In her piece yesterday in the NY Times, Stephanie Strom reports on the increasingly willingness of national foundations, like Carnegie and Hewlett, to admit failures in their grantmaking. Hard to call it a trend with so few examples, but lets call it a trendlette.

What do William Gibson, George Orwell, Karl Rove, Chris Shays, Wikipedia and the rise of YouTube have to do with each other? Browsing today's news offerings, I find a connection.

Google the words “DailyKos” and you’ll get about 2.6 million results. Google the words “Democracy Alliance” and you’ll get about 44,000 hits, and from them you won’t find out much. That's why I'm writing to praise journalist Matt Bai's new book, The Argument.

Beth Simone Noveck has written a seminal piece on "Wiki-Government" for Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, and I recommend you read the whole thing. Noveck is Professor of Law and director of the Institute for Information Law & Policy at New York Law School and the McClatchy Visiting Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at Stanford University, who has been advising the U.S. Patent Office on its new open-source approach to involving the public in helping review patent applications, and that experience informs her vision. She lays out a powerful case for reinventing government with "civic software" (a term I once floated and still love) that "can shift power from professional sources of authoritative knowledge to new kinds of knowledge networks" and create a kind of "collaborative governance." I love it.

Semi-pro campaign journalism gets a mid-term review; Republican consultant launches NoJohn.com; Chuck DeFeo shares his secrets for getting attention online; Obama gets naked with his earmarks, will Clinton follow?; and now you can listen in too on those campaign conference calls.

I'm at the National Press Club for the launch of Stanford Prof. Larry Lessig's new project, Change-Congress.org. He's here as part of Sunshine Week, and his speech is co-sponsored by the Sunlight Foundation (which I consult for) as well as the Omidyar Network. As you may know, last year, Lessig decided to shift his focus from the fight for free culture to the fight for a clean government. Here are my notes on his talk, paraphrasing as best as I can...

The movement towards transparency and free information in government is gaining ground, yet a rec

A super interesting controversy has been brewing over LegiStorm, the transparency-obsessed site devoted to bringing public — but buried — documents and data to light.

Confronted by the prospect of internet-driven public participation in crafting legislation, the past head of the American League of Lobbyists says, "What's next? Are we going to let the American people decide our defense policy, our trade policy, our immigration policy?"

From Obama's "bitter" brouhaha to making new rules for the superdelegates, Internet activists are upending this presidential campaign.