The accepted storyline on President Obama’s souped-up hot rod of a super-secure executive branch Blackberry runs like this: Presidents too often exist in a bubble, insulated from real people and the world outside the sturdy White House gates. There’s some truth to that, of course, but much of that isolation has tended to be self-inflicted [...]

If President-elect Barack Obama and his transition team are looking for a model that uses the power of social networks and citizen democracy to open up government, they ought to bring their own homepage – Change.gov – and replace the g-o-v with a little o-r-g. Online social activism portal Change.org, whose origins predate (by just [...]

Most of the old Palace of Westminster was lost in a disastrous fire in 1834, and much of what was rebuilt to form the modern Parliament chambers of Great Britain by the Victorians was damaged or destroyed by German bombs in the Second World War. So the seat of British democracy is a mixture of [...]