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New Sites Document Community Biochar Business Ventures
We've been working on a new group of websites to document AHG owner Adriel Hampton's efforts as a biochar entrepreneur. Adriel has been researching biochar as a carbon mitigation strategy, and has been interviewing popular chatbot ChatGPT about the…
Avoid Election-Season Burnout
Guest Post Election season can be a stressful time for everyone, but it's especially hard on those of us working in politics and political media. Campaigning, working with email data and append services, reporting, and organizing volunteers for…
Four (Fun) Ways to Improve Marketing Performance
Data-driven marketing is about a lot more than just clean, complete lists with accurate phone, email, and address data. To get the best results for your outbound campaigns to reach and convert your prospective customers, it’s important to…
How to Build Your Company’s Marketing Strategy From the Ground Up
If you’ve just started your own business, you need to increase visibility for your company. That means creating a comprehensive strategy for your brand new marketing department. Even if you’re interested in working with a marketing agency like The…
Tips for Hiring Freelance Marketing and Sales Pros to Support Your Business
Guest post by Jenna Sherman from parent-leaders.com. Photo by Amy Hirschi on Unsplash. As a business owner, you rely on marketing and sales experts to attract customers and drive growth. However, if you're just getting your business off the ground,…
The Pandemic and the Transition to New Political Communication
The COVID-19 pandemic has upended a lot of assumptions. We used to think that things like work location, physical proximity and functional spatiality were all fixed concepts. Remote work was considered a novelty and people were expected to gather…
Is a Mars Mission Feasible?
In an interview late in his life, Carl Sagan speculated on the number of reasons humans would want to colonize Mars. "I don't know why you're on Mars," he said. "Maybe you're there because we recognize we have to carefully move small asteroids…
Can Tech Help Get Out the Vote in a Chaotic Election?
Success in getting out the vote — motivating potential voters to register and then participate in mail-in or in-person voting — acts as the canary in the coal mine for American democracy. Voting is something that the least powerful and most…
Ideographs in the Economy of Political Communication
If you were to open up any campaigning handbook to the messaging section, you’d inevitably find exhortations, commands, and reminders to keep your messages short: short slogans, non-complex sentences, memorable short phrases. It’s reminiscent of…
Propaganda vs Disinformation: What’s the Difference?
The idea that powerful people lie to us to achieve political objectives seems like the bleakest of political truths. There is a silver lining, though: it's the idea that they think they have to lie to us, that they must lie to us because they would…
The AI Debate and Both Sides’ Worst-Case Scenarios (and How to Evaluate Them)
What's the best-case scenario for the application of artificial intelligence? What's the worst-case scenario for AI going wrong? There are, of course, speculative answers to these questions, and it's interesting to list them. But there is also a…
‘Everything We Do is About Solid Execution and Measurable Results’
Phil Mandelbaum recently interviewed me about leftists organizing and technology activism for herald.news. I got to talk a bit about what makes my digital agency tick. We specialize in technology projects for left campaigns and causes. Our original…
Three Non-Obvious Ways the Covid-19 Pandemic Changes Campaigning
Remember, oh, a year ago, what we thought the 2020 election cycle would be like? There'd be unprecedented ground energy for the presidential candidates' campaigns. There'd be intense downballot races and efforts to flip the U.S. Senate and,…
Aesthetics (and Finances) Matter As Space Tourism Takes A Flying Leap
From steampunk and Paleofuture.com to Stanley Kubrick's interpretation of Arthur C. Clarke, the images of space, future, and esoteric technology have stimulated consumers of speculative fiction. But those images have also influenced actual…
The Challenge of AI Regulation—Top-Down or Bottom-Up?
CEOs and the wealthy intelligentsia of technology are calling for regulation in much the same way that Mark Zuckerberg says he'll welcome regulation: as a kind of banner or veneer of legitimacy, designed to decrease risk and increase public ethos.…
7 Problems with predictive policing
For those who either fear or welcome the world of Philip K. Dick's Minority Report, we're getting there and it's time to take stock. Although we aren't talking about actual clairvoyance of crimes and criminals, or about preventative detention based…
Sci-Fi Shows Us Benevolence and Vulnerability in AI Characters
Benevolent and vulnerable superintelligent robots are notable because they are atypical. In both the real world and in many science fiction stories, there's something rather grey and mundane about AI. In particular, it seems like the stereotype is…
Election 2020: boots on the ground & bits in the cloud
I'm getting excited about the election. I feel my pulse get a tiny bit faster watching political ads, getting text messages, seeing people volunteer. It feels "American" even though I know we don't always live up to our ideals. Not all the Founders…
What does 2020 Hold for Big Data, AI and Tech?
Forbes predicts "AI, Disinformation, and Human Augmentation" in 2020 and I can't say I disagree, but let's take a deeper dive. I'm especially interested in the way that new technology, and new conversations, are building upon existing ones. 2019…
Per-Vote Municipal Election Spending and Climate Change: Seattle Questions
Crises, divisions, and battle stakes are all accelerating. That's why it's increasingly important for political candidates to have good information on voters, using vendors like our client Accurate Append, an email, and phone contact data quality…
Why Educating Policymakers Is Not Enough
There's an interesting new article up at Texas National Security Review on policymaking, and specifically on policy "competence." Titled "To Regain Policy Competence: The Software of American Public Problem-Solving," the article laments the decline…
Doing Data & Education Well
Done correctly, big data can make education better. Pritom Das just posted three significant changes in education policy and practice driven by data innovation. They include personalization (tracking student behaviors and preferences to develop…
Big (and Fast) Quantum Data
"Of all the theories proposed in this century," physicist Michio Kaku wrote in Hyperspace, "the silliest is quantum theory. In fact, some say that the only thing that quantum theory has going for it is that it is unquestionably correct." Last…
Data, Election Hacking, and Paper Ballots
Thomas Paine wrote that "the right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which other rights are protected." Taking away that right reduces us "to slavery" and makes us "subject to the will of another." Regardless of whether you're on…
Healthcare Staffing Is the New Data Commodity
If you have nursing credentials, and are willing to travel to meet the ever-shifting (and ever-growing) demands of healthcare providers, chances are that your contact information will be part of varying bundles of data bought, sold, or traded by…
Leadership as Dialogical Communication
South African artist and sculptor Lawrence Lemaoana has a piece called "Democracy is Dialogue" standing in front of old Johannesburg City Hall. The statue is of "a woman protester with a baby strapped to her back. She has a protest placard in one…
One Quick Trick for Increasing Your Podcast Plays
Back in 2009, I produced and hosted a no-budget podcast about the emerging use of social media in government called “Gov 2.0 Radio.” If I were to do it again today, there’s one tool I’d definitely use to grow my audience: ActionSprout. During my…
Local Government Transparency as Value Criterion
Stick the word "transparency" into a news database. Limit the search to the past week. You'll pull hundreds of links: letters to the editor on a local government body's lack of transparency. Congressional hearings on transparency in the federal…
Google and the Right to Be Forgotten
The "Right to Be Forgotten" doctrine is controversial in the United States in ways that frankly surprise most Europeans. The latter are used to the eternal complex struggle to balance the rights of individual and community, and are not used to the…
Comprehensive Communication Tools and the Culture of Government Teams
How is organizational culture changing in government offices? And how are collaborative platforms part of that evolution? Although this is far from a scientific observation, I think as our political culture has embraced more grassroots populism over…
Juicing Your Twitter Visibility To Get Quoted by the Media—Secrets of an Unabashed Reply Guy
I want to tell you what I did to get millions of new Twitter impressions and win coverage in five news articles in just 28 days. I was quoted fighting for progressive values here: Trump Just Threw Some Serious Shade At Fox News For Their ‘Very…
California’s ‘No Party Preference’ Voters, Crossover Democratic Presidential Primary Ballots, and AB 681
I recently wrote about how newly registered voters in California are, in overwhelming numbers, deferring party registration. Astute political friends pointed out that California’s new “motor voter” registration at the DMV defaults to “No Party…
What Do We Do with All These Voters (or, Problems We Want to Have!)
There are two relevant facts about the 2018 midterms that should guide the strategic choices of future campaign organizations. First, MORE PEOPLE voted. This election’s turnout, a high for midterms, is only slightly lower than 2016’s 56 percent…
Other Campaign Media Don’t Trade Off with Email – and Won’t Replace It Anytime Soon
Two declarations I hear a lot from political activists who aren’t really familiar with the ins and outs of digital campaigning: (1) email soliciting is impersonal, dehumanizing, and alienating; and (2) email is a flash-in-the-pan campaign medium…
Accurate Append Leads with Rock-Solid Data Practice
Accurate Append is that special kind of tech company that bridges cutting-edge practices and traditional brick-and-mortar businesses. You’d go to them if you need to merge and enhance complicated contact data sets, or if you need to deliver a few…