Maplight: shining a light on politics and money from JD Lasica on Vimeo. Sean Tanner, research director of MAPLight.org, talks about how the organization provides transparency to the political donations system through widgets that tap into pubic information databases. We spoke at the NetSquared conference in San Jose, Calif., in May 2008, where MAPLight won […]
Politics
How citizen journalism is changing political reporting
Citizen reporting threatens the club from JD Lasica on Vimeo. Anyone who has followed the 2008 presidential campaign knows that a few key media flash points have helped shape the narrative of this race. In two of these episodes, the same citizen journalist was at center stage. But the reality of her involvement is far […]
Issues facing America: Voting rights in DC
I’ve been doing an informal series of video interviews with people about the issues on their minds during this pivotal election year. Recently I caught up with Kate Aishton, a resident of Washington, DC, who’s a staffer at the Aspen Institute’s Communications & Society Program. Kate talked about the lack of representation in Congress for […]
Pander city: On the Republican YouTube debate
Just watched the Republican YouTube debate on CNN. Quite a contrast from the Democratic YouTube debate in so many ways — far fewer inventive user videos and far more predictable questions that made this not very different from a debate with traditional media scribes. The opening was a bit bizarre. Florida Gov. Charlie Crist (who’s […]
The coming Progressive Era
Spent Thursday night at a talk about politics at Adaptive Path in San Francisco, sponsored by Girls in Tech and Good Ol’ Girls. Peter Leyden, who’s a friend from here and there, gave a riveting talk about the wide sweeps of American history. We’re at another epic moment, he suggests: the dawning of a new […]