For the past five years, the little co-op I co-founded has been working on a tool called Loomio. Workplaces, government departments, co-ops, and political parties around the world use Loomio to involve members and citizens in bottom-up decision-making. We focus on small groups, usually less than 500 people. At that...
Yasuni National Park in the Ecuadorian Amazon is shaped like a mechanical claw, or the open jaws of a craggy, prehistoric reptile. It grasps in its mouth roughly half of the land titled to the Waorani, one of the country’s indigenous nationalities. Peering down at the Google Earth view it’s...
If you haven’t noticed already, we are living through a movement moment. Triggered by the election of Donald Trump and his combustive personality and policy moves, millions of Americans are in motion, forming and joining groups, rallying, signing and sharing petitions, and searching for ways to demonstrate their opposition. Thousands...
In early 2016, Operation Libero, an anti-populist movement co-founded by history student Flavia Kleiner, 26, successfully defeated an anti-immigrant Swiss ballot initiative. The “enforcement” initiative, sponsored by the nationalist Swiss People’s Party (SVP), would have ordered the deportation of immigrants in Switzerland for any criminal offense, no matter how minor....
Where online petitions help marshal an army of protesters or shift the media narrative, they will be more relevant and valuable than ever before.
This is the third piece in a multi-part series on the Orphan and the Empire.
“You know, I believe in forgiveness. I believe in trying to work with people. It will be hard. It’s going to be very difficult. I don’t see this president-elect as a legitimate president. I think the Russians participated in having this man get elected, and they helped destroy the candidacy...
While the 2016 presidential debates will be remembered for upending assumptions about preparedness and the importance of facts, they might also be noteworthy for the integration of technologies and platforms designed to increase civic engagement.
Commission on Presidential Debates member Michael McCurry discusses the pros and cons of crowdsourcing questions, the role of debate moderators, and inviting third-party candidates to join the debates.
We’re about to experience a phase transition in American activist politics. It’s a move from the “politics of articulation” to the “politics of opposition.” And this is what we can likely expect from the next few years.