April 27, 2012

I’m at The Next Web in Amsterdam, speaking in about an hour. Yesterday two columns of mine were published online – thanks, publishers! – Bloomberg View When We Wage Cyberwar, the Whole Web Suffers (Apr. 26, 2012) Wired.com Be Very Afraid: The Cable-ization of Online Life Is Upon Us (Apr. 26, 2012) The class is [...]

Many ways to participate

The Open Government Partnership launch last September 20 was brave and new. Now there’s another public-facing meeting, in Brasilia on April 17-18. The basic model – encourage governments to be more transparent and use technology to empower citizens, without mandates requiring them to reach particular specific metrics – seems to be working. There are questions [...]

TNW Keynote 2012

End game

The cable guys in America have pretty much a monopoly when it comes to truly high-speed wired Internet access – except in areas where Verizon’s FiOS has been rolled out – but they do compete for market share when it comes to video. For must-have programming that cable subscribers want, there may not be substitutes. [...]

China, fiber, fracas

Via Dave Burstein comes the news that China is adding 2-3 million people to online connections a month. I’ve heard elsewhere that China plans to have 300 million of its citizens connected to fiber (FTTH, or fiber to the home) by 2015. As one of my colleagues quipped via email, “They must have the special [...]

Wednesday

Great to have @digiphile talk to my class yesterday; we have some work to do on wildly creative ideas, and we’ll be doing it over the next week or so as a class. Today I have another column up online – this one for Bloomberg View is here. My first official Berkman co-directors meeting this [...]

Surveillance and Sandel

Thanks to Matt Souden, I’ve gotten control over this site again. I’ve updated my publications, fixed my bio, started listing my presentations again, and linked to the course I’m teaching – it’s been about five years since I had the power to do that, and I know it’s no excuse to say I’ve been busy.  [...]

Q&A

Byrd: We’d like to see every American voter get involved. We’re seeing early adopters now. As candidates go forward we’re seeing inspiring moments. Levine: We’ve seen 2.5 million people sign petition to get the ballot lines. Byrd::  We have 30 states and we’re going after the next 20 states. We have had 1K people on [...]

Americans Elect at SXSW

Americans Elect CTO Josh Levine and CEO Kalil Byrd – session title: Isn’t It Time for an Online Presidential Primary? #OnlinePrim Levine::  We can all agree that there’s something wrong with politics. Stagnation and fighting is all it’s about. Nothing is getting done – jobs, the deficit – all we get is disagreement.  This sucks. [...]

Q&A

Kelsey::  There is pushback, both departmentally and public servants, but we sit with people and do our best. If you can show your own colleagues the benefits, that helps. Power: One of our biggest challenges is that this is new. It’s a new set of tools in the toolkit.  Foreign service officers aren’t themselves trained [...]