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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 facilitation...

Grad school advice

From time to time people ask me for advice about whether and how to apply to graduate school. I completed a PhD in political science at Harvard in 2004 and have thought a lot about whether, when and how people might want to apply to graduate school. Over time I’ve...

Moving WordPress: redirects

I recently moved my blog from http://alexandrasaamuel.com/blog to http://alexandrasaamuel.com. That involved not only moving my actual WordPress program files but also figuring out how to redirect visitors following outdated links to my old content. Today the...

.bed

Our headboard needs an ICANN-accredited domain registrar. We always come up with the best domain names as we're falling asleep, and forget them by the morning. No godaddy jokes, please.

This sheep talks back

On my way back from this weekend's meeting of the Online Deliberative Democracy consortium I had a chance to enjoy the ever-increasing vigilance of US airport security. At the end of my last US visit I ended up at the airport with a colleague who relayed the...

My 10 sites

As promised, I'm picking 10 sites for my bookmark bar; in fact they're pretty much there already. Here's what I'm going to try to live off of for the next week, with no search and no typing addresses into the address bar: My blog's admin page My del.icio.us page My...

Take the 10-site challenge

I'm blogging this from Mike Weiksner's sidekick and it is painful not to have one, bluetooth or no bluetooth. (Its one major shortcoming.) The phenom of mobile browsing - which makes typing a little annoying - reminds me of a favourite question of mine: if you were...

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...

Online tools for ODDC: URLs

I'm in Minneapolis for the Deepening Online Deliberation workshop hosted by the Online Deliberative Democracy Consortium. We had a terrific conversation today about some of the tools available for online deliberation and for collaboration among deliberation...