Government

Who Will Be America's First TechPresident? A Challenge to the Candidates

By Andrew Rasiej and Micah L. Sifry

As we prepare to pick the next President, we’d like to challenge all the candidates running to tell America: How should this public resource be used to make our country more competitive, more democratic, healthier, better educated, more secure and financially sound?

» Read more...
   7 comments

Dave Witzel, 05/09/2008 - 7:34am

At a talk on Monday, Ellen Miller, Executive Director of the Sunlight Foundation (Andrew and Micah are advisers to the Sunlight Foundation), said "there is a fundamental cultural change that has to happen not only with government to embrace the notion of openness but even in the NGO sector to understand that 'of, by, and for the people' now has to become 'of, by, for, and open for the people' (at 2:15 in the video clip).

login or register to post comments | Read more ...
Micah L. Sifry, 12/19/2007 - 10:11pm

Beth Simone Noveck has written a seminal piece on "Wiki-Government" for Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, and I recommend you read the whole thing. Noveck is Professor of Law and director of the Institute for Information Law & Policy at New York Law School and the McClatchy Visiting Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at Stanford University, who has been advising the U.S. Patent Office on its new open-source approach to involving the public in helping review patent applications, and that experience informs her vision. She lays out a powerful case for reinventing government with "civic software" (a term I once floated and still love) that "can shift power from professional sources of authoritative knowledge to new kinds of knowledge networks" and create a kind of "collaborative governance." I love it.

| Read more ...
Justin Oberman, 10/10/2007 - 4:37pm

 Images Kiwanja Handsets 23 A month ago my friend Ken Banks of | Read more ...

Micah L. Sifry, 06/07/2007 - 12:10am

Longtime PdF readers may remember that for a while we had a page on the site that showed which Members of Congress were most being talked about in the blogosphere, a ranking system that was built for us by Aaron Swartz, using incoming links to their official congressional web sites as one metric, and using blog posts referencing their names as a second metric. We called it "HotPols," but ultimately we took it down because we weren't happy with either metric: too many posts were being counted that referred to people with the same name as a Member (take Adam Smith as once obvious example) and not enough bloggers were bothering to link to the Members' web pages for that metric to show anything meaningful. Well, I'm pleased to say that now we've got a much better window into who in Congress is driving attention online, thanks to the great folks at OpenCongress.

| Read more ...
Joshua Levy, 04/03/2007 - 2:14pm

Deval Patrick, the new governor of Massachusetts, has rolled his old campaign web site into a new site that opens the door to citizens who want to directly propose and discuss important issues, and for the Governor himself to get into the fray. In doing so, he is going where no top elected official in America has ever gone before -- into a real online dialogue with constituents about the decisions that affect their lives. Here's hoping the presidential candidates take notice.

| Read more ...
Noel Hidalgo, 02/28/2007 - 12:40pm

Opencongress.org just installed a new sunroof on the big dome.

7 comments | Read more ...
Micah L. Sifry, 02/15/2007 - 3:40pm

Steven Clift, who knows more than anyone I know about how countries around the world are experimenting with reinventing government in the electronic age, has a fascinating new post on his blog about a new service in England: the Prime Minister's office is inviting the public to petition him directly online. Right now, the top petition, with more than 1.4 million signatures, is urging Tony Blair to scrap a proposed vehicle tax. Clift adds:

| Read more ...
Micah L. Sifry, 01/29/2007 - 6:05am

Or rather, Rep. Stephen Urquhart's legislative wiki, Politicopia, is having a good showing in its first week. Urquhart emailed me to say, "The first week has been good. Citizens are participating and leaders are taking notice. Politicopia made both of the major newspapers, and the Governor, the Senate President and the Speaker of the House have all been on the site."

Indeed, the Salt Lake Tribune reports that Urquhart used the site to put up a preview version of an education voucher bill he is sponsoring, and Democrat Minority Whip Brad King responded positively, saying he "really kind of liked" the idea. "We'd much rather have it out there where we can all see it," he said.

| Read more ...
Joshua Levy, 01/26/2007 - 11:33am

Adam Conner, who wrote a screed against about protests against Facebook's then-new "News Feed" feature back in September, is back with more Facebook fun, this time taking a close look at the Facebook group, "One Million Strong for Barack," which has the goal of getting one million Facebook members to sign on in support of Barack Obama.

2 comments | Read more ...
Syndicate content
Technology and the Internet are changing democracy in America. Personal Democracy Forum is a hub for the exciting conversation underway between political professionals, technologists, and anyone else invigorated by the remarkable potential of technology to engage citizens in the democratic process.

Navigation

© 2008 Personal Democracy Forum | All Rights Reserved |
The layout, use of images, color, and other qualities.
How well is does the site carry the message of the candidate?
How the site discusses the issues and how it uses language.
How easy is it to get involved in the campaign?
How well does the site utitlize blogs, video, podcasts, discussion boards, and other technologies?
The ease of navigation and the quality of interactivtity.