TechPresident

12/06/2013

"In a highly connected, networked world, where the network's evolving all the time, the power comes from being able to connect the dots," OpenCorporates founder Chris Taggart told me. "And at the mome

16/05/2013

Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced today that New York City has implemented city-wide a new risk based inspection system focused on fire safety that is driven by analytics from multiple city agencies.

10/05/2013

Amid all the clamor over proposed biometric databases, constant electronic surveillance, and the trends toward autonomous warfare this week, there was a bit of news that emerged that didn't hit the h

09/05/2013

The White House's new policy on open data is designed to give entrepreneurs more to work with, officials say.

https://techpresident.com/news/23860/president-obama-sets-government-default-open

The White House on Thursday morning released an executive order from President Barack Obama that mandates any data in information systems created by government agencies going forward be available for

30/04/2013

Why do some writers insist on treating the end of the 20th century like an intellectual black hole, capturing all ideas that enter and preventing new ones from escape? A more interconnected global soc

25/04/2013

Tumblr and Personal Democracy Forum are teaming up to offer conference fellowships that cover the full registration costs and a meal with the team from Tumblr at PDF13.

15/04/2013

"Sometimes things happen that are unpredictable and awful, and sometimes the news of the day is deeply unfortunate. And there's not an algorithm in the world that can quantify the sadness and hurt in Boston on Monday, there's no helpful number here, really, or statistical salve. There might be clues in the pileup of data created today that will be helpful tomorrow, or next week. For now, though, it seems social media's most useful aspect is how people use it to reconnect, and reassure, and in the ability of sharing to lessen grief."

http://techpresident.com/news/23739/chaos-spills-online-blasts-boston-marathon

As of this writing, the most reliable reporting finds that 22 people are injured and two are dead in the wake of two blasts at the finish line of the Boston Marathon Monday afternoon. More can be

12/04/2013

Listen in and join the conversation: What can technology do to help citizens and government connect?

Join the conversation with your comments. We'll be giving one commenter a Personal Democracy Plus subscription, sponsored by Microsoft.

https://soundcloud.com/personaldemocracy/techpresident-podcast-open

Can technology improve communication between citizens and government? We've been closely watching the Knight News Challenge, a $5 million experimen...

10/04/2013

Don't miss any of techPresident's best feature articles, essays and op-eds — keep an eye out for "TechPresident: Selected Stories," an ebook with some of our best work from the first quarter of 2013.

Coming soon ...

20/03/2013

Listen to our latest podcast and join the conversation: Does the Democratic Party need to up its technology game in order to stay ahead of newly refocused Republicans?

https://soundcloud.com/personaldemocracy/techpresident-podcast-0318

In this week's techPresident podcast, the crew discusses 21st century statecraft and the Republican Party's plans for revival.

20/03/2013

The federal health insurance marketplace will have a brand-new, open-source front end. But it'll also be powered by a proprietary "data hub" — and the company building that hub is connected to a major health insurer.

http://bit.ly/Y1dcqT

Exclusively for Personal Democracy Plus subscribers: The federal Department of Health and Human Services is giving an open-source face to the complex new world of health insurance under the Affordable

11/03/2013

Alec Ross is leaving the State Department. Sarah Lai Stirland has details: http://bit.ly/Y6vWze

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

01/03/2013

Feed your head this weekend with our techPresident podcast.

https://soundcloud.com/personaldemocracy/techpresident-podcast-mobile

Micah Sifry solves Washington's intractable problem with the sequester; Reboot principal Panthea Lee comes by to explain what mobile money can do f...

22/02/2013

South Korea has a uniquely tech-savvy culture but a nascent civil society. Maybe it's no surprise, then, that the free culture movement has been the seed ground for efforts to open government and improve press freedom.

http://techpresident.com/news/wegov/23538/south-korean-digital-activists-work-google-toward-digital-freedom

South Korea is one of the most wired societies in the world, but its civil society is weak, the result of decades of military rule. Censorship is common, as are government attempts to limit digital fr

22/02/2013

What will Obama for America's much-hyped techies do next?

http://bit.ly/WdryOk

With the campaign behind them, Obama for America Technology alumni are scattered across the country — some still in Chicago, some making a new start in a new city, others still taking time off f

19/02/2013

Must-read: Sarah Lai Stirland's new piece on the libertarian gun-owning activists of Silicon Valley.

http://bit.ly/XnyRmN

Gene Hoffman, an affable Silicon Valley entrepreneur, speaks rapidly and logically, and his hands whiz expertly around the weapon as he attaches the lower receiver into the rest of his LCW-15, a type

15/02/2013

In New York, researchers found that the population who helped allocate discretionary City Council fund through participatory budgeting is far more representative than the population who elected City Council members.

http://techpresident.com/news/23516/backchannel-unequal-participation-open-governments-unresolved-dilemma

In this post for Backchannel, our ongoing conversation between practitioners and close observers at the intersection of technology and politics, participatory budgeting research Tiago Peixoto writes

15/02/2013

This quote is from Lois Beckett at ProPublica, talking about political data.

Listen to the full podcast here: http://bit.ly/Xeg90W

15/02/2013

"The emphasis 10 or 15 years ago was all on operational things, on keeping things running. The new emphasis is on implementation, on integration, on helping people solve specific problems, it’s much more customer facing, and less data center-y —if you know what I mean — than it was 15 years ago ... The consumerization of IT has really, really changed the whole face of an IT department."

Baltimore's CIO, Chris Tonjes, has been on the job six months. Sam Roudman spoke with Tonjes about how he hopes to advance open data and civic technology in one of America's biggest and most dynamic cities — a city with a thriving tech sector, a City Hall with a checkered past, and a limited budget to stretch as far as he can.


http://bit.ly/11Jf7S7

Exclusively for Personal Democracy Plus subscribers: Baltimore has a thriving tech community and a top-level leadership that has made moves over the years towards embracing a bigger role for technolog

13/02/2013

http://bit.ly/VUhSbi

German freelance journalist, TV moderator and blogger Richard Gutjahr worked together with Open Data City, a team of journalistic open data designers, to create LobbyPlag, a platform that examines sim

12/02/2013

Five pieces of advice for new civic hackers, on the day the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation opens its latest News Challenge on open government: http://techpresident.com/news/23492/five-things-you-ought-know-if-youre-getting-started-civic-hacking

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation is getting ready to invest a lot of money in the idea that technology can help scrape the rust from the corroded gears of American democracy. This being

12/02/2013

The theme of this year's Personal Democracy Forum: "Think Bigger."

What's your big idea?

http://bit.ly/Yacimw

We've chosen "Think Bigger" to be the theme of our 10th annual Personal Democracy Forum conference it in part to honor our late friend Aaron Swartz, who used that phrase it in an email he wrote to me

06/02/2013

Using technology to keep the peace ahead of elections in Kenya, which sparked violence in 2008.

http://techpresident.com/news/wegov/23455/digital-initiatives-aim-foster-transparency-prevent-violence-kenyas-upcoming-elections

Community organizers, activists and civil society workers are hoping a mix of technology and on-the-ground organizing can stave off political violence around Kenya's upcoming elections.

05/02/2013

New York City is asking hackers to come up with new uses for payphone booths. There are 11,000 of them in the city. We made this little map to show where they were to accompany a story for Personal Democracy Plus: http://techpresident.com/news/23430/repurposing-old-infrastructure-new-tech

01/02/2013

Can data-driven decision making make politics better for everyone, or just a wealthy few? In this week's techPresident podcast, we start the conversation. What do you think?

https://soundcloud.com/personaldemocracy/podcast-2

In this week's techPresident Podcast: MICAH SIFRY: "This kind of microtargeting and data analytics and so on may well work to enhance some ...

30/01/2013

We're just going to leave this here ...

http://techpresident.com/news/wegov/23440/israel-has-two-pirate-parties-hate-each-other

In a 21st century digital echo of Monty Python's Life of Brian, Israel, a country of just over 7 million, has two Pirate Parties. One is called Pirate Party Israel and the other the Israel Pirate Part

30/01/2013

Check out this interesting map from The New York Times.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/01/29/us/where-50000-guns-in-chicago-came-from.html

The Chicago Police Department traced the origins of about 50,000 guns that it recovered between 2001 and March 2012. More than half of those guns came from outside the state.

29/01/2013

Sad trombones for Organizing for Action: Their domain names, like organizingforaction.com, belong to a techPresident commenter who says he isn't going to give it up without a price.

http://techpresident.com/news/23428/looking-organizingforactioncom-sorry-domains-taken

Obama supporters have developed a reputation for being tech savvy, but they may have dropped the ball on this one. Organizing for Action, the advocacy group founded to enable Obama 2012 campaign suppo

29/01/2013

In the gun control debate, will Silicon Valley find its political identity?

http://bit.ly/124Qo9N

Ron Conway is well known in Silicon Valley for his ability to connect entrepreneurs to each other and to potential investors — so much so that one news account from August quotes a Valley inside

22/01/2013

The Obama campaign's legacy organization, Organizing for Action, launched this weekend. The core question, writes Sarah Lai Stirland, is this: Can local-scale organizing raise enough money to support national-scale infrastructure?

http://bit.ly/Wlnviz

"Organizing for Action," the successor organization to Obama for America tasked with pushing the president's agenda, is built on the idea that it can still be greater than the sum of its parts. Wit

18/01/2013

It's clear some issues, like an "existential threat" to the open Internet or bills that would limit access to health care for women, travel better online than others. But this is far more art than science.

What is it that makes a cause or an issue that travels well on the Internet, that picks up the kind of steam that SOPA/PIPA or even "binders full of women" accumulated in a short amount of time?

TechPresident's Micah Sifry and Nick Judd started to hash this out in a podcast. Here's a clip. What do you think?


https://soundcloud.com/personaldemocracy/preview-techpresident-podcast

We're trying something different at techPresident — a podcast to bring you into some of the conversations we have around our newsroom about what we...

17/01/2013

Two years after now-techPresident Senior Editor David Eaves suggested exactly this idea, Yelp is publishing city restaurant inspection data in its listings.

http://techpresident.com/news/23384/san-francisco-restaurant-inspection-data-appear-yelp-reviews

San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee is expected to announce today that his city's restaurant inspection data will begin to appear on Yelp, the business listings service. Also included in the announcement, e

17/01/2013

After Aaron Swartz's su***de, a close look at the law used to charge him reveals broad leeway for prosecutors.

http://techpresident.com/news/23380/swartz%E2%80%99s-su***de-prompts-proposals-curb-doj%E2%80%99s-prosecutorial-power

17/01/2013

What's the best way to use a digital map as a tool for change?

http://techpresident.com/news/wegov/23370/mapping-might-be-overhyped-its-importance-undeniable

17/01/2013

Democratic Promise: Aaron Swartz, 1986-2013

Micah Sifry remembers Aaron Swartz.

http://techpresident.com/news/23363/democratic-promise-aaron-swartz-1986-2013

Aaron Swartz, a leading activist for open information, internet freedom, and democracy, died at his own hand Friday January 11. He was 26 years old. There is no single comprehensive list of his good w