democracy

With nearly 8,000 ideas and more than 600,000 votes, the Ideas for Change In America competition of Change.org made evident a widespread interest in the power of technology to enable citizen-centered policy change. We’ve been watching with great interest here on Social Citizens as thousands of ideas have funneled into Change.org since early November.

But with yesterday’s announcement of the top ten ideas and a lively panel discussion at the National Press Club, I’ve been focused on what it means as this new era of participatory democracy takes hold - perhaps even more so than on the ideas themselves. It’s one thing to rally your network to elect an individual candidate or to vote for a specific idea – but how do you take that network and sustain it, and more importantly how do you use technology to bring new and diverse voices into the dialogue? Read more »

I had the pleasure of speaking on a panel last week with an incredibly smart and interesting group: Jay Rosen, a leading media critic; Baratunde Thurston, The Onion’s web editor; and Andrew Rasiej, the founder of Personal Democracy Forum. Our panel, The Forum on Participation and Politics Online, was organized by Susan Crawford, the founder of One Web Day, in honor of Internet Week New York. Read more »

Today’s guest blogger is Maya Enista, CEO of Mobilize.org.

I’ve come up with one definition for my generation, the infamous Millennials: we don’t like being defined. We especially don’t like being defined by people who don’t have Facebook accounts, don’t know that RSS feeds are a legitimate way to get your news, have never used Twitter, don’t understand that we can text and listen and jokingly tell us that we must be “itching to go to the bar” after a well-delivered power point presentation at a conference at which I’m the youngest one, by years … so, please stop talking about me. Read more »