techPresident

Needed: Better Tools and Data for Understanding Social Media's Role in #IranElection

Micah L. Sifry — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 19:52:33 +0000

I just finished a very interesting PdF Network call with Katrin Verclas of MobileActive.org, talking about the role of social media in the aftermath of the Iranian election, and Jim Gilliam of WhiteHouse2 and act.ly asked a really good question that deserves repeating and amplification. "What tools would be useful to you," he said to Katrin, "to help you with this work" of sifting and analyzing all the raw data coming out of Iran.

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Daily Digest | A Closed Bid to Open Government

the editors — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 19:31:26 +0000

In Closed Bidding, Defense Contractor Gets $18M to Open Up Recovery.gov ABC News' Rick Klein broke the story that a Maryland-based IT firm has been awarded a five-year contract worth a full $18 million to revamp the struggling Recovery.gov website. By general consensus, Recovery.gov isn't doing a very good job fulfilling its raison d'etre, which serving as a window onto giant government contracts awarded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. And so, it needs to be improved. But here's the irony -- the contract was awarded as part of the closed Alliant Government Acquisition Contract, a $50 billion behemoth that is open to only about 60 or so pre-approved government contractors. GSA's pre solicitation for the Recovery.gov redesign read, "There will be no public bid opening"...

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Clearing the Cache: More Popular Than Obama

Nancy Scola — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 17:04:22 +0000

Michael Jackson tribute spurs more Facebook traffic than the '09 presidential inauguration. And with just fewer than 8 million fans, Jackson now has the single largest following on the site.
A Twitter petition launches against David All's Twitter petition tactics.
Inside the Green Latern campaign for DC Mayor.
Make your own flu PSA.
And the Department of the Interior is looking for a deputy director of new media.

(With Micah Sifry)

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Peer-to-Patent Closes Shop [UPDATED]

Nancy Scola — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 16:28:53 +0000

The Peer-to-Patent project, spearheaded by Beth Noveck in her law professor days before she became Deputy U.S. CTO for open government, often gets talked about as one of the more successful examples of how citizens can be invited in to do the actual work of governing. Alas, from now on, it will have to be talked about in the past tense. The U.S. Patent Office has chosen not to renew the project. Peer-to-Patent has fallen victim, says its leaders, to the country's troubled economic situation. From their just-released second anniversary report:

As we conclude Year Two of the Peer-to-Patent project I am reminded of the opening line of Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” By almost every conceivable measure Peer-to-Patent has met or exceeded the goals established at its outset. Yet, due to the broad economic downturn of the past year we find that we are unable to continue the Peer-to-Patent project at this time. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has placed a moratorium on extending the pilot beyond June 2009 until they can complete a full evaluation of the impact Peer-to-Patent has had on the quality of the examination process. Those who have expended so much money, time, and energy to make Peer-to-Patent what it is remain hopeful that the program will be renewed in the near future, either as an extended pilot or a standard part of USPTO practice.

The report is chock full of details of how the experiment in fixing the patent mess through citizen-expert engagement worked over the course of its two-year run. Read the full thing here.

UPDATE: Mark Webbink, Executive Director of the Center for Patent Innovations at New York Law School, writes in to say that while the Patent Office has chosen not to renew the project, it technically soldiers on while several dozen patents are still under consideration. From peertopatent.org: "The USPTO has closed the Peer-to-Patent pilot and is no longer accepting new applications. Applications already in the system will continue to be processed."

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In Closed Bidding, Defense Contractor Gets $18M to Open Up Recovery.gov

Nancy Scola — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 15:50:05 +0000

We'll get the to the irony, but first the facts. ABC News' Rick Klein broke the story that a Maryland-based IT firm has been awarded a five-year contract worth a full $18 million to revamp the struggling Recovery.gov website. By general consensus, Recovery.gov isn't doing a very good job fulfilling its raison d'etre, which is serving as a window on giant government contracts awarded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in an effort to cut down on waste, fraud, and abuse. And so, it needs to be improved. The contract was awarded as part of the closed Alliant Government Acquisition Contract, a $50 billion behemoth (described by GSA as "indefinite-delivery, indefinite quantity" contract) that is open to only about 60 or so pre-approved government contractors. GSA's pre solicitation for the Recovery.gov redesign read, "There will be no public bid opening."

The lucky awardee for the Recovery.gov 2.0 contract, worth $9.5 million in the first six months alone, is called Smartronix Inc. According to the firm's website, the company is "a global professional solutions provider specializing in NetOps, Cyber Security, Enterprise Software Solutions, Defense & Commercial Products." Smartronix's client list is heavy on defense community organizations, including the Marine Corps, Navy, and the Pentagon.

Of course, there's some potential irony baked into what seems at first glance an out-sized government contract awarded in closed bidding, all to the end of increasing the transparency and oversight of government spending. In asking for bids, GSA said that the successful contractor "will use innovative and interactive technologies to help taxpayers see where their dollars are being spent." Good idea! To that end, an act.ly petition has sprung up asking that Smartronix conduct their build out of Recovery.gov 2.0 in an open and transparent way, including regular tweeting of how that $18 million is being spent. Will @whitehouse sign on? Stay tuned.

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PdF Chat Time with Sam Graham-Felsen

Anna Curran — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 15:10:22 +0000

Sam Graham-Felsen is currently serving as content director and director of outreach for Blue State Digital. Sam was the Director of blogging and blog outreach for Obama for America, where he also helped to produce online videos for the campaign. Prior to the Obama campaign, Sam covered youth politics for The Nation and was a video producer for Current TV. He graduated cum laude from Harvard in 2004.

Hear Sam's experience of how he went from being one of the first bloggers on the Obama Campaign to managing a whole team. Sam shares the secrets of his blogging success and talks about his current work at Blue State Digital.

PdF Chat Time, new feature here at Personal Democracy Forum, gives you a behind the scenes glimpse into the lives of the politechnorati. Hear what inspires them, what keeps them up at night, and who throws the wildest parties. Get informed by the most knowledgeable players in the world of politics and technology.

This interview was conducted by phone on June 22th at 3:00pm and has been edited for clarity.

Know someone who I should interview? Email your suggestion to me at anna@personaldemocracy.com.

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Daily Digest | I Stand with Batwoman

the editors — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 17:54:22 +0000

Deconstructing (Twitter) Vote Report: Lessons Learned and What's Next One of things that made the Twitter Vote Report project so darn exciting during the '08 U.S. election also, at times, threatened to pull the whole shebang under. The thing simply had dozens of moving parts. Nina Keim and Jessica Clark of American University's Center for Social Media have done a great job of compiling a report that chronicles the creation and execution of Twitter Vote Report from a few thousand feet up. Called "Public Media 2.0 Field Report: Building Social Media Infrastructure to Engage Publics —Twitter Vote Report and Inauguration Report 09," it deconstructs not only TVP, but the other projects that have followed, including citizen-reporting around the 2009 presidential inauguration in DC and vote reporting in India's recent election. There's much to be learned from these projects on how to organize without organizations...

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Clearing the Cache: Tweeting from Mount Rushmore...Actually, on Mount Rushmore

Nancy Scola — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 17:00:22 +0000

Greenpeace is doing a series of actions in favor of clean energy around the occasion of Italy's G8 summit that includes tweeting from atop mountains: "@greenpeaceusa: Jess here, tweeting on a netbook, strapped in a harness, hanging on Mt #Rushmore http://bit.ly/n2zi9 #climateaction." Let's hope Jess is a one-handed typer.
Follow the action on the Greenpeace live stream.
Minor details watch: The White House goes ahead and connects White House Live to its Facebook live chat app that seems to be a feature of every White House event these days.
And the latest participants in the White House's Facebook-powered chat series: Secretaries Sebelius and Vilsack on the future of food.
A related plea -- Can we finally agree as a nation that those "You are leaving White House Web Servers" are, in 2009, an insult to our collective intelligence and should be done away with? We get it. We click on a link on WhiteHouse.gov, we move about the web, and then it says Facebook right at the top of the screen. No one is confused any more. No one!
Vanity Fair covers Politico and what it stands for as a model of modern political journalism.
New York City announces that it will award media and tech fellowships to 20 or so "'rising star' media and technology entrepreneurs."
Tony La Russa has dropped his Twitter-squatting case. (Note to self: he has something to do with baseball.)
And web radio and record labels finally reach a royalty deal that takes into account the unique nature of Internet radio. Translation: Pandora lives.

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I Stand with Batwoman

Nancy Scola — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 16:33:55 +0000

The progressive training shop New Organizing Institute's current crop of trainees are learning the ins and outs of online political organizing by full-featured web campaigns for DC mayoral candidates who happen to be of the superhero variety. Pretty clever. In the running: Wonder Woman, Spider-Man, The Atom, The Green Lantern, Batwoman, Superman, Cyborg, and Batgirl. Election day is Friday.

Good thing Aquaman isn't in the running. He would have swamped the competition.

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Weekend-Long Cyber Attack Targets Top U.S. Government, Press, and Business Sites

Nancy Scola — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 15:33:46 +0000

The United States was under attack over the July 4th holiday weekend. Didn't notice? That's because it was a cyber attack. According to reports, distributed denial-of-service attacks were launched against dozens of major American websites, including those of the White House, State Department, Nasdaq, New York Stock Exchange, Washington Post, Federal Trade Commission, Secret Service, Department of Transportation, and the Washington Post. More than a dozen high-profile South Korean websites were also targeted, and intelligence officials in that country are blaming North Korea for the DDOS offensive, which was said to have called into action more than 20,000 zombie computer in and out of South Korea. DDOS attacks are death by a thousand cuts; in bulk, repeated attempts to connect to a site block legitimate efforts to reach it. The White House is staying more or less mum on whether it was indeed a target. But the event is no doubt prompting some deserved Maalox moments in cyber security circles.

A massive computer takedown like the one being reported could be damaging to government and industry if it goes on for very long. And what's particularly troubling about this weekend's events is that the effects of the attacks seem to have persisted for at least three days. Big-name sites like WhiteHouse.gov are hosted on a plethora of redundant servers sprinkled all over the globe for just this reason, and the White House's limited response to the event has been to say 'We get slammed by cyber malice all the time. Just another day in the White House.' But lesser sites like the Department of Transportation's were indeed knocked out of service.

President Obama unveiled a revamped cyber security plan at the very end of May, but the U.S. is still awaiting the appointment of a cyber security chief.

Related coverage: AP, New York Times, and Washington Post.

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techPresident

Needed: Better Tools and Data for Understanding Social Media's Role in #IranElection

Daily Digest | A Closed Bid to Open Government

Clearing the Cache: More Popular Than Obama

Peer-to-Patent Closes Shop [UPDATED]

In Closed Bidding, Defense Contractor Gets $18M to Open Up Recovery.gov

PdF Chat Time with Sam Graham-Felsen

Daily Digest | I Stand with Batwoman

Clearing the Cache: Tweeting from Mount Rushmore...Actually, *on* Mount Rushmore

I Stand with Batwoman

Weekend-Long Cyber Attack Targets Top U.S. Government, Press, and Business Sites

Clearing the Cache: Tweeting from Mount Rushmore...Actually, on Mount Rushmore