Gavin Newsom

Thanks to everyone who participated in our wonderful event today, Twitter, Iran and More: Impressions from the Frontlines of the Global Media Revolution with Nico Pitney, Eric Jaye and Theo Yedinsky.  We had a packed house and more than a 1,000 people watching live online, our most viewed on-line event in the recent history of NDN. 

For those wanting to watch it again, or refer others to it, look back here in the next few days for a full video of the event. 

Thanks all.

Hope you will join us either at the NDN office or over the web for what is going to be one of our more interesting events of the year - a discussion with three people on the frontlines of the global media revolution.  Eric Jaye and Theo Yedinsky will be talking about the wildly innovative ways the Gavin Newsom for Governor campaign is currently using new media, particularly twitter.  They will be followed by Nico Pitney, of the Huffington Post, who has been at the very center of reporting on, and interpreting the extraordinary events in Iran these past few weeks.  

To learn more or to rsvp visit here, and I hope to see you later today! It is going to one of our better events of the year.

This week was an important week for NDN in the policy and legislative arenas as a top Democrat in the U.S. House of Representatives introduced legislation based on one of NDN's key initiatives, a proposal by NDN Globalization Initiative Chair Rob Shapiro to use the nation's infrastructure of community colleges to provide free computer training to all comers wishing to improve their IT skills. The proposal is targeted toward improving the computer skillls of U.S. workers in the increasingly globalized economy.

U.S. Rep. John Larson (CT-01), Chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, today introduced the legislation, H.R. 2060, on Thursday at a news conference with Shapiro.

The Community College Technology Access Act of 2009 is based on a paper Shapiro wrote in 2007, Tapping the Resources of America’s Community Colleges: A Modest Proposal to Provide Universal Computer Training. During the presidential campaign, then-U.S. Sen. Barack Obama endorsed the idea as part of his platform.

National Journal's Tech Daily Dose previewed the news conference and a good write-up in Community College Times.

On Wednesday, Nelson Cunningham, newly named Chair of NDN's Latin American Policy Initiative, made a splash in the Chicago Tribune with a major essay focused on President Obama's recent trip to the Summit of the Americas. Look for more commentary for Nelson, widely seen as one of the foremost experts on U.S.-Latin American relations in the United States.

Earlier in the week, President Barack Obama signed into law the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act, which dramatically expands the national service corps. NDN Fellows and Millennial Makover co-authors, Morley Winograd and Mike Hais, wrote a special essay to mark the occasion and did several interviews. Check out this fantastic piece by Susan Milligan in the Boston Globe, Kennedy's hometown paper, which quotes Morley and Mike, who finished the East Coast leg of their book tour last week. 

Their essay -- which also was cross posted by FutureMajority -- focused on the Millennials Generation's desire to serve and its identity as a "civic" generation. Morley and Mike also received a prominent mentioned on pollster.com.

NDN is always the place to go to talk new tools and media. When San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom announced his gubernatorial run last week via all new media, Carla Marinucci from the San Franciso Chronicle asked Simon to weigh in:

"The way that Gavin Newsom announced will become standard practice in the post-Obama era of politics," said Simon Rosenberg, who heads NDN, which studies Democratic policy issues. "We're seeing a reinventing of politics ... and in a state as wired as California, and a campaign as expensive as this one will be, the candidates who can figure out how to tap into the power and passion of their supporters will have an advantage."

And Morley and Mike talked to the Providence (RI) Phoenix about the Internet and new media. The take-away: while Rhode Island still has many older, non-Internet users, Ocean State politicians who ignore new tools and media do so at their own peril.