Now in its third year, Open Data Day events is far bigger than we ever dared imagine. More interesting still is its impact, both expected and unexpected. Read More

Someone at South by Southwest may have already beaten them to programming drones to do the Harlem Shake, but the US military is still getting into memes.  An intelligence tool currently in development at the Office of Naval Research will track the spread of viral content online by actually treating it like a virus, using epidemiological models to predict how and where different ideas will emerge.

A week out from the Kenyan election, a contested victory for Uhuru Kenyatta has summoned comparisons to the country’s 2007 ballot.  But this time around, political violence has been largely absent in the public’s response to the results.  The 2013 election may be better known for its technical difficulties. 

State Department Senior Adviser for Innovation Alec Ross will leave government Tuesday and immediately start work on a new policy analysis and advisory shop to governments, investors, and other kinds of institutions — a company that plans to advise its clients on geopolitics in a globally networked world. In a protracted email exchange and a phone interview, Ross explained to techPresident where he thinks "21st-century statecraft" now stands and discussed his future plans. Read More

The March 2011 earthquake in Japan had a debilitating impact on infrastructure, and took a devastating cost in human life. Response to the disaster and the road to recovery were aided significantly by a wide range of communications systems. As in many disaster situations before and since, several crisis-mapping efforts immediately took off, filling in information gaps for survivors and providing a picture to the international community.  Two years later, how useful were these maps to disaster response?

America's secret drone campaign in Pakistan's remote tribal areas is meant to target militants, but frequently kills civilian bystanders as well. The White House argues that the campaign is a necessary and effective means of fighting terror, while watchdog groups struggle to learn more about how and why American intelligence officials kill with "aerial vehicles." But both sides predicate their arguments on one deeply flawed assumption: That we cannot know the names of the dead. Read More

Russian citizens will soon have their own e-petition portal, though they may not be able to demand the construction of a Death Star.  President Vladimir Putin signed an order earlier this week to create The Russian Public Initiative, a site will launch in April for e-petitions to the federal government, with regional and local petitions following later in the year.