Civicist

CIVIC TECH NEWS & ANALYSIS

Month: September 2015

Categories
future of work Sharing Economy

HOUSE SUBCOMMITTEE CONSIDERS “HOW SHARING IS FARING”

HOUSE SUBCOMMITTEE CONSIDERS “HOW SHARING IS FARING”

Of the witnesses, only one pointed out that lumping these companies and issues together as the “sharing economy” was a mischaracterization and a problem.

Yesterday, as part of the ongoing “Disrupter Series,” the House Commerce, Manufacturing, and Trade Subcommittee held a hearing on the “sharing economy” entitled “How Sharing is Faring: Growth and Adjustment in the Sharing Economy,” although it was evidently later retitled “How the Sharing Economy Creates Jobs, Benefits Consumers, and Raises Policy Questions.”

Witnesses included a vice president of Intuit, a personal finance software company, an assistant vice president of Property Casualty Insurers, a driver-partner with Uber, the chief economist at Thumbtack, an online marketplace for specialized services, the president of the Internet Association, a trade association representing Airbnb, Intuit, Lyft, Uber, and others, and the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Of the witnesses, only one, Jon Lieber, the chief economist at Thumbtack, pointed out that lumping these companies and issues together as the “sharing economy” was a mischaracterization and a problem.

Lieber said:

A quick note on terminology – because these services are essentially connecting people to other people, they have attracted a variety of ever-changing terms to describe them. One popular term – the “sharing economy” – is particularly inapt due to the fact that the one feature each of these services has in common is that money is being exchanged for a service. There is no actual “sharing” in the sense of which we learned about in preschool. The gig-economy, 1099-economy, collaborative consumption, peer-to-peer, on-demand… these terms confuse the issue of what is actually happening with the changes we are seeing in how people are turning their time and effort into money.

He went on to explain why this has policy implications:

Being precise in how we talk about these issues is important because the differences in the business models raise different sets of policy considerations. To take two prominent examples, Uber and Airbnb have both figured out how to take underutilized resources, private cars and private dwellings, and create productive assets out of them by enabling people to “share” them with others for a fee. But saying they are both part of the same sector totally obscures the radically different policy issues raised by both. Airbnb doesn’t have the labor issues that Uber does, and Uber doesn’t have the zoning and other issues that Airbnb does.

In spite of these points, it seems likely that the tyranny of the phrase “sharing economy” will continue, since statements by other witnesses and from the Energy and Commerce Committee use the phrase without question or air quotes.

 

Michael Beckerman answers some follow up questions.

Michael Beckerman answers some follow up questions.

“These companies have an extraordinary story to tell,” said Michael Beckerman, the president of The Internet Association. “Their story is about job creation, economic growth, opportunity, and life changing flexibility.” His breathless testimony invoked the metaphor of the “tale of two cities” to describe the difference between states and cities that have tried to regulate new companies (“growth is stifled, and opportunities are lost”), and those that have not (“consumers and the local economy have seen job creation and growth”).

Beckerman also made an interesting clarification about the nature of the “sharing economy” platforms he represents:

But first, I’d like to put the sharing economy in the proper macroeconomic context. Sidecar, Uber, and Lyft are neither taxi companies nor transportation companies. They are technology platforms connecting supply and demand. Likewise, Airbnb is not a hotel or lodging company. It is a technology platform that connects supply and demand. In 1980, for example, if you wanted a ride to the airport, you might pick up the Yellow Pages and look up a phone number for a car service, then call to arrange a pickup. In that pre-Internet age, the Yellow Pages served a similar function that Lyft and Uber do today connecting supply (the driver) with demand (the rider).

Whatever Uber and Airbnb are, they are not merely the Yellow Pages.

Job growth and creation were front and center, and for the most part the “sharing economy” was presented as being unquestionably good in this area. In the background memo sent to the subcommittee members before the hearing, a section on “Observed Benefits” cited the “new income opportunities.”

“The reasons for seeking freelance work or renters vary widely,” the memo reads, “and individual success stories come in myriad forms, but it is clear that a significant number of Americans are taking advantage: one survey finds that about 34 percent are freelancing, and another report projects 40 percent will be “contingent” workers by 2020.”

Note the positive-sounding phrase “taking advantage,” when some cases must also be “falling back on” or “resorting to.”

Representing Uber driver-partners, Luceele Smith testified to the benefits of working for the company, praising the flexibility: “I have worked in traditional jobs before, but there’s nothing else out there where you can set your own schedule and set your own goals. Sometimes drivers ask me, ‘how much do you make?’ I tell them, ‘you can make as much as you want.’”

Reading through the testimony—of all the witnesses, not just Luceele Smith—it’s interesting to see how easily the benefits of self-employment and the “sharing economy” are conflated as one and the same.

David McCabe reported for The Hill that the questions that followed split along partisan lines, with Republicans expressing concern that regulation would hurt job creation and stifle innovation and Democrats raising questions about worker protections and rights, as well as the safety of consumer data.

McCabe writes that the “hearing represents the first move by Republican lawmakers to exert their authority over the issues associated with the on-demand economy,” and points out that Republicans in Congress are playing catch-up with the GOP contestants in the presidential primary in this regard.

The voice of caution in the proceedings was Dean Baker, the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, who Politico identified as the “Democratic witness.”

He outlined a litany of risks and issues that arise from the so-called sharing economy, and his testimony should be required reading on the subject. The four categories of regulatory issues Baker identifies are: labor regulation; consumer protection regulation; property rights; and rules prohibiting discrimination in the provision of services—an issue which had received little to no attention from others.

Categories
First Post

LEADERS AND FOLLOWERS

LEADERS AND FOLLOWERS

Science by the people, for the people; @Snowden on Twitter; and more.

  • This is civic tech: The annual Code for America Summit starts this morning on the west coast and is streaming its main hall sessions live. I’ll be attending along with my colleague Erin Simpson—come say hi!

  • The White House is holding a live webcast forum on citizen science and crowdsourcing called “Open Science and Innovation: Of the People, By the People, For the People” today from 8am-noon EDT. Watch at wh.gov/live.

  • Chicago’s sharp-elbowed Mayor Rahm Emanuel is planning to privatize his city’s pioneering 311 operation, Russell Berman reports for The Atlantic. It’s not clear from his story, though, whether Emanuel—who has run into criticism for privatizing other city services like its parking meter system—is merely seeking to shift the call-center work to a cheaper, non-unionized vendor, which could save the city a measly $1 million, or if he is looking for a company that will modernize the whole 311 system.

  • The Smart Chicago Collaborative has just launched “The @CivicWhitaker Anthology,” a collection of Christopher Whitaker’s writings on civic tech.

  • The Council for Big Data, Ethics, and Society is calling on researchers, practitioners, and educators to provide case studies based on real-world examples that examine complex issues of data ethics.

  • Snowden’s new platform: NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden is now on Twitter at @snowden, Dan Froomkin reports for The Intercept. His decision to start using the service appears to have been prompted by an interview he recently did with astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. “You and I will be Twitter buddies,” Snowden told Tyson. “Your followers will be: the Internet, me, and the NSA.”

  • Hilariously, @snowden has chosen to follow just one account so far: @NSAGov, the official account for the National Security Agency.

  • Former New York Governor George Pataki called on Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to “not give a platform to terrorists or traitors” and to “shutdown @snowden,” The Guardian’s Ben Jacobs notes.

  • Dorsey didn’t respond directly to Pataki, but instead tweeted a welcome to Snowden, retweeted him saying “Hero, traitor—I’m just a citizen with a voice,” and also a graphic showing “the world’s response” to Snowden’s joining the site.

  • Speaking of Twitter, after winning one of the MacArthur Foundation’s flagship “genius” grants, writer Ta-Nehisi Coates went on a tweet-storm yesterday to DEMOLISH the whole notion of “GENIUS.” Just read a bit back in his timeline for the full flavor.

Categories
First Post

WINNOWING

WINNOWING

The third wave of civic reform; censorship in the App Store; and more.

  • Tech and the presidentials: Vox’s Ezra Klein has noticed that “The tools that party insiders use to decide both electoral and legislative outcomes are being weakened by new technologies and changing media norms,” and posits that this explains why outsiders and insurgents like Donald Trump, Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina and Bernie Sanders are doing much better than party insiders want and media elites would expect. Couched that carefully, Klein’s statement isn’t really controversial, though clickbait being what it is, he portentously titled his post, “A theory of how American politics is changing.”

  • Not surprisingly, Mother Jones’ Kevin Drum disagrees that anything that seismic has happened.

  • My view: Sanders (who is close to hitting the million mark in his small donor total—one-fourth the total number of donors Barack Obama had in 2008 by the end of the election) is clearly benefiting from his and his supporters’ mastery of online media. I suspect that Trump, Carson and Fiorina are benefiting more from rightwing talk radio. But either way, the old “Gang of 500” (Mark Halperin’s term for the “campaign consultants, strategists, pollsters, pundits, and journalists who make up the modern-day political establishment”) has far less influence over the winnowing process than ever.

  • Food for thought: The House Energy and Commerce Committee is holding a hearing this morning on the disruptive impact of the sharing economy, featuring testimony from executives from Intuit, Uber, Thumbtack, the Internet Association and the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

  • This is civic tech: The Sunlight Foundation’s president Chris Gates takes to GovTech.com to describe his vision of the “third wave of civic reform” where evidence based on open data helps communities runs themselves more effectively.

  • Government websites should start improving, prodded by new design standards developed in part by 18F and the U.S. Digital Service, reports Alex Howard for the Huffington Post.

  • This is civic dreck: The mayor of Lewiston, Maine wants to create an online registry of state welfare recipients, but as the Huffington Post’s Arthur Delaney reports, he isn’t getting much support in the legislature.

  • Sam Biddle of Gawker zings Apple for censoring an app made by Josh Begley of The Intercept that notifies users of U.S. drone strikes. The company said it was removed from the App Store due to “excessively crude or objectionable content.” Meanwhile, as Biddle notes, Apple happily hosts dozens of crude and objectionable apps that let people track their body smells, stalk women, and the like.

Categories
First Post

PROMISES

PROMISES

Digital justice in Detroit; new Facebook company team taps into social causes; and more.

  • The news from Facebookistan: Facebook now has a social good team, led by longtime manager Naomi Gleit, reports Seth Figerman for Mashable. He writes, “Facebook’s social good team, which numbers in the dozens, is less focused on activism and on-the-ground work than building a new suite of products that tap into the social causes and personal needs of its community.” Gleit told him, “It really is bottom up. We don’t want to do whatever Mark thinks is most important or whatever I think is most important. That’s not the position we want to be in.”

  • Perhaps this is unfair, but can we please not use “social good” and “products that tap into” in the same sentence? At least put those phrases in separate sentences?

  • Related? Facebook is partnering with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to bring internet access to refugee camps, Somini Sengupta reports for the New York Times. “It’s not all altruism,” Zuckerberg admitted. “We all benefit when we are more connected.”

  • Connected: U2’s Bono and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg praise the UN Agenda for Sustainable Development goals, in particular the promise to provide Internet connectivity for all by 2020.

  • India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Facebook HQ and, not surprisingly, sang the praises of social media while he was there, the BBC reports. “The strength of social media today is that it can tell governments where they are wrong and can stop them from moving in the wrong direction,” he said in Hindi. “We used to have elections every five years and now we can have them every five minutes,” he added. But do they?

  • Food for thought: Don’t miss Sherry Turkle’s provocative piece in yesterday’s New York Times about how the “always on” generation is losing the ability to have a human conversation.

  • Also, Jack Smith IV asks some good questions in Mic.com about where the “disruption” of private services like laundromats is taking San Francisco.

  • This is civic tech: Melissa Jun Rowley of Humanise reports on Detroit’s Digital Justice Coalition, which is working to build a wireless mesh network to distribute internet access to the entire Morningside neighborhood, and Data Driven Detroit, which provides data analysis to strengthen communities.

Categories
First Post

KARASSED

KARASSED

When smart objects “can lie and cheat”; Nirvana band member et al. launch U.S. Open Source Party; and more.

  • Our brave new future: “As the Volkswagen case demonstrates, a smart object can lie and cheat,” writes technosociologist Zeynep Tufekci in the New York Times. And, she notes, we shouldn’t worry just about smart objects like cars, but also take note of the dangers of non-auditable voting machines.
  • Related: Jim Dwyer of the New York Times turns to Columbia University’s Eben Moglen, a longtime advocate of software transparency, to explain the lesson of the Volkswagen scandal: “Intelligent public policy, as we all have learned since the early 20th century, is to require elevators to be inspectable, and to require manufacturers of elevators to build them so they can be inspected,” Moglen said. “If Volkswagen knew that every customer who buys a vehicle would have a right to read the source code of all the software in the vehicle, they would never even consider the cheat, because the certainty of getting caught would terrify them.” The code in cars is, in fact, “tightly protected under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act,” Dwyer notes.
  • Hacking elections: With the Canadian national elections approaching, many citizens are turning to vote swapping sites in order to maximize the chances of their party winning the most seats, Samantha Rideout reports for Civicist.
  • The U.S. Commission on Presidential Debates announced the locations of next year’s general election events, and included this intriguing item: “An additional campus, Dominican University of California, will lead an initiative to use technology and social media to engage young voters in a discussion of major issues in the 2016 debates (#DUdebate16).”
  • Krist Novoselic (Nirvana band member and political activist), R.U. Sirius (techno/countercultural author), Nathan Wilcox (former political consultant) and Jon Lebkowsky (internet maven) have launched the United States “Open Source Party.” It is, they write, to be based on four simple principles: “Laws, policies, and political processes are seen as a body of code. The code, and any changes to the code, are visible and understandable: i.e., transparency is a fundamental. The code is accessible and modifiable. Anyone who shares our needs and values can access the code and propose modifications, which may be accepted by democratic consensus, or by executive decision in a framework decided democratically.” We’ll keep an eye on this effort.
  • The Asia Foundation reports on the ongoing progress of the MaePaySoh (Let’s Vote) Hack Challenge, which has rallied 130 developers in 30 teams who are working to build apps that will help Myanmar’s 32 million voters in its November 8 elections.
  • These may be the jobs that you are looking for: Civic Hall’s civic imagination fellow Andrew Slack is looking to hire a communications director and an operations director for a five-month campaign called “MayTheForceBeWithUs” focused on Star Wars and money in politics.
  • The Center for Government Excellence at Johns Hopkins University is currently looking to hire an analyst, a senior analyst, and an administrative coordinator. The center is helping the What Works Cities program create a culture of evidence-based decision making in midsize U.S. cities.
  • Network weaving: At the Change.org memorial for Jake Brewer in Washington, D.C., Monday night, his mother held the post-it he had on his monitor at the White House, recounts Jennie Kim Eldon in this moving post. It read “Cultivate the Karass.” For those of us who need a Kurt Vonnegut refresher, she explains that a “karass” was a term he invented in Cat’s Cradle for “a group of people who kind of get mixed up in each other’s lives in order to do God’s will.” I never heard Jake use this term but boy does that three-word phrase describe what he did. Now the #RebelAlliance will have to continue that work.
  • Related: Movement organizer Marianne Manilov suggests, on Twitter, the following “Idea: hashtag #brewered Def (v) to fully believe in someone’s possibility and tell them w/yr heart.”
Categories
First Post

Karassed

Karassed

When smart objects “can lie and cheat”; Nirvana band member et al. launch U.S. Open Source Party; and more.

  • Our brave new future: “As the Volkswagen case demonstrates, a smart object can lie and cheat,” writes technosociologist Zeynep Tufekci in the New York Times. And, she notes, we shouldn’t worry just about smart objects like cars, but also take note of the dangers of non-auditable voting machines.
  • Related: Jim Dwyer of the New York Times turns to Columbia University’s Eben Moglen, a longtime advocate of software transparency, to explain the lesson of the Volkswagen scandal: “Intelligent public policy, as we all have learned since the early 20th century, is to require elevators to be inspectable, and to require manufacturers of elevators to build them so they can be inspected,” Moglen said. “If Volkswagen knew that every customer who buys a vehicle would have a right to read the source code of all the software in the vehicle, they would never even consider the cheat, because the certainty of getting caught would terrify them.” The code in cars is, in fact, “tightly protected under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act,” Dwyer notes.
  • Hacking elections: With the Canadian national elections approaching, many citizens are turning to vote swapping sites in order to maximize the chances of their party winning the most seats, Samantha Rideout reports for Civicist.
  • The U.S. Commission on Presidential Debates announced the locations of next year’s general election events, and included this intriguing item: “An additional campus, Dominican University of California, will lead an initiative to use technology and social media to engage young voters in a discussion of major issues in the 2016 debates (#DUdebate16).”
  • Krist Novoselic (Nirvana band member and political activist), R.U. Sirius (techno/countercultural author), Nathan Wilcox (former political consultant) and Jon Lebkowsky (internet maven) have launched the United States “Open Source Party.” It is, they write, to be based on four simple principles: “Laws, policies, and political processes are seen as a body of code. The code, and any changes to the code, are visible and understandable: i.e., transparency is a fundamental. The code is accessible and modifiable. Anyone who shares our needs and values can access the code and propose modifications, which may be accepted by democratic consensus, or by executive decision in a framework decided democratically.” We’ll keep an eye on this effort.
  • The Asia Foundation reports on the ongoing progress of the MaePaySoh (Let’s Vote) Hack Challenge, which has rallied 130 developers in 30 teams who are working to build apps that will help Myanmar’s 32 million voters in its November 8 elections.
  • These may be the jobs that you are looking for: Civic Hall’s civic imagination fellow Andrew Slack is looking to hire a communications director and an operations director for a five-month campaign called “MayTheForceBeWithUs” focused on Star Wars and money in politics.
  • The Center for Government Excellence at Johns Hopkins University is currently looking to hire an analyst, a senior analyst, and an administrative coordinator. The center is helping the What Works Cities program create a culture of evidence-based decision making in midsize U.S. cities.
  • Network weaving: At the Change.org memorial for Jake Brewer in Washington, D.C., Monday night, his mother held the post-it he had on his monitor at the White House, recounts Jennie Kim Eldon in this moving post. It read “Cultivate the Karass.” For those of us who need a Kurt Vonnegut refresher, she explains that a “karass” was a term he invented in Cat’s Cradle for “a group of people who kind of get mixed up in each other’s lives in order to do God’s will.” I never heard Jake use this term but boy does that three-word phrase describe what he did. Now the #RebelAlliance will have to continue that work.
  • Related: Movement organizer Marianne Manilov suggests, on Twitter, the following “Idea: hashtag #brewered Def (v) to fully believe in someone’s possibility and tell them w/yr heart.”
Categories
Canada Democracy elections

ONLINE VOTE SWAPPING BOOSTS CITIZENS’ SAY IN CANADIAN ELECTIONS

ONLINE VOTE SWAPPING BOOSTS CITIZENS’ SAY IN CANADIAN ELECTIONS

Vote swapping is reinvigorating some citizens’ interest in elections by offering them a greater say, and perhaps a greater influence on election outcomes.

Although it would come as news to a sizeable chunk of Canadians, they do not elect their head of government—at least not directly. Like some other nations that used to be British colonies, Canada is governed by the Westminster system, meaning the prime minister is appointed by the Queen’s local representative, the governor general. Normally, this official appoints the leader of the party that wins the most seats in the House of Commons, making the prime minister a democratically chosen leader in practice, if not on paper.

However, this democratic choice is arguably distorted by the first-past-the-post (FPTP) voting system, in which the candidate who gets the most votes in an electoral district wins a seat. FPTP is usually (though not always) consistent with the popular vote when there are two dominant parties, as in the United States, but because most Canadian ridings (electoral districts) now have three or more non-“fringe” candidates, somebody can easily win a seat without earning the majority of the votes, just so long as he or she still has more votes than each of the competitors.

As a result, Canada’s government is often elected by a minority of the citizens. The current prime minister’s party, the Conservatives, had 39.62 percent of the popular vote in the 2011 election. The geographical distribution of these votes also happened to give the Conservatives a “false majority”: they hold over half of the seats in the House of Commons despite having earned under half the vote—and are therefore able to pass legislation without support from any of the other parties.

Given the potential for this kind of scenario, it isn’t unusual for Canadians to cast a ballot, not for the candidate they like the most, but instead for the person they believe has the best chance of defeating the candidate they like the least.

Leading up to the Canadian election scheduled for October 19, web-based vote-swapping hubs are offering another tactical option. Instead of simply voting for second- or third-choice candidates, vote swappers aim to pair up with somebody who lives in a riding where their preferred party has a real chance of winning a seat according to poll data and statistical modeling. Each partner in the swap agrees to vote for the other partner’s preferred party.

Dr. Mai Yasue, a conservation scientist in Vancouver, thinks her priorities are most in line with those of the Green Party, but her riding is a close three-way race between the Conservatives, the Liberals and the New Democratic Party (NDP). “Although I’d like to show my support for the Green Party and help them gain a reputation of being a real Canadian political party, the idea of helping to give a seat to the Conservatives is abhorrent to me,” she says. She is looking to swap her vote with a Liberal Party supporter in a riding with a strong Green candidate.

Preserving the overall vote count of small parties like the Greens is one of the advantages of vote swapping. “It’s a way to get their leaders into the house, and these parties bring important conversations to the table,” says Craig Hubley, one of the administrators behind Vote Swap Canada 2015, a Facebook group where would-be swappers can post want ads to find a partner.

Another purported advantage of swapping is that once you’ve committed to vote on behalf of somebody else, your conscience is more likely to send you to booth on election day—even if you’re busy or tired. “It creates a feeling of solidarity between myself and the person I’m swapping with,” says Marena Brinkhurst, an NDP supporter voting in Nova Scotia who found a Liberal partner in Quebec through Vote Swap Canada 2015. “We’re in different provinces and we support different parties, but we’re both in the same bind and we can help each other. It’s a refreshing moment of connection and trust to find during an election.”

In addition, swapping offers the option of voting for a candidate whose track record or ideas you admire but who isn’t running where you live. “Maybe you can’t stand any of the people in your riding,” says Hubley. “But there must be someone, somewhere in the country, whom you can respect.”

PILOTED IN THE USA

Informal vote swapping between family and friends has probably existed for decades if not longer. Even before Canadians took to the web in 2008 to swap votes with strangers, a similar endeavor had been tried during the American presidential election in 2000, when Ralph Nader supporters in swing states agreed to vote for Al Gore in exchange for Nader votes in predictable states. One of the websites facilitating these arrangements, voteswap2000.com, was threatened with criminal prosecution by California’s secretary of state, frightening it (and others) into shutting down. Seven years later, it was vindicated by a circuit court’s decision that these threats had violated the website creator’s freedom of speech. Online vote swapping has continued playing a minor role in the United States ever since.

The Gore-Bush race was so close that Gore-Nader swaps held the potential to change the outcome, but since 2000, the margins of victory in presidential elections have been wider. In Canada, by contrast, it’s recently been the rule rather than the exception that a few thousand vote swaps could theoretically make the difference between a majority government (that can largely do as it pleases) and a minority one (that must cooperate to a certain extent with other parties)—and once you get into tens of thousands of swaps then you could even give the government to an entirely different party and prime minister.

The challenge is making these swaps in effective places. “Local riding polls are expensive,” says Hubley. “They’re mostly done by parties and kept secret.” In 2011, some of the publicly available riding projections were off, so that vote-swapping hubs’ recommendations were off, too. “That’s part of the reason why, in the end, there was no seat that we could point to and say, ‘That was us,’” Hubley says.

Former Green Party leader and author Jim Harris is trying to address this problem by crowd-funding polls in key swing ridings via voteswapping.ca. “Statistical modeling is something to go by, but it’s not as reliable as an actual poll,” he explains, adding that the results of any polls he manages to fund will be made available to everyone, not only to the people formally registered to swap votes on his site.

HOW IT WORKS

There are several different ways a website can facilitate vote swapping. It can be a forum for posting want ads, it can host a partner-matching app, or it can be a place to register for swaps that will be orchestrated by humans behind the scenes. Each method has been tried out at least once, and each has its pros and cons. Want ads offer no privacy, but they let you zero in on exactly the type of swap you’d like to make for whatever reason. Different swappers might have different strategies in mind, and they can all simultaneously pursue them in a free-for-all.

The other two methods allow, if desired, for a more coordinated strategy—and administrators will ideally be transparent about what that strategy is. Voteswapping.ca, for example, is explicitly an anti-Stephen Harper site: its foremost goal is to prevent him from staying on as prime minister. Harris says this initiative is aiming to “concentrate swaps in fewer ridings and make a difference, rather than spread them out where their effect would be diluted.” To this end, only people who live in ridings that are known to swing between the Conservatives and another party can get a partner through voteswapping.ca. Those who live in “safe” ridings are encouraged to participate by spreading the word.

In the Canadian context, vote swappers tend to be anti-Conservative because the other four seat-holding parties—despite their differences—are all left-leaning by comparison. So far, formal swappers also tend to be people who are more politically engaged than the average citizen, according to Hubley, although most of them would of course like to see swapping take off as a mainstream practice.

Neither Harris nor Hubley are game for predicting how many people will take part this year. In previous elections, the numbers have been modest but not so small that a real impact has been out of the question. In 2011, around 78,000 visitors perused votepair.ca, the largest vote-swapping hub at the time, and over 7,500 of them formally signed up. (As a point of comparison, the Conservatives won a majority government in that election by 6,201 votes.) There’s also evidence that discussing swapping—or hearing that it’s going on—motivates more people to vote tactically, with or without a swapping partner.

The leader of the Green Party of Canada, Elizabeth May, might partially owe the seat she won in 2011 to this effect, Hubley says. The Green supporters trying to find a swap in her riding outnumbered the potential partners who had signed up there, and canvassers mentioned this when they were going door to door. Although they garnered only around 120 formal swaps this way, May defeated the Conservative incumbent by a landslide, against expectations. “A lot of people there in Saanich-Gulf Islands might have said to themselves, ‘Why should I vote in a narrow, partisan way when all these Greens are willing to look at the big picture and make a compromise? And why should a party with nearly a million supporters not have a single seat?’” says Hubley. “Maybe it tapped into a primate fairness/reciprocity instinct.”

PRESSURE-RELEASE VALVE OR PUSH TOWARDS PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION?

Elections Canada, the agency responsible for running federal elections, has weighed in on vote swapping only once, back in 2008. They said there is no law against it so long as no money is exchanged, but they also warned of the danger that your partner will not keep his or her promise to vote for your party of choice. Since it’s illegal to follow anyone into a voting booth and watch what they do, swapping must rely on an unverifiable handshake.

There would be less reason for vote swapping—and for assuming its risks—if elections were based at least in part on proportional representation (PR). Canadian citizens’ groups are advocating for this on Twitter under the hashtag #PR2015, and much of the chatter in vote-swapping web forums is about the kind of electoral reform that would make the practice obsolete.

Harris believes that vote swapping will accelerate the drive for reform, because parties and candidates would rather win or lose straightforwardly than have their fates decided by voter dealing. Also, the practice’s very existence—regardless of participation numbers—attracts media attention and highlights certain absurdities in the first-past-the-post system.

There’s reason to believe that adding an element of proportional representation to the voting system is not just a pipedream. The Canadian constitution does not stand in the way, the New Democratic Party has committed to it and Liberal leader Justin Trudeau has made it part of his election platform. Both the New Democrats and the Liberals currently have as good a chance of forming the next government as any party does.

Deciding exactly what types of reforms would best suit the country is another kettle of fish, and for his part, Hubley says he would rather stick with FPTP—with vote swapping as a “pressure release valve” for voter frustrations—than end up with any of his least favorite of the possible forms of proportional representation.

Whether from active campaigns by groups like Fair Vote Canada or merely from personal experience, plenty of Canadians are aware that many votes count for nothing under FPTP. Voter turnout in 2011 was 61.1 percent, 2008 saw a record-low 58.8 percent, and “the current system breeds apathy,” argues Yasue. If nothing else, vote swapping is reinvigorating some citizens’ interest in elections by offering them a greater say. “People who were feeling helpless have told me they’ve stopped feeling that way,” says Hubley. “The psychology of the swap is empowering.”

Samantha Rideout is a freelance writer and editor in Montreal.

Categories
Automation First Post

ARRAY OF THINGS

ARRAY OF THINGS

What $3 million in sensors will do for Chicago; Google hires part of “Netflix for books” team; and more.

  • Women are being asked inappropriately personal and family-related questions on stage at major tech conferences, Margaret Gould Stewart writes in Medium, and it is a waste of an opportunity for the participants on and off stage alike. Stewart argues that interviewers should either pose the same questions to men, or to stop asking them full stop. She also complains that the conference gift bags are sometimes tailored exclusively to men, which would annoy me, too.

  • Array of Things: Susan Crawford reports for Medium’s Backchannel on the sensor network that will soon be taking up residence in Chicago, tracking and reporting air quality, pedestrian traffic, ambient noise levels, and more. With $3 million in funding from the National Science Foundation, Chicago plans to deploy 500 devices by the end of 2017.

  • “I’ve seen innovation every damn day of my life and very little of it gets love from the likes of Silicon Valley,” writes Samala, in a piece published on Medium that touches on the tech culture in San Francisco and the greater Valley, neglected civic tech endeavors, and why she personally no longer believes that the Bay Area is “a mecca of innovation”:

    Put simply: “The industry is not building products and services that will change all lives for the better.”

  • Speaking of Silicon Valley, Geoffrey A. Fowler’s Wall Street Journal review of the iPhone 6s calls it the “stickiest iPhone yet,” a trap meant to wed us to Apple services and software and keep us there ’til death do us part.

  • And Google has hired most of the Oyster—the “Netflix for books”—team, Peter Kafka and Mark Bergen report for ReCode. This could mean that Google wants to launch a similar service down the line; if so, they’d be competing with Amazon.

  • Donald Trump shouts down reporter who asks about Fred Trump’s 1927 arrest during a Ku Klux Klan meeting, according to this interview transcript from New York Times reporter Jason Horowtiz. The story was first broken by Matt Blum in Boing Boing, which Trump dismissed in the Times interview as “one little website.” One little website can be one big thorn in one’s side.

  • Hollie Russon Gilman explains for Civicist how the new U.N. Sustainable Development Goals have civic participation written right into them. For more evidence that the hacktivist/build-with-not-for ethic has penetrated the U.N., see this U.N. Foundation-sponsored piece by Rosie Spinks in Good Magazine on “How Hackathons Could Make World Peace a Reality.”

  • After a year as the Chief Data Officers of LA, Abhi Nemani is ready to move on. These are his initial reflections on his time there.

  • Opportunity: The Knight Foundation is launching its second Cities Challenge in October, in which anyone can submit their idea for improving their city. The best ideas will receive some portion of the $5 million set aside for this challenge. See winning ideas from last year here and start thinking about your own proposal now. Applications will be available starting October 1.

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First Post

DIRECT SERVICE

DIRECT SERVICE

Kickstarter has reorganized as a Public Benefit Corporation; lessons from the Smart Chicago Collaborative; and more.

  • Our Jake: One of Jake Brewer’s White House colleagues likened him to the “mayor of the building” despite only having been on the job for 15 weeks, Sarah Wheaton of Politico reports as part of a round-up of tributes to our fallen friend.

  • Brewer’s behind-the-scenes work co-founding and building the pro-immigration group Define American is lovingly detailed by Elise Foley for the Huffington Post.

  • “We are mourning all that he had yet to do,” writes Jennifer Pahlka, the founder of Code for America. She includes two beautiful tributes to Jake in her post, one from his close friend Clay Johnson, and one from Ryan Resella, a Code for America Fellow. Read the whole thing.

  • Luke Fretwell, the founder of GovFresh, shares his memories of Jake Brewer.

  • The Jake Brewer memorial education fund has raised more than $264,000 from over 3,400 donors.

  • This is civic tech: Dan O’Neil of the Smart Chicago Collaborative explains why it’s “not your typical civic tech outfit.” He writes: “What we’ve learned at Smart Chicago is that direct service to regular residents beats any technology that any single developer can make by slogging along alone. We’ve learned that direct action—being in rooms with real people, working together, sharing our money and our food and our love—works.” Amen, brother!

  • Kickstarter has reorganized as a Public Benefit Corporation, its co-founders announced yesterday.

  • Food for thought: how the rise of the conversational user interface will re-orient how we interact with computers, by David Pierce for Wired.

  • Fusion’s Kashmir Hill offers a tour of anti-surveillance artist Trevor Paglen’s new gallery show in New York City.

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First Post

JAKE BREWER, 1981-2015

JAKE BREWER, 1981-2015

The civic tech community mourns Jake Brewer.

  • The civic tech community is in mourning at the untimely death of Jake Brewer, senior technology advisor to the White House, who was killed Saturday while on a charity bike ride in Virginia. Here is President Obama’s statement on his passing. It reads, in part:

    We set out to recruit the best of the best to join their government and help us harness the power of technology and data to innovate new solutions for the 21st century. Simply put, Jake was one of the best. Armed with a brilliant mind, a big heart, and an insatiable desire to give back, Jake devoted his life to empowering people and making government work better for them.

  • U.S. Chief Technology Office Megan Smith said, in part, “He had a generous heart and a vision for engaging with technology, data, and most importantly each other, to create opportunity and find solutions together. Jake lived and loved more in his 34 years than some people do in their whole lives.”

  • Jake’s wife, Mary Katharine Hamm, a Fox News contributor, shared her feelings on her Instagram account.

  • The Washington Post’s Moriah Balingit and Faiz Siddiqui spoke with several of Jake’s close collaborators, including Michael Silberman, who was on the charity ride with him Saturday and Jose Antonio Vargas, with whom he co-founded Define American.

  • Here is Define American’s statement on Jake’s death.

  • Conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, a friend of Mary Katherine Ham, Jake’s wife, shares his respects in the Washington Examiner.

  • Guy Benson, Mary Katherine’s co-author, has created a GoFundMe campaign setting up an education fund for their children.

  • Jake’s friends Adam Conner and Nicco Mele have put together JakeMemories.org. Send them your additions.

  • Change.org is hosting memorial gatherings tonight for Jake at its offices in New York City, Washington and San Francisco. Jake was its director of global policy before he went to the White House.

  • Here is my remembrance of our friend Jake.

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