In democracies worldwide, billions of citizens hold an untold number of interests, opinions and positions. Political reality on the ground is vastly more complex than our political symbols and categories allow us to express. Our political choices are artificially constrained by existing abstractions that either compress us into just two large...
Dear Personal Democracy Forum and Civic Hall community: Some of you may have heard that Pawel Adamowicz, the Mayor of Gdansk, Poland, was brutally stabbed to death two days ago while on stage during a popular charity fundraising event. Ironically the event was focused on raising money for medical equipment for local hospitals...
In just the last two weeks, newly elected Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) has gained half a million new Twitter followers, zooming from 1.6M to 2.1M. On Instagram, another platform where she excels at sharing interesting glimpses of her life as an activist-turned-newly-successful-politician, Ocasio-Cortez now has 1.6M followers, putting her in...
Around the world, defenders of democracy are working to understand and respond to the ways that technology is impacting political and electoral processes.
Last week, I spent a good part of Monday and Tuesday at a training workshop on the vTaiwan public engagement process and Taiwan’s Public Digital Innovation Space (PDIS), the innovation lab inside the central Taiwanese government. It was organized by the New York City node of the g0v (pronounced “gov...
How a radical experiment in participatory democracy came to Bowling Green, Kentucky.
From the Golden Globes stage in December, at the height of the #MeToo moment, Oprah Winfrey delivered a speech that sounded downright presidential: “A new day is on the horizon,” she said. Soon after, #Oprah2020 began trending on social media platforms. Wearing black, watching the #GoldenGlobes, listening to President Oprah...
A few months after the 2016 election, in a sterile conference facility in San Francisco, two prominent CEOs squared off presenting opposing visions of how technology could heal what ails Democrats. The first speaker envisioned a world where technology would radically scale the number of people who engage in politics....
Three projects tackle partisanship and attempt to reclaim civility in a divided America
What a time to think outside the nation-state, as North Korea taunts “American bastards” with intercontinental ballistic missiles; as the Trump administration escalates immigration arrests to an unprecedented rate; as migrants and refugees pour into Central and Eastern Europe; as the United Kingdom trudges towards Brexit. It is a time...