does the same thing, basically, but with details on the political money tied to the people and organizations in your ... Read More
Trend Watch: Cops and Communities Talk Traffic Data
BY Nancy Scola | Tuesday, May 24 2011
Governing Magazine's Heather Kerrigan reports that cities across the U.S. are finding a useful policing edge in overlaying crime data and traffic safety data. (In broad strokes, crime and traffic incidents tend to happen ... Read More
Meet the ex-Democrat Developer Now Seeking to Sell Tools to the GOP
BY Nick Judd | Wednesday, May 18 2011
Steven Adler had to wait five years before he could get back into the political software industry. He did things like this in the meantime. Say you're the co-founder of a company that quickly becomes part of the core ... Read More
Edward Tufte: Saving America from "Intellectually Impoverished" Data Design
BY Nancy Scola | Wednesday, May 11 2011
Edward Tufte; photo by Nancy Scola. Over in the Washington Monthly, Joshua Yaffa has a deep profile of information design legend Edward Tufte that includes a look at how he answered his country's call to service and got ... Read More
San Francisco Gets Ambient Awareness of How It Parks
BY Nancy Scola | Monday, May 9 2011
Image credit: SFPark.org The New York Times' Matt Richtel profiles San Francisco's new SFPark app, a mobile tool for helping drivers find parking spots in the city by the bay. Finding elusive open parking spots in a city ... Read More