Digital Democracy

Tomorrow, January 28 from 3:00 to 6:00 pm, we’ll be presenting at Eyebeam’s Activist Technology Demo Day. Come say hi and check out our Occupy Votes & Choose Your Democracy systems in action. Update 2/1/12: It was a great day! Check out our photos here: http://bit.ly/wJl35R  “From Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street, technology has played [...]

What is an open-source protest (or in Egyptian nomenclature, a wiki-revolution)? Can technology tools be used to develop new methods of distributed grassroots decision-making? It’s clear that the Occupy movement is about something much bigger and greater than one person or group … how can the large numbers of people who identify with the movement [...]

There is a different approach to projects between techies and filmmakers. Those in tech rapidly prototype and release ideas and applications, while the filmmaking community is much more prone to keeping a project under wraps until it has reached near-perfection. I had the extreme pleasure of witnessing this creative conflict first hand when I attended [...]

What is the current discussion around how technology is being used for supporting people advocating for democracy around the world? Please vote for the panels we and are friends are trying to host at the upcoming South by Southwest Conference in Austin, Texas. SXSW is shaping up to be a pretty exciting festival this year. [...]

“I paid maybe the first and last bribe in my life for “The Economist” in the Soviet Union. It was 3 rubles. A babushka (grandma) sold it to me for 6.” So says Giga Bokeria, the Secretary of the National Security Council for the country of Georgia. And he should know. He’s a crucial part of [...]

What is the future of cybersecurity and what is the impact on youth, as well as democracy advocates around the world? I recently attended the EastWest Institute’s Cybersecurity Summit to discuss and present on these issues amongst the worlds leading technology security firms. There I met Michel Nienhuis who wrote a thoughtful piece that I’m [...]

How can designers, hackers and business work with government to make it more innovative? To put their mouth where our money is? We’re co-sponsoring OpenGov Camp NYC, an unconference to bring together the brightest minds to tackle the issues that we citizens face in our day to day lives. We love unconferences. What better way [...]

Right now there are protests throughout the middle east and governments are falling. People on the ground are calling for democracy and the world is wondering what they mean when they say it. What if we put up a fun interactive tool that helps to explain this? By translating the key terms associated with governance [...]

Still reeling from the earthquake nine months ago and with elections later this month, what do Haitians living in the camps think about voting and the opportunities for changing their country? Last week, Dd’s Emily Jacobi, Emilie Reiser, and I traveled there to find out.

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 [...]