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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Today, I had the good fortune to attend a lecture on NGOs and civil society in China by Nick Young. As a journalist in China, Nick provided detailed coverage of the emerging non-governmental organization sector in China. He unpacked some of the tensions between the grassroot NGOs and, what he calls, the “corporatist” [...]
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Have you read about a bill in an online news article and wanted to read the bill? Good luck because most online news articles neither name the bill nor hyperlink to it.
Consider the waterboarding bill that Bush vetoed. According to the Washington Post article Bush Announces Veto of Waterboarding Ban, George [...]
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I recently read “Nader Announces Pick for Vice President“, and posted this comment (which has been slightly modified to include the voting record of John McCain) to respond to partisan Democrats who blame Ralph Nader for the Iraq War and the prospects of additional war mongering by the Republicans:
“Nader didn’t authorize the invasion of Iraq. [...]
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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 Prize: Presidential Candidates on Iraq, Iran and Nuclear Weapons, they omit the perspectives [...]
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So far, the computational journalism symposium at Georgia Tech has been thought-provoking. It has provided an opportunity for me to provoke the corporate media with democratic theory.
Chrisopher Barr, a senior editor at Yahoo offered his dream list of information innovations. One of these ideas struck me: self-identifying content. This is related [...]
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Change or experience?
Change We Can Believe In. I Believe In Words. Our Words Inspire. We Can Do Better America! Participate. Hope. Dream. I Need You. We Need Each Other! We Are Many And We Are One. We Are All Americans. I Represent All Americans. [...]
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To sustain the citizen journalism movement and end the corporate media’s censorship of public opinion, we need a sound model for public finance. By public finance, I do not mean the largely involuntary and undemocratic form of funding often given the moniker which relies on the goodwill of an elite group of wealthy legislators, [...]