Public Please

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 [...]

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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. [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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While reading an article on DemocracyRising.us, I was surprised and disappointed to discover that the Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL), a non-partisan Quaker lobbying organization, has engaged in the political censorship of pro-peace candidates.
In their report, Eyes on the [...]

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The distinction between citizen journalism and professional journalism is historical, but not conceptual. It is possible to have professional citizen journalists and unprofessional corporate journalists.
By “professional”, I do NOT mean the business of reporting; I mean the manner [...]

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