February 2009
Where OFA Belongs in the Fight: Health Care →
Elections are simple (in theory) and for the vast majority of participants in any campaign, a single action is requested: a vote for the candidate. A smaller sub-set will give money. An even smaller…
January 2009
Daily Digest: Obama Organizes While Republicans... →
Can Obama Organize the Stimulus? Should He?: You’ll remember that we’ve been exploring just how the Organizing for American outfit that evolved out of the Obama campaign is actually going…
Organizing for America Will, and Should, Fail →
Organizing for America sent out a request for house parties today, asking people to watch a video about Obama’s economic recovery plan, talk about it with their friends, and build support for it….
Progressives Have a Hashtag →
It sounds to me like it should be the name of a third-party candidate in that Kodos and Kang election episode of The Simpsons, but “topprog” is actually a new political Twitter hashtag that is…
New Director of Citizen Participation Brings... →
Spend some time on the new WhiteHouse.gov and the realization hits you: this is no Change.gov. Launched barely over a week ago, the Obama Administration’s online home is missing much of…
Daily Digest: Forget Sod. Will Obama's Bill... →
“We Will Run Campaigns in Their Districts”: Even after dropping a $20 million provision for resodding the National Mall, Barack Obama’s $819 billion stimulus package came up with a big…
Obama Campaign's New Media Staff was NOT a Part of... →
Cross-posted on e.politics
At a New Organizing Institute presentation this week, former Obama new media director Joe Rospars (last seen in the pages of e.politics talking about the importance…
Obama's Networks and the Stimulus →
If you stop by our part of the Internet often, you’ll know that here on techPres we’ve been interestedly tracking what would become of the energy, momentum, and — perhaps most importantly — the…
Daily Digest: Right and 'Net Getting Over First... →
One Word: “Networks”: While progressives spend time trying to figure out whether that’s the real John McCain on Twitter (point in favor: no staffer would risk being that dull),…
Daily Digest: Stimulus, Subsidies, Scurvy and More →
Boehner’s Bid to Get on the White House YouTube Channel: There’s a fuss being made about President Barack Obama’s refusal to allow a video from House Minority Leader John Boehner to …
"Wide-Eyed Staffers" →
I spy with my little eye the signs of an actual blog-like blog post on WhiteHouse.gov. Since the site’s launch last Tuesday, the presidential blog has hosted ten posts. The first, a welcome note…
Inside the Stimulus: Broadband's Triple Play →
Sure, stacked up against prescriptions for staving off complete collapse of the global credit market, what’s in Obama’s stimulus package having to do with broadband might seem minor in comparison….
Remedying the Purple Ticket Debacle Through... →
I shouldn’t admit it in this space, but you can count me among those skeptics still surprised that creating a cantankerous Facebook group can be your ticket to a meeting with a big-city law…
Daily Digest: In Local Blogging, Conservatives Spy... →
Right Aims to Play Catch Up on State Blogs: Patrick Ruffini is on to something. The conservative consultant is sounding an alarm that progressives would rather he’d rather just hush up…
The People v. The Counsel's Office →
Will the openness and transparency promised at all levels of government come to pass? Or will the people be thwarted, yet again, by the law?
Those are questions that have been running through my…
The President's Blackberry: Permission to Click? →
The accepted storyline on President Obama’s souped-up hot rod of a super-secure executive branch Blackberry runs like this: Presidents too often exist in a bubble, insulated from real people and the…
Intimate Democracy →
Nicholas Lemann has a terrific piece in the Jan. 26 New Yorker that says that personal characteristics are not enough to make someone a great president. To achieve that status, Obama “has to…
Daily Digest: New Guard Stumbles Upon a Few Bugs →
Obama’s Made Up His Mind, He’s Gonna Keep His BlackBerry, Ooh…: It was touch and go there for a while. Would Barack Obama emerge victorious from the first major face-off of his…
White House Web FAIL? →
A couple of days ago, I reviewed the launch of the new WhiteHouse.gov. Today, nearly 72 hours after Barack Obama’s inauguration, the only official documents of the Obama Administration online are…
Latency Issues? White House Site Is Gorgeous ....... →
In the movies, the President is usually surrounded by technology the rest of us can only imagine - escape pods, hand-held full body scanners, real time satellite video technology to remote regions…
Daily Digest: Through the Wormhole, Into the White... →
A Presumption of Open Government: One of the two executive orders signed by Barack Obama in his first full day in office pledged to shift governing presumptions about secrecy in the…
Code Warriors Debate Whitehouse.gov Robot Commands →
As the tech community poured over the new whitehouse.gov site, one of the first subterranean changes noted was that of a file most people would never notice called robots.txt. This file serves…
Obama Day Two: Towards a More Open and... →
The Obama Administration took its first major steps toward implementing its promise to make government more open and transparent, with two presidential memoranda covering freedom of information,…
Daily Digest: First Peeks Inside the New White... →
Exploring the New WhiteHouse.gov: While it might not have been until a few minutes after noon that Barack Obama and John Roberts got that oath of office thing sorted out, the White…
Thoughts on the new WhiteHouse.gov →
As Sarah noted yesterday, the White House website got a facelift at 12:01 yesterday as the typically stuffiness of the White House web site smacked headlong into the calming blues of the Obama…
Obama’s non-reductive rhetoric as new media... →
Whatever the accolades for the speech that Obama delivered at his inauguration, it seems it won’t generate a singular sound bite as in JFK’s “Ask not…” or FDR’s “Fear itself” (Many of the major…
New Whitehouse.gov is Live →
At 12:01pm Eastern time, as promised, the whitehouse.gov domain flipped over and we received our first glimpse of what’s to come over the next four years. Take a look!
Whitehouse.gov did actually…
Watch the Inauguration of the 44th President of... →
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value=”http://www.ustream.tv/flash/live/1/438774”/>Live video streaming by Ustream
Daily Digest: The Dawn of Day One →
As we prepare for today’s inauguration festivities, we’re presented an abbreviated Daily Digest. We’ll be back in full force tomorrow.
Inside TIGR: A new video from the Obama…
Twittering the Inauguration (Plus a Few Parties... →
On the assumption that for the next 18-36 hours I am a) not going to be near my laptop much; b) not able to get much bandwith on my cell phone and therefore c) mostly Twittering whatever…
TIGR's Moment in the Sunlight: Noveck, Kundra,... →
Must viewing for all techPresident and Personal Democracy Forum readers:
With just hours to go before the Obama transition finishes and the new government is born, the…
MeetUp on the Mall: Say Hello to Your Fellow... →
During the 2008 presidential race, it seemed like “community organizing” came to stand as a proxy for the competing world views of the Democratic and Republican tickets. Barack Obama, of…
Voting for Change? PopRule.com Emphasizes Regional... →
All politics is social: that’s the claim of online startup PopRule.com, a new people-powered politics site set to launch as Barack Obama takes the oath of office tomorrow. Call it a…
Organizing for America Launches; Structure TBD →
If you’re on the Obama campaign email list, by now you’ve probably received a message alerting you to a special message from President-elect Barack Obama announcing the formation of “Organizing for…
Ideas for Change Settles on a Top Ten →
As I’ve mentioned in the past, techPresident partnered with Change.org on their Ideas for Change in America project, in which people voted for the priorities they’d most like the incoming…
It's the Tim Kaine Show →
Tim Kaine isn’t wasting any time making use of what Politico’s Ben Smith notes is a big new megaphone provided by a DNC empowered by Obama’s communications networks. Kaine’s answering…
Daily Digest: Fighting for a See-Through Stimulus →
Recovery.gov: Washington is going crazy over snappy domain names. First there was Change.gov, and now this. “Acknowledging concerns about potential government waste,” reads a draft of the…
Think You Had a Busy Year? →
This is the 2008 Dopplr report for Barack Obama. The travel tracking site is sending out custom reports to all users, but is rather cleverly promoting one for the President-elect. It’s…
InaugurationReport's First Draft of History →
With only a handful of days left until people start flooding towards DC to celebrate the inauguration, the time has come to check back in with InaugurationReport. The project, you’ll remember,…
Daily Digest: Crafting Obama's Triangle of Press,... →
Is Obama 2.0 an Extension of Dean’s DNC?: The LA Times’ Peter Wallsten serves up what at first glance looks like some juicy details on what evolution of Barack Obama’s campaign…
'Define PDFs' →
The actual contracts used in the implementation of the incoming Obama Administration’s massive economic stimulus plan will be available to the public online - that’s what Peter Orszag, the nominee…
Obama in HD →
Releasing the official portrait of the incoming president, the Obama team made special note of the fact that it’s the first presidential photo portrait taken with a digital camera….
Daily Digest: Questions, Cats, and Chaos Avoidance →
Quizzing RNC Hopefuls: The race to be the next Republican National Committee chair is heating up, and it remains particularly fascinating because no clear front-runner has emerged. With two…
WHaiku (or The White House Tweets) →
Executive Tweets
On drug policy no less
tech president creeps
87
Vote for Change (Again) →
techPresident partnered up with Change.org in the early days of their Ideas for Change in America project. The goal of Ideas for Change is to not only use social-media magic to identify…
Peeking Under the TARP →
People seemed to enjoy the last YouTube video we posted from TARP overseer Elizabeth Warren, so hey, let’s go back to that well. Warren, you might remember, heads up the…
Daily Digest: Walking the Participatory Government... →
We the Briefers: Joining the growing list of President-elect Barack Obama’s experiments in interactivity is the Citizen’s Briefing Book, as Nancy Scola reports. The top-rated policy…
Change.gov's Latest: Citizen's Briefing Book →
Putting together a policy briefing book for your boss is one of the toughest jobs handed to a political desire. There’s a strong desire to present him or her with the latest and best intelligence on…
Whither SoapBlox? →
There’s right now a fascinating conundrum facing the progressive blogosphere. As we’ve covered, a hosted blogging service called SoapBlox has been the victim of sustained hacking attacks, and the…
GovLoop: A Social Network for Public Servants →
Are you a local elected official looking for advice from your peers on how to make better use of web technologies to relate to your constituents? Or perhaps you’re a government IT specialist…