Archive for the ‘Digital Culture’ Category

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From the British Isles

Sunday, October 1st, 2006

18 Doughty

18 Doughty Street is a new web based internet TV channel. They won’t hide its rightwing agenda. I wonder if it will be Fox News for the UK. Discussing politics is always good for democracy in an age where civil liberties are compromised for the Anti Terror crusade. I am looking forward for the 10th of October to watch the channel. I tend to the left and currently live overseas. Good luck to the 18 Doughty Street team.

David Cameron, Conservative party leader, has launched his own (video weblog) to try to get his message across to young people. Blogging is the latest PR and marketing weapon for political parties, trying to look fresh. David Cameron shows his domestic charm in the kitchen, dining room, the car and in the office. The question is will help Cameron win the next elections.

Posted in Digital Culture , Government , Media , Politics , blog , democracy , internet , web | No Comments »

Who is Papadizi?

Wednesday, August 23rd, 2006

played by Israeli actor Menashe Noy, a goat shepherd from Macedonia who is looking for an American wife. The short videos were released to the internet via and are part of a viral marketing campaign by producer OUri Sasson

MISTER GOOGLE FIND ME AMERICAN WOMAN
hello internet village
i am papadizi
and i will kill my self
if i dont fined
american woman

חשיפה: מי זה פאפאדיזי ?

Posted in Digital Culture , Israel , internet , web | No Comments »

S5 has a future

Wednesday, August 16th, 2006

Ryan King has announced that he will continue S5: A Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System. I have used S5 a few times in the last couple of years, and really enjoyed it. The web never looks good on a presentation because of the size and the detail it presents. PowerPoint on the other hand, isn’t web friendly for the same reasons the other Microsoft office products are not web-friendly using not standardized and bloating converted files. S5 gives me the liberty of enjoying both world’s files as well as hyper-linking to other sources.

I see the future where software and : A Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System will be mashed up to form a tool where presentation will have s and s and really create a discussion.

Posted in Digital Culture , blog , internet , tools , web | No Comments »

95 Theses of Geek Activism

Wednesday, August 16th, 2006

A must read:

Geek activism has not taken off yet, but it should. With the gamers recognizing the need for a louder voice, EFF gaining momentum and Linux taking on the mainstream on the one hand and recent severe losses in privacy, freedom of speech and intellectual property rights on the other, now seems to be the best time to rally around the cause.

Posted in Digital Culture , democracy , internet , must read , web | No Comments »

Wordpress as petitioning software in two stages.

Saturday, August 5th, 2006

. The war against the in and bloodshed are having their toll on the population. The majority of the Israeli general public support the war and numbers haven’t declined since it started, 3 weeks ago.

The other day Gili challenged me and asked me if I could help her with an online petition. I said that I don’t write code, but I could help her and find a solution.

Orit and Gili have been petitioning the government for a ceasefire and needed way to collect signatures in an easy way.

The Blogging software is very easy to skin. You can create and design your own theme very easily if you have basic knowledge of and ( is also usefull).

How to create a petitioning software with Wordpress?

  1. I used the default theme Kubrick and changed the commenting system and internal instruction to a form for adding names, emails and addresses. I shortened the comment field and labeled it as the place for entering the address.
  2. I added a Page template that creates a list of all the signatures collected.

Basically this is it. The first version was in Hebrew I started working on English one adding a printer friendly version and thinking of other features.

Shortly, I will post the Wordpress Petition theme \ code on the internet and share with others.

Here is the English test site and the Hebrew working version of the , calling the Israeli government for a cease-fire and the opening of negotiations with Lebanon.

Posted in Digital Culture , Israel , Politics , blog , democracy , web | No Comments »

unparliament

Thursday, April 6th, 2006

An unparliament is a conference where the content of the meeting is driven and created by the public rather than by elected politicians. The unparliament is the reality gathering where Open Politics are debated, a meeting place for the community.

The concept based on Unconference, an idea by Lenn Pryor when discussing BloggerCon but popularized by Dave Winer in his blog.

please add ideas to this short definition.

Posted in Brainstorming , Digital Culture , Politics | No Comments »

Social Software and Cyber Networks: Ties That Bind or Weak Associations within the Political Organization?

Wednesday, February 22nd, 2006

Social Software and Cyber Networks: Ties That Bind or Weak Associations within the Political Organization?

Proceedings of the 38th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS’05) - Track 5 p. 117b

David T. Green, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, Carbondale, IL
John M. Pearson, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, Carbondale, IL

David T. Green, John M. Pearson, “Social Software and Cyber Networks: Ties That Bind or Weak Associations within the Political Organization?,” hicss, p. 117b, Proceedings of the 38th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS’05) - Track 5, 2005.

The 2004 U.S. Presidential election has tapped into the online medium to reach the growing demographic of online citizens. In the Democratic Party’s primary season, the Howard Dean campaign organization proved to be phenomenally successful at incorporating the online medium into its fundraising and grassroots mobilization, going beyond the online organizing and fundraising success of campaigns of John McCain in 2000. Both the Dean and McCain organizations were praised for their use of the Web to organize at the “grass-roots” level as well as their accomplishment in raising money. The current paper examines the unique social network ties that are created through the use of social software (i.e. blogs, email, instant messaging, meetup.com), specifically focusing on its use by political campaigns to engage potential voters in what could be considered a growing electronic democracy. Media richness is also taken into account.
Full Article Text: pdf Text

Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences

Posted in Digital Culture , Politics , internet | No Comments »

Podcast update 30/Jan/2006

Tuesday, January 31st, 2006

an audio (podcast) update on Open Politics in Israel

Read my open politics implementation.

Posted in Digital Culture , Israel , Podcast , Politics , blog | No Comments »

my open politics implementation

Tuesday, January 24th, 2006

I am a new media strategist to MK. Dr. Roman Bronfman and the Democratic Choice Party. I started in August 2005 after a friend; Eran Vered introduced me to Dan Goldenblatt, Dr. Bronfman’s political advisor. Vered showed me the proposed site of the party and complained about the backstage user-interface.

The design wasn’t exciting but not bad just a standard party website (here is the new russian site). Goldenblatt invited me to the meeting with the website developing company. During the meeting Eran Vered lost his patience and complained about the unfriendly editing interface, which was really bad. I calmed them down and said that it wasn’t that bad and we can work around it, I suggested a few new features like blogging and content syndication (RSS), Eran added a forum. We decided that I would produce an outline and a plan. I started to work on a web strategy.

The first thing was to implement a blogging system and Wordpress was my choice. The developing company didn’t respond to my requests for database and server access and it took them 3 weeks till they obliged to do so. I spent less than 20 minutes installing the Wordpress weblog software. I started experimenting with wikipedia mediawiki as a social software system. Dan organized a meeting with Dr. Roman Bronfman and I presented my web strategy. Bronfman was excited with the blogging idea and asked if it could be and audio one. Yes, I replied “it is the coolest thing on the net called podcasting“. After inviting friends to experiment with the wiki. I got to the conclusion that it was to complex, and I swapped the mediawiki software with the Drupal based civicspace. Wikipedia is popular in Israel as an encyclopedic source, like anywhere else, but there is only a minority of people whom are tempted to edit it. Drupal/Civicspace uses conventional content posing structure people are less hesitant to publish content. Elections were called for the end of March 2006. If we were not in a tight campaigning schedule I would have continued with the wiki.

Posted in Digital Culture , Israel , Podcast , Politics , internet | No Comments »

The Open Politics definition

Tuesday, January 24th, 2006

The wikipedia definition of Open Source Politics or Open Politics combines traditions of the free software and open content movements with postmoderism, and promotes a decision making method claimed to be a more open, less antagonistic, and more capable of determining what is in the public interest with respect to public policy issues.

Critera

  • anyone can participate
  • all participants are equals
  • all actions are transparent
  • all contributions are recorded and preserved
  • all deliberation is structured
  • all content is re/organized by participants on an ongoing basis.
  • partisan behavior is limited by the format and community standards.

Underlying preferences

  • decentralization of authority: giving the widest and most potent franchise to citizens is thought to minimize what economists call the principal-agent problem, or the tendency for managers to abuse authority.
  • centralization of information: the use of information technology to facilitate communication challenges is key to the practicality of the process.
  • equality of opportunity: anyone can participate in deliberation, with the expectation that people themselves select to participate on issues in which they have the greatest stake, expertise or both. Open politics treats the expert and the citizen as equals, implying that the experts are obliged to convince the citizens directly, rather than using representatives as intermediaries/brokers of policy. This use of peer review is emphasized as the best method to determine what is true or good (with the understanding that this should change over time).
  • encouraging diversity of thought, such that multiple positions and arguments are created, refined and compared; usually the more the better, provided they are succinct.

Implementation

These criteria are generally satisfied by a wiki or some other collaborative workspace in which multiple points of view are conveyed and reviewable in “living documents” that reflect, on an ongoing basis, what the community thinks.

Posted in Digital Culture , General , Government , Politics , internet | No Comments »

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