Digital Democracy

What are the similarities between open source software and a Hawaiian shirt? I recently traveled to Erbil, Iraq with Digital Democracy Advisor, and Director of Tech Innovation for the NY State Senate, Noel Hidalgo for the Emerging Technologies/Emerging Democracies IREX and Institute for War and Peace Reporting hosted Iraq E-Media conference. To break through the [...]

If you were to Google “Internet”, “freedom”, “security”, “privacy”,”blog” and pull together the people and organizations that make up the top hits of the search, you would have the Internet at Liberty Conference, hosted by Google on September 20-22 in Budapest. A venerable who’s who of people involved in the worldwide discussion surrounding Internet freedom, [...]

Thai journalist and anti-censorship activist is detained & released on bail 12 hours later (updated at 5:30pm EDT following Jiew’s release from Thai authorities) September 24, 2010: New York, NY —Chiranuch Premchaiporn, known as Jiew — an advocate, founder and manager of a leading independent news website in Thailand — was detained today in the [...]

In 2003, I went to Armenia and started working with youth on “blogging” before the term blogging was actually in the lexicon. Back then, access to computers was hard to come by and the internet was crawling along. I was working with a documentary film company, Bars Media, and found that young people were not [...]

“Saddam tried to use the indictment of Bill Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky scandal to show how shameful and perverse the United States is. The message that Iraqis heard was that in America, no one is above the law. Not even the President.” ~Anes (trainee) I recently returned from a trip to Erbil, Iraq, a [...]

Liz Hodes represented Digital Democracy today while testifying to the New York City Council Technology Committee on Open Data. Introduction 029-2010, seeking to establish open data standards for all city agencies. Int. 029-2010 (formerly Intro. 991-2009) aims to increase government transparency and facilitate easier access to public data. Beyond the ‘good government’ benefits of this [...]

Violence is closely correlated to elections in the minds of many voters in young democracies. With elections and democracy correlated as well, there’s a dangerous chance that people will draw causation between violence and democracy. We launched Ethiopia Vote Report with a local partner in Ethiopia knowing that the turnout would be low. The project [...]

What does real-time mapping with NYC school kids look like? On Saturday, Digital Democracy was invited to work with 120 young people from all 5 boroughs as part of the Department of Education’s “Future Now” program. Having gone through the system myself, I jumped at the chance to help them innovate. While technology access is [...]

On the border of Thailand and Burma/Myanmar, I met Aung Zaw, who told me about risking his life  to document human rights abuses performed by the government of Myanmar. His hope was that this information could help to defend his people. At the end of our talk, he asked if we could become Facebook friends. [...]

Elections are an important part of any democracy, but only when they’re properly executed. When an election happens, how can one be sure that they’re actually free and fair? Is it international monitors that ensure this or local grassroots organizations? The answer is complicated and varies in different places. That’s why it was so exciting [...]