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The Personal Democracy Forum has announced that Rebooting America, an anthology of essays, will be released in June to commemorate its 5th anniversary conference. Allison Fine, along with Micah Sifry, Andrew Rasiej and Josh Levy, will be editing the volume.
We are lucky to have Allison join us live and online tomorrow (4/29) at 10am ET to answer questions about the book and her work. Allison is a regular contributor to the PDF and author of Momentum, winner of the 2007 Terry McAdam Book Award for outstanding contribution to the advancement of nonprofit management. In Momentum she argues that digital tools are important because they connect us to one another in inexpensive, accessible, and massively scalable ways.
Ask your questions now and come back tomorrow to join in the discussion.
The Center for Global Development has just announced that Scott McNealy, co-founder and Chairman of Sun Microsystems will be speaking in Washington DC on May 5 at 11am. The free event called “Open Source, Open Education and Eco-friendly: Can Sharing Improve Policy?” will focus on how ideas of openness and sharing work in business and how they can help improve public policy and international development.
McNealy, self-anointed, champion of “sharing,” is a forceful voice for open standards and open source; has funded Curriki.org, a collaborative education resources project; and recently announced Sun’s OpenEco.org to help reduce greenhouse gases. Lawrence MacDonald will be managing the event and I’ll be a discussant.
RSVP now and come join the discussion.
While it is big news that life expectancy in the US is falling for significant numbers of women, I was also taken by the source — a paper being published in the open access journal PLoS Medicine. The Public Library of Science argues that “unfettered access to this research literature will… hasten the development of new treatments for those most in need.” Check out page A1 of today’s Washington Post for the story.
The 2008 edition of the “Computers, Freedom, and Privacy” conference will be held in New Haven, CT from May 20 through 23. The program includes sessions like:
Early bird registration ends on May 2.
That’s the question to be answered in an upcoming book, Rebooting America, being prepared by the folks at the Personal Democracy Forum. It will be a collection of essays about what the “next generation” of American democracy should look like edited by Allison Fine, Micah Sifry, Andrew Rasiej and Josh Levy.
Essays have been invited from the likes of Yochai Benkler, danah boyd, Steven Clift, Ellen Miller, David Weinberger, and you. “Up to three” submitted essays will be included in the book. Authors of those essays will also get a free pass to the Personal Democracy Forum in NYC in June.
If you are more a critic than an author, you can vote on submissions (after you register). There are already four submissions to review including Mark Murphy’s nine principles of “online opinion aggregation” and Pablo del Real’s proposal to let people vote on the bills their representatives are voting on.
I’m very excited to have two Brits joining for upcoming LIVE Interviews Online. Suw Charman-Anderson, blogger and social media consultant, will be online on Tuesday (4/22) to talk about how social media matters to government and how digital rights matter to us. I’m hoping she’ll also offer insights on how these issues differ from the US to the UK.
On April 30 Becky Hogge, Executive Director of the Open Rights Group, will join us to talk about her work. ORG works to preserve our rights in the digital age on issues like copyright reform, electronic voting, network neutrality and online privacy. Becky also writes the New Statesman and openDemocracy among others.
This is a great opportunity to get direct feedback from across the pond so please be sure to ask questions now.
John Sebes and Greg Miller have identified a big problem — electronic voting is broken. And they have a big idea — fix it with a collaborative, transparent, open source approach. They call it a “digital public works project.” They argue that American elections are suffering a loss of trust and that commercial vendors expected to provided voting technology can’t be expected to put the publics’ interests before their own. John and Greg propose that a team of technologists working with a virtual community of volunteers design and develop a trustworthy e-voting technology.
To manage this process they are establishing a new organization, the Open Source Digital Voting Foundation (OSDV). The OSDV will look at the entire ballot system including design of software but also hardware, systems, standards, and specifications. The Foundation will also play an promotional role to convince the public this approach can work and is better.
John Sebes will be online with us on April 10, 2008 at 2pm ET to discuss the OSDV and issues with voting technology. Ask him questions, join the discussion or read the transcript at LIVE Interviews Online.
The Washington Post today says House staffers are “livid” over the release of personal information by LegiStorm. LegiStorm has aggregated public, but difficult-to-get-to, information and made it easily available online providing salary details not only for Senators and Congresspeople, but personal and committee staff as well. The Post summarizes the issue, saying “aides argue that the recent disclosures leave them highly vulnerable to identity theft. But the Web site, LegiStorm, contends that it has a First Amendment right to publish already public information about some of the Capitol’s most powerful players.”
LegiStorm has proposed some “next steps” to respond to concerns while maintaining access to information including modifications to the report form and payment to cover the cost “to redact the past disclosures”.
It wasn’t an April Fools joke. Yesterday the Creative Commons announced that they got both a sizable new grant from the Hewlett Foundation ($4M to support the CC and ccLearn) and a new CEO as well — Joi Ito, “entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and free culture advocate,” and avid twitter’r. Ito is replacing Lawrence Lessig who is redirecting his energies at Congress.