Rebooting Tawain

Last year I had the great good fortune to edit a compilation of essays with my friends at Personal Democracy Forum called Rebooting America. The essays are all focused on reimagining our democracy for the digital age. Essayists are a who’s who of digital luminaries including Joe Trippi, Newt Gingrich, Tara Hunt, Craig Newmark, with a terrific foreword by Esther Dyson.

We decided to walk our talk and “open-sourced” the book by posting all of the essays for free online. This may have depressed sales of the hardcopy book, but we weren’t in this to make money (alas) but to get these ideas out into the cyberworld and, more importantly, the real world.

Yesterday we received an email that shows what an interesting little journey these essays are having.  Charles Chuang, the founder of the Drupal Taiwan Community asking for permission to translate the book into Chinese to distribute online in Taiwan.  Why exactly did he want to do this, we asked.  For three reasons, wrote Charles:  1) Reboot Taiwan, 2) Encourage and engage like-minded people, 3) Promote cyber-activism concept to elder people in local political parties.  Can’t argue with any of those reasons!

We’ll keep an eye on his website at http://net2.netivism.tw/projects/rebooting-america to see how Rebooting Taiwan is going.

Rebooting America is Launched!

Rebooting America, an anthology of essays that I co-edited with my friends from Personal Democracy Forum, was officially released this week.  It’s generated lots of fun conversations about whether and how we an reinvent our American democracy using new, social media.  I hope you’ll read the essays (including mine!) and consider buying a copy, too to support our “open-source” publishing model that encourages people to pay a fair vaue for our creative effort.

C’mon, take a peek!

Let Congress Tweet

I had no idea until I read Matt Stoller’s essay in Rebooting America that Congresspeople couldn’t use social media tools in their official capacity. As Matt writes, stupidity like this makes his “Obviousmeter” go off. The bottom line for Matt is if a 16 year old can use a widget or a gadget, Congress ought to be allowed to use it too. But, it if doesn’t have a .gov on the end, then YouTube and blogs doesn’t exist to Congress. Until last week.

Last week a brouhaha erupted in the House over the use of Twitter — or more specifically over the ban on the use of Twitter because it’s not a government approved something. Rep. John Culberson of Texas accused Dems of trying to shut down his personal Tweets. J’Accuse!!

The indefatigable Sunlight Foundation quickly jumped into fray launching their “Let Our Congress Tweet” campaign. I say let ‘em Tweet, ping, poke, post, upload, download because maybe, just maybe, a 21st Century Congress could do better than a 20th Century Congress — maybe.