Category: Uncategorized

DefectiveByDesign.org a joint project of teh Free Software Foundation and CivicActions got some digital ink this morning in the Chicago Tribune. Columnist Eric Zorn wrote about Amazon’s Unboxed license agreement which FSF ED Peter Brown described as: [A] road map for what all content providers want to have down the line: Their goal is to…

I went to see “Who Killed the Electric Car” over the weekend. It is a nice little documentary that will make you really mad if you are anything like me. Big oil, and big auto have way to much control in our government.

There were to good stories on NPR and PRI about technology today. The All Things Considered bit is about back to school technology, back to school sales and what is “wanted” vs “needed”. Market Place ran a story about wireless email access and vacations.

In mid September nearly the entire CivicActions team will converge in Amsterdam for our fourth Quarterly “off siteâ€?. It is an anniversary of sorts, we were in Amsterdam in October of 2005 for our first offsite. As a virtual firm, distributed across the world, we make it a point of coming together on this periodic…

TerraPass a company that allows the public to buy carbon offsets in the cap-and-trade system (you buy carbon polution that companies are selling basically) to offset CO2 polution from driving has introduced a flight calculator. Visit the

Never mind that the penguins look like a little L:inux Penguin, or that the video is actually not funny at all, it seems that this piece of YouTube ephemera mocking Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth” has an inconvenient truth of it’s own: the video seems to have been paid for by a PR firm that counts Exxon…

Kaliya Hamlin pointed me to this article about Mashup Camp (not to be confused with MashPit the Mashup hackathon that Chris Messina envisioned and has been involved with.) Mashup Camp is an unconference utilizing open space strategies like the law of two feet. Apparently unconferences are becoming so popular that “Doug Gold and David Berlind,…

CivicActions launched HightowerLowdown.org on Monday. This site follows on our launch, earlier this year, of JimHightower.com and last year’s Hightower Roadmap, our first project with Hightower’s team.

M&R Strategic Services did a quick little study on the effectiveness of images in advocacy emails. Basic idea is now that so many people block images in their mail clients, or their mail clients do it for them, images may hurt, rather than help the organization. You can read the 4 page study here. From…

Kaliya Hamlin, a friend of mine from various converenences, is involved in the planning/convening of an open space conference in Vancouver about single sign on, identity related issues. What do I mean by that? Well, I think Kaliya can explain it better. I agree with her that it is important for folks from our sector…