He’s mobilized youth to previously unprecedented levels, shattered fund-raising records with an Internet-enabled army of small-dollar donors, and made many impassioned calls for sweeping changes in Washington. But can Obama really transform the cynical, self-interested, and frequently factious nature of politics, while bringing new levels of transparency and participation to the process?
Three recent articles [...]

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How will policy-makers keep pace with today’s rapidly changing world and bring greater agility and dynamism to public responses to monumental challenges like climate change, food scarcity and the spread of infectious disease? How can citizens and others stakeholders feed their knowledge and experience into the policy cycle and how can policy-makers tap the collective [...]

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Some time ago I was asked by the U.S. General Services Administration to write an article describing how I envision the role of public sector CIOs. The article has now been published (Role of the Public Sector CIO) along side articles by Karen Evans, John Suffolk, Bill Vajda, Teri Takai, P.K. Agarwal, Jerry Mechling, [...]

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Recent data from the presidential primaries in the US suggests that youth participation has risen sharply. In some states the proportion of young people who turned out to vote has tripled and even quadrupled in comparison the primaries in 2000. All told, more than 3 million youth participated in the Super Tuesday primaries and 61% [...]

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Written petitions have long been an important means by which citizens can bring their concerns to public officials. Petitioning was common in 18th and 19th century England and is thought to have played an important role in enabling working class movements to force significant social and political reforms, and eventually universal suffrage. The tradition was [...]

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As the presidential candidates race heats up, the political power of the blogosphere is growing.
All eight Democratic presidential candidates will be wooing potential supporters at the YearlyKos convention beginning on Thursday, a key gathering for liberal bloggers organized by DailyKos - one of the first and most influential political blogs. The event, btw, will be [...]

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My colleague Paul Artiuch just alterted me to a new Wiki initiative that aims to expose the secrets of the world’s oppressive regimes. The Wikileaks initiative is,
“developing an uncensorable Wikipedia for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis. Our primary interests are oppressive regimes in Asia, the former Soviet bloc, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, [...]

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Presidential hopeful Barack Obama is set to expose politics and possibly the next election to the world of social networking. On January 16th 2007 a group called Barack Obama (One Million Strong for Barack) was started on Facebook. Today the group has grown to almost 260,000 members and hopes to reach 1 million members by [...]

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Another Wikinomics reader Stacy Becker wrote in to alert us to a Minnesota-based citizen’s project called Map150 that is working to reinvigorate local democracy. Becker rightly argues that “citizens have tons of really important information that never finds its way into expert-driven policy-making processes.” “This information is critical,” she says, “if we are to solve [...]

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Anamik Saha of Goldsmith’s University in London tipped me off about a new online journal called Re-public. The journal is currently featuring a fascinating series on the future of “the commons” and intellectual property in a connected world. The series includes contributions from Richard Stallman, Dougalss Rushkoff, and Michael Bauwens. I’m looking forward to reading [...]

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