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Transparency on the Web: a Democrat Virtue?

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0800

TechPresident - By Tiago Peixoto - Jan. 26 (Special Report) - The study Show Us the Stimulus (Good Jobs First) is one of the most comprehensive and systematic assessments of US state "recovery" websites. The authors of the report analyze the effectiveness and transparency of state websites in providing information on the different categories of stimulus spending, the allocation of funds across different areas of the state, and individual projects carried out by private contractors and their respective impact on employment levels.

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The Obama Disconnect: What Happens When Myth Meets Reality

Fri, 01 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0800

TechPresident - By Micah L. Sifry - Jan. 01 (Opinion) - The truth is that Obama was never nearly as free of dependence on big money donors as the reporting suggested, nor was his movement as bottom-up or people-centric as his marketing implied. And this is the big story of 2009, if you ask me, the meta-story of what did, and didn't happen, in the first year of Obama's administration. The people who voted for him weren't organized in any kind of new or powerful way, and the special interests--banks, energy companies, health interests, car-makers, the military-industrial complex--sat first at the table and wrote the menu. Myth met reality, and came up wanting.

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What Happens to the Obama Network After the Election?

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0800

TechPresident - By Micah Sifry - Nov. 04 (Opinion) - We vote in order to change the country, to exercise our rights, to make our voices heard and a hundred other clichés as shopworn as they are true. But we also vote because it places us in direct fellowship with other citizens; we vote because it is a secular sacrament, an act of civic solidarity. Because it is the ultimate declaration that we are, indeed, all in this together.

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Obama's Long Tail is Producing Results on the Ground

Sun, 02 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0700

TechPresident - By Micah Sifry - Nov. 02 (Opinion) - This is the "long tail" in practice. I'm not going to argue that all of this is solely because of how well the Obama campaign has used the internet. The investments the campaign made in recruiting and training campaign organizers--the Camp Obama intensive workshops--have been equally important. I suspect that when the election is over, it will be the story of how the Obama team married the two--old-fashioned community organizing and new-media powered internet organizing--that we'll all be talking about.

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How much is 700 billion?

Mon, 22 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0700

TechPresident - By Zephyr Teachout - Sep. 22 (Comment) - Big numbers are hard for people to process. 700 billion can start to sound like 300 billion, or 900 million for that matter. It becomes like sand grains or moon strands, magically big, past the point of counting; an amount you sit with a nephew and contemplate in wonder. Or, if you're rushing through the paper, "a whole lot." But since Congress is seriously considering giving 700 billion to be spent at the discretion of the Secretary of the Treasury, I thought I'd ask for some distributed help on describing this number to other people.

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Online Social Networks in Politics: Promise, Frustration and...

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0700

TechPresident - By Colin Delany - Aug. 27 (Speech) - Is 2008 the MySpace/Facebook election? You might think so from the political attention and resources invested in online social networks in the past year or so. The top presidential campaigns all amassed much-chronicled lists of hundreds of thousands of "friends" on MySpace and Facebook, and the Obama and McCain campaigns also invested in custom social networks for supporters early on (MyBarackObama has built to hundreds of thousands of members, while McCain's equivalent never hit critical mass and died when his overall campaign first imploded in the middle of 2007).

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McCain's "The One" Attack Video: Does it Have a Deeper Message?

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0700

TechPresident - By Micah Sifry - Aug. 07 (Opinion) - The Matthew 25 movement--a group of progressive evangelicals that runs a PAC and has endorsed Obama--is charging that the ad is actually full of coded messages meant to convince evangelical voters that Obama is actually, literally, the anti-Christ.

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United, Delta, American, Southwest...the Airlines Move in on Moveon

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0700

TechPresident - By Zephyr Teachout - Jul. 11 (Opinion) - A few years ago, I argued that there were three powerful forces in modern society--civic democracy, corporations, and religion--and which ever of these learned how to harness the collective action power of the internet would, in effect, win--would define the basic framework for society for generations to come. Its an oversimplified argument, but has a serious refrain; one of the pieces of hope, for those of us rooting for civic democracy, has been how slow corporations have been to leverage collective action power of the net for political purposes. They're getting faster. What this means, I think, is that there is even greater urgency on the part of those of us who want a society organized around groups of interest, not groups of corporate interest, to figure out how to do it better, more, and bigger.

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The FISA Protest and myBO: Can We Talk? Can They Listen?

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0700

TechPresident - By Micah Sifry - Jul. 03 (Opinion) - The fact is, we're all entering completely new territory here. There have always been efforts to influence political candidates to take or change positions during a campaign (or afterward), but we've never before had a national campaign create an open platform for mobilizing supporters AND THEN seen a salient chunk of those supporters openly use that platform to challenge the candidate on a policy position. Indeed, while the net is inherently a two-way, many-to-many medium, no politician has yet used it to listen to his supporters as a group. Yes, the Obama campaign has asked its supporters to share their stories about their health care woes, and some of those anecdotes have made it into the campaign's blog or policy papers. But we have no norms for a collective, public discussion--even though we now have the capacity for one.

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The Trustees of the Republican Leadership Trust

Wed, 21 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

TechPresident - May. 21 (Opinion) - We thought we'd been covering the political technology space pretty well over the last year or so, but a new top-secret project somehow alluded us. Convinced that the conservatives' deficit in online efficacy simply comes from lacking the right tools, The Trustees of the Republican Leadership Trust (yes, that's the real name) are working on a secret weapon: the Republican All in One Political Suite. Beware Democrats! Look out progressives! The TRLT is convinced that their new tool will be the "GOP's answer to MoveOn.org, Act Blue and multiple commercial vendors who provide political technology." Without giving any details at all about what their Political Suite will look like, the TRLT is asking for pledges of $10 or $25 a month to help take over the world.

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Political Implications of the Cognitive Surplus

Thu, 08 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

TechPresident - By Luigi Montanez - May. 08 (Opinion) - In 2003, Howard Dean supporters who rallied around the candidate's fierce opposition to the Iraq War used their Cognitive Surplus to organize themselves on Meetup.com, create (along with Clark supporters) the Netroots, and donate an unprecedented amount of dollars and volunteer hours. Between 2004 and 2006, many of those supporters turned to local politics, helping run the campaigns of down-ballot candidates, and in some cases, running for office themselves. And of course in 2007 and 2008, the campaigns of Barack Obama on the left and Ron Paul on the right have harnessed an untapped Cognitive Surplus to awaken the political consciousness of huge swaths of the citizenry.

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Beyond Bittergate, Barack Yields Success to His Supporters

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700

TechPresident - By David All - Apr. 28 (Opinion) - This realization by Barack that his success is due (at least partly) to the connectivity of the Internet is important. There is a Revolution taking hold of American politics. I only fear that this Revolution continues to thrive on the wrong side of the aisle.

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Show Us Some Real Money, Hillary

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700

TechPresident - By Micah Sifry - Apr. 24 (Opinion) - An email from Terry McAuliffe, Clinton campaign chairman, that I received three hours ago, says "More than 50,000 people have contributed to the campaign for the very first time in the last 24 hours alone." If 80% of Clinton's donations are from new givers, that implies a total number of about 60,000 donations. If we're very generous and assume an average donation of $100, which is high for first-time donors, that gives Clinton a current take of at most $6 million.

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You Can Run, But You Can't Hide

Mon, 20 Aug 2007 12:42:38 -0700

TechPresident - By Micah Sifry - Aug. 20 (Editorial) - I happened to catch William Gibson on NPR this morning, being interviewed about his new book "Spook Country", which I'm enjoying reading. The interviewer asked him if he thought we were heading toward a world where technology makes it possible for Big Brother to watch our every move, and Gibson's answer stuck with me. Technology is not only giving Big Brother the power to watch us, we can also watch Big Brother, he said. And Gibson added, this is going to make it harder for politicians to hide secrets and get away with lies, an argument he first made here, on the 100th anniversary of George Orwell's birth four years ago.

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The Battle to Control Obama's Myspace

Wed, 02 May 2007 09:46:57 -0700

TechPresident - By Micah L. Sifry - May. 02 (Opinion) - In November 2004, Joe Anthony, a paralegal living in Los Angeles, started a unofficial fan page for then-newly-elected Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) on MySpace.com. Inspired by Obama's keynote address at that summer's Democratic convention, Anthony had never been politically active before.

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