Tidying tags (and cars?)

When a story titled Confession: I’m a car slob popped up in the RSS feed I use to track who’s linking to me, I figured that some recent passenger had decided to out me to the world. Turns out that Beth Kanter has identified the correlation between untidy...

Alex 2.0: Now with extra civic-mindedness

Yippee! Today Corante launched its new Civic Minded blog on Internet politics, e-democracy and online engagement. This is a little project I cooked up with co-conspirators Steve Clift, Marnie Webb and Stephen Coleman. I’m thrilled to be working with such a great...

10 ways to keep online dialogue on topic

I’ve spent the past two days at a Ohio State for a conference on Building Democracy Through Online Citizen Deliberation, which has been a terrifically productive gathering. One session consisted of an interesting conversation about how to structure online...

Community goes corporate

Boyd Neil of Hill & Knowlton has written a very kind and thought-provoking post in response to the launch of Social Signal. Boyd’s observation is that corporate communicators have a lot to learn from social movements and community activists about how to use...

Introducing Social Signal: collaboration for communities

I’m delighted to announce the launch of Social Signal. Social Signal’s goal is to support online communities and distributed collaboration networks — networks of communities that share content and relationships by using the latest generation of web...

National Conversation now online

Politics Online has launched theNational Conversation project, which aims at engaging Americans in dialogue about major national issues (in the first instance, 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina). I like the effort to encourage multimedia contributions, and to allow people to...

From AdvocacyDev

Today is the last day of AdvocacyDev II, a gathering of people using technology to support nonprofit and social change work. As promised by Mark Surman, it’s been a truly mind-blowing experience. A big part of what’s amazing is the event organizing and...

e-Democracy skills training

I was part of a break-out group discussion today on making online deliberation tools accessible. We discussed three facets of this challenge: tool design, user training, and motivating participation. Our conversation began and ended with user training issues, becuase...