Yearly Archives 2008

While I was at the ACLU, my colleague and superfriend Allison Walker deferred to my judgment on Internet matters with that funny combo of enthusiasm, and TOEFL skepticism that still greets Internet staff almost everywhere. So imagine my superdelight to see that Allison is blogging from Sundance for the ACLU, on the roster of social issue films on offer this year. As one time indie pioneer Sylvester Stallone said in Rocky IV about another beautiful blond, "If I can change, and you can change, everybody can change!"

This NYT photo by Todd Heisler says so many things about gender, the presidential race and the U-S of A.

At CAP's Internet Advocacy Roundtable on transparency, Bill Allison mentions that even if data is available from Congress, the GAO, etc., it often takes help from NGOs to interpret, standardize, aggregate the data for people to be able to make connections and glean the benefit of the knowledge. Group's like The Sunlight Foundation, where Bill works, are harnessing the Internet's power to collect information and literally open a window into it on your desktop. But is raw data, even standardized, well-coded, cross-referenced data, ultimately an opaque pearl before well-intended swine? Do real-people activists get the most out of simple information, or do they get infinitely more from the interpretation (or at least the organization of information) that real-people advocates and experts provide? As I write, it becomes clear that all the panelists have been thinking about this. "People care more about issues than they do about money and politics" in…

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