Overview: Politics

Let’s hope [Beme] catches on ... and make social media about real people again -  not their carefully edited versions, and certainly not companies, Institutions and all the others choking up my feed with their marketing as they desperately try to appear human.

"at some point, you start to crave something with more substance. Today’s readers want more than listicles and clickbait, and this is driving meaningful change across the digital publishing industry... In the maelstrom of Internet content, we are drawn to articles that make clear promises for what we will get out of them, as well as those that …

When cars come with an 'ethics module', will it be optional? Will there be choices? Will you have to get an upgrade if you change your religious beliefs? Fun cans of worms: "a professor of philosophy at Cal Poly is exploring the ethical dilemmas that may arise when vehicle self-driving is deployed in the real world." - Self-Driving Cars Get …

"Just imagine how much happier you would be if a prematurely deceased loved one were alive, or a debilitated one were vigorous — and multiply that good by several billion, in perpetuity. Given this potential bonanza, the primary moral goal for today’s bioethics can be summarized in a single sentence.Get out of the way. A truly ethical bioethics…

I developed a metric to identify gatekeepers, who increase your influence, and flak-catchers who reduce it. I tested the GREEDY FRAGILE algorithm developed by West Point for drone targeting decisions, which measures how much an individual participant in a network makes it more or less centralized. The results were fascinating. - An x-ray of Bru…

"@NASA is the 104th most popular Twitter account in the world... and 3.5 million on Instagram. The Department of the Interior, whose stunning wildlife and nature pictures make it the only government agency with cool visual content to rival NASA’s, has just 654,000 ... John Yembrick and Jason Townsend are veterans of other government agencies...…

My EuropCom 2015 workshop on online communities is taking shape. (Update: view all slideshows and key takeways from the session) According to the EuropCom2015 site it'll be held after lunch on Day 1, and will cover:Convening and managing an online community is an extremely effective way of achieving communications goals, but will probably fai…

The Art of Hosting is a highly effective way of harnessing the collective wisdom and self-organizing capacity of groups of any size.  ... a suite of powerful conversational processes to invite people to step in and take charge of the challenges facing them... better decision-making, more efficient and effective capacity building and greater abi…

So the question at hand is how to keep your community alive and thriving. Or, on the flip side, here are the top 15 ways to (inadvertently) to kill an online community: - How To Kill An Online Community In 15 Easy Steps | Vanessa DiMauro | LinkedIn

The real story might have been that data played a more important role than social media... reports that smart campaigns used data intelligently to target the right voters with the right messages... This combination of data and social media, with more traditional campaigning techniques will surely develop still further in the next few years. …

"the rise of suggested content tools has shifted the balance between conversation and link-sharing, and in so doing has diminished the value of the links that get shared... a tweeted link no longer reflects any curation or judgment on their part; it may well be something that was found for them rather than by them. Nor is it a sign that they’ve…

Why does one “experiment” (i.e., introducing a new product) fail to raise ethical concerns, whereas a true scientific experiment (i.e., introducing a variation of the product to determine the comparative safety or efficacy of the original) sets off ethical alarms? - Please, Corporations, Experiment on Us - The New York Times

The Coral Project aims to change how publishers, contributors and readers think about interacting in online communities ... to further opportunities for online engagement, extending beyond comments into conversations and contributor contributions... The goal of the open-source software is to enable publishers to better manage contributions and …

sixth edition of the annual report series provides a snapshot of the progress and changes in community management approaches and highlights emerging standards. This year, TheCR analyzed data from more than 200 communities representing a broad range of community sizes and sectors to measure community maturity and its relationship to member engageme…

"Networks are pretty good for collisions. Bureaucracies are pretty bad for collisions." - Why I Write on Medium — The Message — Medium

Some really advanced techniques in handling trolls here - The Internet’s Most Trolled Cartoonist — The Nib — Medium

“In fact, the very point was to get them, and these comments, off my pages,” - After deciding to charge for comments, Tablet’s conversation moves…to Facebook » Nieman Journalism Lab

despite improvements in the number of female MEPs, there is still a chronic lack of women in key decision-making positions, particularly in the Commission and the Council. - EUROPP – The lack of gender equality in EU decision-making means EU citizens are still suffering from a ‘double democratic deficit’

I need three speakers for a EuropCom2015 workshop to share their thoughts on convening and managing communities in the context of public communications and policymaking. The following throwaway remark on Linkedin landed me with the task of setting up a workshop at EuropCom 2015:"I'd suggest combining "Setting-up and managing online …

"a study published by... transparency NGOs portrays an expert group system dominated by corporate interests and lacking in basic accountability in how members are appointed and who they actually represent ... over 25 percent of the groups it examined are controlled outright by corporate interests ... in 64 percent of the groups, business interests…

"According to Morgan Stanley, self-driving cars will be commonplace in society by ~2025. This got me thinking about the ethics and philosophy behind these cars... can you imagine a world in which say Google or Apple places a value on each of our lives, which could be used at any moment of time to turn a car into us to save others?" - Self-dr…

I quite enjoyed the experience of reposting to Medium, and really like how Medium is evolving as a platform, particularly how they are… … re-imagining comments with Highlight, Comment & Respond… these three interactive features echo the ‘nibble, bite, meal’ content model, but in the other direction, from you back to the …

"Switzerland, Iceland, Denmark and Norway are the world's happiest countries, according to the 2015 World Happiness Report, ... Bringing countries together in a big bloc such as the EU doesn't help increase social capital. And when some countries in such a union do worse than others, their social fabric rips in a dramatic way, trust erodes and th…

An array of sophisticated language technologies could help ideas flow across EU borders, link national conversations together and support the EU Online Public Sphere - the demos the EU needs. But BloggingPortal is unlikely to feature them. [update (17/5/15): I finally decided to kick Medium's tyres by reposting this there, with less history. …

"The much fussed-over crisis in media isn’t the crisis of journalism. "Printing yesterday’s news on paper and slapping an ad on it — that’s a 19th-century formula, and in 2015 there are reporters and executives who are surprised the model isn’t working. The nostalgia for a past that was a very comfortable one at the beginning of our careers and so…

"Min-Soek Pang of Temple University found that for every dollar governments invested in technology, spending decreased by $3.50. ... It’s not just investing in gadgets that shrinks government, but investing in tech talent that makes things run better." - How Government Shrinks Itself—By Investing In Technology - ReadWrite

"a year after Russia swallowed Crimea, the EU is moving into the propaganda business in a bid to win an information war it is currently losing... the EU’s spin-team is to be largely made up of the same civil servants who have so miserably failed to convince the bloc’s own citizens of the benefits of Europe. Having worked with EU officials for alm…

"Dogfooding is the golden rule of platforms. And currently, open government portals are flagrantly violating this golden rule... I can’t find a single example of a government entity consuming the data they publish... For the most part, inter-agency data sharing doesn’t happen ...when it does, the agencies set up non-public back channels to push a…

Comment moderation and online community management strategies for news organisations, but relevant to government sites too: "Comments are a way for readers to connect with one another, and with the journalists and editors reporting the news. But ... can quickly turn uncivil, and news organizations often don’t have the resources or manpower to con…

Good case study, concluding with observations on the role of journalists which also apply to government communicators: "An engaged journalist's role in the 21st century is not only to inform but to bring readers directly into the conversation through... real-time coverage, alternative story forms, crowdsourcing, beat blogging, user-generated co…