Digital Democracy

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 [...]

26.3 miles. That’s the distance I’ve been driving every day this past week to work with two communities of refugee youth living on opposite sides of town in Indianapolis, Indiana. Many of their experiences – moving to a new country, resettling in the US, adapting to life at an Indianapolis high school – are quite [...]

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.

We are thrilled to announce support from United States Institute of Peace for our work with grassroots Haitian Women’s groups. Thanks to an urgent grant from their Haiti program, we are launching a citizen reporting initiative for the upcoming presidential and parliamentary elections in Haiti, scheduled for November 28. This week, I’m in Port-au-Prince to [...]

After a whirlwind six days in Port au Prince, Emily and I have much to share. Our trip actually came two weeks ahead of schedule. We received a request from the Protection Officer for Sexual Exploitation and Abuse working on behalf of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, who relayed the enormous [...]

We just wrote about the power of the volunteers who have worked on Haiti. However volunteers are not only useful in times of crises. Digital Democracy’s core team is small, and we accomplish our work through partnerships and collaborations. Our volunteers and interns play a crucial role, and today we want to highlight the work [...]

The power of new technologies has made a lot of headlines recently, but behind these new tools is a deeper story – the power of the people who wield them. When it comes to open-source and particularly crowd-sourcing tools, those people are so often volunteers, and they are the true heroes of technological successes. For [...]

This weekend, Digital Democracy is heading to join the conversations at the first International Conference on Crisis Mapping (ICCM 2009). Co-organized by the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative (HHI) and John Carroll University (JCU), ICCM is bringing together leading thinkers and practitioners in the field of humanitarian work and human rights, along with scholars, software developers, policy [...]