Public Please

I recently lauched a website, The Petition Archives, which I entered into the Apps for America contest.
The Petition Archives collects, geocodes, publishes, and preserves personal email petitions targeted at public figures, including government officials, corporate executives, and media personalities. Instead of sending a private email to a public figure, the Petition Archives allows you to [...]

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Today, CNN’s Situation Room totally missed the point of Ralph Nader’s Parrot video.  Nader created the video to draw attention to the way the mainstream media ignores 3rd party and independent candidates.

Lipstick on pigs and pitbulls, pandas and parrots? Nader’s video criticizes the mainstream, corporate media, both the liberal and conservative echo [...]

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At the 2008 Democratic Convention, C-Span has started a Qik group to directly broadcast parts of the convention in the field via video on the Qik website. The C-Span Qik group appears to be private (I tried to join it without success so far.) Currently, the C-Span Qik group contains only two Qik [...]

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Howard Dean, the Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, dodged a tough accusation today from a C-Span caller that some Democratic presidents were war criminals. The C-Span caller argued that the Democratic party had previously supported presidents who were war criminals. The caller claimed that Lydon Johnson was a war criminal with his [...]

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On October 15th, thousands of bloggers from around the world will be writing against poverty. At Public Please, we too, will be writing against poverty by discussing the communication breakdown between poor people and their elected representatives.

How can we improve communication between poor people and their elected representatives?

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I am trying to get a list of email addresses to all elected officials from the federal government, so I thought I’d just ask for it. I went to USA.gov to find out how to Contact Elected Officials. I looked for email addresses on the contact pages of U.S. Senators, U.S. Representatives, and State [...]

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Remix America promises to bring political satire, and its implicit accountability, to a new level. Now, people can mix and mash embarassing videos of political celebrities like Obama and McCain. Beyond the question of rudeness, we must ask whether these entertainments, and their remixed satire, actually foster a civic perspective. Does a [...]

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For my final project, I’m working on PoliChat, a web-based tool for large-scale democratic intergroup chat. It is intended to facilitate communication between groups. For example, citizens and politicians can create groups and democratically chat with each other.

You can check out my development site here.

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According to several state-controlled Chinese media outlets, including China Daily and the China Tibet Information Center, thousands of Chinese people are signing an online petition against bias in the Western media. In particular, the petition responds to the Western media’s coverage of the violence in Lhasa. China Daily translates the site’s grievances and [...]

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According to the New York Times’s “Health Database Was Set Up To Ignore ‘Abortion‘”, managers of PopLine, a federally funded reproductive health database at Johns Hopkins University, removed the word “abortion” from the list of potential search terms. The article reports that the dean of the school, Dr. Michael Klag reversed the restriction after [...]

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