Civicist

CIVIC TECH NEWS & ANALYSIS
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First Post

FINDINGS

FINDINGS

OpenStreetMap founder launches OpenGeoQuestion; the repercussions of #IStandWithAhmed; and more.

  • This is civic tech: The founder of OpenStreetMap, Steve Coast, has created a nifty new mobile app called OpenGeoQuestion that anyone can use to collect data in the field. He writes: “You can answer questions about where you are in a quick-fire way. You can also ask new questions for anyone else to answer, all over the world. What will be really interesting is—what questions will you ask everyone else about the environment. The data is aggregated together and then hopefully we can do meaningful things with it.”

  • Laurenellen McCann writes in praise of VoterVox’s effort to open American political participation up to a more polyglot population.

  • If you’d like to add your name to a “net neutrality” amicus brief drafted by Sascha Meinrath and Zephyr Teachout, which they are submitting to the DC Circuit Court of Appeals in the lawsuit by the U.S. Telecom Association challenging the FCC’s new rules for protecting the open internet, go here.

  • Vauhini Vara raises a great question in The New Yorker about Ahmed Mohamed’s cause celebre and the new age of flash celebrity: “…after a trending topic has been forgotten, people still have to live where they live. What, [Anil] Dash [a key amplifier of Mohamed’s story] wondered, would the child’s relationship with his principal and teachers look like in the future—and what about his family’s standing in Irving itself? Isn’t it conceivable, he asked me, that all the negative attention to the school and the town will, in the long run, harm the Mohamed family rather than help them?”

  • Tech and the presidentials: Remember during the Republican National Convention in 2008 when Sarah Palin belittled Barack Obama’s role as a community organizer, and a rapid-response email from the Obama campaign pulled in $10 million in donations from supporters in response? It’s not quite the same scale, but more than a year earlier in the process, an attack on candidate Bernie Sanders by Correct the Record, a SuperPac aligned with Hillary Clinton, that compared him to the new leader of the British Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, has generated more than $1.2 million in rapid donations to Sanders’ campaign, Sam Stein and Samantha Lachman report for the Huffington Post.

  • “We’ve never seen an immediate donor response like what the Sanders campaign received on Tuesday. At one point, it drove 180 contributions through our platform per minute,” Erin Hill, executive director of ActBlue, told Stein and Lachman. “Over its 11-year history ActBlue has sent money to over eleven-thousand campaigns and committees—and the Bernie Sanders campaign holds the record for the two biggest donor days ever for a campaign on our platform.”

  • The Bing Pulse analysis of Wednesday night’s GOP debate, while not a scientifically representative sampling of viewer responses, offers some fun findings nonetheless. Of self-identified Republicans who used the tool to register their responses to what the candidates were saying, the most negative response came to Jeb Bush’s declaration that “40 years ago, I smoked marijuana.” There were nearly 1.5 million viewer responses collected during the debate.

  • Mentions of Donald Trump in both traditional and social media are dropping, Ben Schreckinger reports for Politico. “He has stalled, potentially,” Echelon Insights’ Patrick Ruffini somewhat equivocally states.

  • Future, imperfect: Nilay Patel has a great explainer up on The Verge about the ongoing war between Google, Apple, and Facebook for your attention, and why the open web is losing.

  • For your weekend consideration: The new issue of Science includes this article, titled, “An ultrathin invisibility skin cloak for visible light.” Harry Potter fans, rejoice!

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First Post

SIGNS OF HOPE

SIGNS OF HOPE

Community-based solutions to ticketing and fines; 18F and the Department of Defense collaborate, saving millions; and more.

  • The Internet Public Speaks: Since yesterday, more than 1,000,000 tweets have included the hashtag #IStandWithAhmed, according to Topsy.

  • As Manny Fernandez and Christine Hauser report for the New York Times, the massive wave of support for the 14-year-old Texas boy arrested for bringing his clock invention to school included President Obama, who tweeted his support for Ahmed Mohamed and invited him to the White House.

  • The police now say they won’t pursue charges against Mohamed, the Dallas Morning News’ Avi Selk reports. The boy’s new Twitter account has 72,000 followers. As Selk reports:

    The joke to his big sisters, Ayisha and Eyman, is that Ahmed was invisible on social media before an outcry over his arrest made him an online sensation. Their tech whiz of a brother had no Twitter account, no Facebook, no Instagram or Snapchat. So the sisters set him up on Twitter as @IStandWithAhmed—a slogan that the world had given the boy as his story spread overnight. The young women stared at their phones Wednesday morning, stunned as the phrase became one of the most popular memes of the day.

  • These two photos of “an Arab-looking man of Syrian descent in a garage w/his accomplice building what appears to be a bomb” also got a lot of retweets.

  • This is civic tech: The winner of St. Louis’ GlobalHack V last weekend, which focused on creating solutions to improve the working of the city’s court system, was Inveo, which, according to Matt Meniette, Global Hack’s executive director, “developed a platform called CommuniSee that allowed residents to easily look up and resolve tickets through a variety of methods (e.g. by name and birthdate or through a simple map). Their solution also introduced a new way for residents, municipalities, and the private sector to collaborate to reduce the number of outstanding fines and fees: a tool for corporations or nonprofits to pay off outstanding fees in exchange for volunteer work and help hard-working individuals (many of whom may already be volunteering in their community) get a fresh start.”

  • A recent consulting project between the Department of Defense and 18F saved the DOD $150 million by taking a “more technically informed approach to procurement,” Federal Times’ Aaron Boyd reports. That’s more than the entire $105 million currently requested for the whole U.S. Digital Service.

  • April Glaser and Alison Macrina report for Slate on how the citizens of Lebanon, New Hampshire, came out in force Tuesday night in support of their library reinstating its Tor relay for safe, anonymous web browsing, which had been suspended after an inquiry from the Department of Homeland Security. By evening’s end, the library’s board voted to restore the relay. Glaser and Macrina report that “dozens of libraries” have contacted the Library Freedom Project as a result of the controversy, “hoping to set up their own Tor nodes.” They add, “This week’s victory for Lebanon Libraries is a sign of hope in a post-Snowden world.”

  • The Open State Foundation has uploaded its full Politwoops archive of more than 1.1 million deleted tweets by more than ten thousand politicians in thirty-five counties to the Internet Archive.

  • Tech and the presidentials: If you want to see how people watching last night’s GOP debate responded in real-time on Bing Pulse, check out this page. The three questions that came “from social media,” as CNN anchor Jake Tapper put it, raising the issues of medical marijuana, guns, and climate change, were a refreshing break from typical debate questions that tend to focus on personalities and the horserace.

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First Post

SCHOOLED

SCHOOLED

A homemade digital clock gets a 14-year-old Texan arrested; it is crazy easy to buy a good online reputation; and more.

  • Teach our children well: New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio is announcing today that within ten years all city schools will be required to offer computer science to all students, Kate Taylor and Claire Cain Miller report for the New York Times. Only one percent of the city’s students now get to take computer classes. Half of the $81 million to be spent to achieve this ambitious goal will come from private donors, including the AOL Charitable Foundation, the Robin Hood Foundation, and Fred and Joanne Wilson.

  • De Blasio might want to dispatch a few of his yet-to-be-hired computer whiz teachers to Irving, Texas, where a 14-year-old high schooler named Ahmed Mohamed was arrested Monday after his teachers called police because he brought a homemade digital clock to school and they mistook it for a bomb. As Avi Selk reports for the Dallas Morning News, the school’s principal threatened to expel him if he didn’t make a signed statement while being interrogated by cops and he’s now been suspended for three days. Mohamed has “vowed never to take an invention to school again,” Selk writes.

  • The boy’s case is now blowing up online, Nicole Stockdale reports for the Dallas Morning News, with many supporters using the hashtag #IStandWithAhmed.

  • This photo of Ahmed Mohamed as he was walked through school in handcuffs, surrounded by cops, was shared by his sister. Yes, he’s wearing a NASA t-shirt.

  • The city of Irving was last in the national news after its mayor claimed to be blocking the establishment of a “sharia law” court in the city. Politifact investigated that claim and found it to be false, noting that all that happened was “a few Muslim individuals teamed up to offer Sharia-governed, non-binding mediation services in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, including in Irving, with the declared intent of complying with state and federal laws.”

  • “A perfect shitstorm of Islamohobia and technophobia appears to have congealed outside Dallas,” writes Markus Wohlsen as the lede of his article responding to the case, telling readers of Wired how to make their own homemade clock that isn’t a bomb.

  • Isn’t it interesting what the internet public rallies around? Ahmed Mohamed’s case, which has instantly galvanized nerds and social justice warriors alike (some of whom are the same people—I’m thinking of the amazing Anil Dash, who is at the center of organizing support for Mohamed), is arguably the polar opposite of the Donald Trump phenomenon: smart instead of dumb, embracing the “other” instead of demonizing him.

  • Future, imperfect: “For less than an expensive dinner out at a 5-star restaurant,” Kashmir Hill of Fusion was able to give “a completely invented business a sterling online reputation.” Her expose of how she created and popularized something called the “Freakin’ Awesome Karaoke Express” should stop you in your tracks.

  • A drone belonging to an animal rights group was shot down over a fundraiser for Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) that included a pigeon hunt, reports Elise Viebeck for the Washington Post.

  • Civic tech news: “The rise of civic tech was the main topic at the morning session of Techonomy Detroit,” reports John Gallagher of the Detroit Free Press. He writes: “Beth Niblock, [Mayor] Duggan’s chief information officer, said the city has benefited from strong civic tech movements launched by private or non-profit entities such as Data Driven Detroit, which helped create the Motor City Mapping database of Detroit properties. ‘This is such a strong civic tech presence in Detroit,’ Niblock told about 200 attendees in the audience. ‘They had to be strong because government wasn’t functioning’ in Detroit’s pre-bankruptcy days.”

  • The Citizen Engagement Lab has announced the OPEN-US Kairos Fellowship to “address the racial disparity that exists within the digital movement by pairing robust recruitment with a training and mentorship program that creates a new cohort of tech-savvy campaigners of color.” Eleven fellows will be placed for six month apprenticeships at leading national and state organizations

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Mexico

IN MEXICO, COLLABORATING ON A CIVIC ENGAGEMENT APP

IN MEXICO, COLLABORATING ON A CIVIC ENGAGEMENT APP

Our thesis is that everyone in the city is an expert. Residents have an intimate understanding of the spaces they frequent within the city and have unique perspectives on associated challenges and possibilities.

Mexico City is huge. Over 21 million people live in the metro area, the most populous in the Western Hemisphere. Nearly 9 million people live in the federal district alone. There are pockets of immigrants from all over the world and of course the full spectrum of Mexican ethnicities. This means there are myriad interesting issues to tackle and a wide mix of opinions on how best to go about it.

From August 31–September 4, 2015, the MIT Center for Civic Media traveled to Mexico City for a workshop organized by the Laboratório para la Ciudad and MIT Media Lab. Gabriella Gómez-Mont, the Laboratório’s founder and director, is a Director’s Fellow at the Media Lab this year.

The workshop was an experiment in collaboration and innovation, part of the Laboratório’s mission. Considering how we at the Center for Civic Media strive to design civic interventions collaboratively with local partners, this was an exciting opportunity for us.

 

In a few intense days, we worked with Laboratório staff and local experts, as well as select students from nearby universities, to prototype projects worthy of Mexico City’s scale and complexity. Teams were organized by topic area—learning, data and mobility, and civic tech—and relied on a mix of existing and speculative technologies brought to the table by participants. Our team chose to focus on how to integrate new forms of citizen input into the planning and transformation of public spaces around the city using both digital and non-digital strategies. Our solution: EncuestaCDMX.

 

MAPPING CITIZEN INPUT IN REVITALIZATION

 

Our team’s thesis is that everyone in the city is an expert. Residents have an intimate understanding of the spaces they frequent within the city and have unique perspectives on associated challenges and possibilities.

 

On our first day, we spoke with two sets of experts to get a better understanding of the problem space. We met with members of Neri Vela, a community organization, to learn about citizen voice in the context of Mexico City and community organizing around redevelopment. We also sat down with representatives from the Public Space Authority, a government entity responsible for revitalization projects in public spaces throughout the city, to learn how they incorporate citizen input into their decision making. 

 

We identified opportunities to increase citizen voice and engagement in the planning process through the following channels:

 

  1. a multi-modal data collection system inclusive to citizens with different levels of digital access (in-person interviews + smartphone app use), and

  2. a public dashboard to provide analysis and visualization of collected feedback for both government officials and citizens

Our design goals for these channels emphasized securing buy-in from both officials and participating citizens. We considered the question: how might we incentivize engagement on both sides of this planning dialogue by making the input and analysis components accessible and relevant?

 

TEST SITE IDENTIFICATION

As a test location, we chose Libertad de los Pueblos, also known as Ho Chi Minh Park. Located two blocks away from the Laboratório in a high traffic area, the park was an ideal pilot space due to its proximity. The space was also under consideration for revitalization according to city staff, making the feedback we were soliciting from citizens relevant and authentic. Finally, it offered the opportunity to engage with a diverse mix of citizens as it attracts all manner of commuters, vendors, bus drivers, and residents.

 

COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT DESIGN

 

Before developing our survey, we did initial viability testing with citizens in the park to hear some of their initial impressions of the area.

 

One man we spoke with lives far to the north of the City. He works as a plumber and comes to the park to rest on a daily basis. His true passion is dancing and he said he would be interested in joining dance events if put on in the park. This helped us confirm cultural activities as a resonant category.

 

SURVEY DEVELOPMENT

 

We built on the Public Space Authority’s basic structure of prioritizing problems and opportunities by adding more experiential questions meant to assess how the space made residents feel and what words they associated with it. Through these fields we hoped to get a quick impression of what the park represents to people, rather than simply its specific problems or potential.

 

In order to ensure an inclusive range of feedback, we developed both digital and non-digital outlets for citizens to participate. Working with a team of surveyors, we used a tool already being deployed in Mexico City (Flocktracker) to record interview responses with over 50 users of the park during a 40 minute window.

 

We found citizens were happy to be asked their opinion and offered detailed feedback on how they currently used the park and what they would like to see implemented in the space.

 

 

Screenshot courtesy MIT Center for Civic Media

Screenshot courtesy MIT Center for Civic Media

 

THE ENCDMX APP

 

To complement in-person surveys, we extended the Action Path app developed by the MIT Media Lab’s Center for Civic Media to allow smartphone users to submit their feedback directly. The Android app sends push notifications to users as they walk by the space, asking the same questions as the in-person interviews.

 

Using this location-based smartphone service, we are able to engage citizens who might be in the space when official surveyors are not present. The app can also reach those who may avoid in-person surveys and might prefer to offer their opinion in a private context.

 

PUBLIC DASHBOARD

 

In the interests of providing both city planners and citizens with real-time feedback on the information coming in, we developed a public dashboard that aggregates and visualizes the results from both channels.

 

In the case of our survey of Ho Chi Minh Park, the primary concern identified by citizens was trash and overall cleanliness. About a quarter of those surveyed said that free Wi-Fi would be one of the best additions to the park. The majority, however, suggested programming we had not included in our list, such as activities for kids and vocational training—underlining the value of citizen expertise. The word cloud provides a quick look into the impression most people have of the park. 

When future surveys are administered, we plan to distribute cards with the dashboard URL so that citizens can see how their responses fit into the bigger picture informing the Public Space Authority’s planning. This helps incentivize participation by closing the feedback loop, and creates an opportunity for public accountability.

FUTURE WORK

 

This week was a first step toward our big picture vision for engaging citizens in the planning of public spaces and capitalizing on their expertise. In the future, we want to:

 

  1. Make the app and survey process more playful, experimenting with different incentive structures among citizen survey takers and official surveyors

  2. Develop an installation like a kiosk or interactive signage that can increase the modes of engagement and thereby the inclusivity of the system

  3. Work with the Public Space Authority on a revitalization process from start to finish to create a system that truly expands and transforms the use of citizen voice in planning and policy-making

  4. Replicate the model with other partners and issues both within and beyond Mexico City

EncuestaCDMX was itself an incredible collaboration of citizen experts. We are thrilled to have had the opportunity to work with such a wide range of actors throughout the week and hope this deployment represents the start of a fruitful collaboration between the MIT Center for Civic Media and Laboratório para la Ciudad.

A version of this post was originally published on the MIT Center for Civic Media blog. Emilie Reiser contributed to the writing of this report.

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First Post

AUTOMATIC

AUTOMATIC

Tweet to donate; the Clinton campaign embraces nostalgia; we killed the sharing economy; and more.

  • California is on the verge of becoming the second state (after Oregon) to automatically register residents to vote, Andrew Prokop reports for Vox.

  • Writing for Politico, Andrew Zaleski uses Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers’ (R-Wash.) comments at Personal Democracy Forum 2015 as a jumping off point to discuss just how bad the state of tech in the Legislative Branch can be—”deplorable,” according to one chief of staff who did time in Silicon Valley. The co-founder of the Congressional Data Coalition, Daniel Schuman, compared what was happening in Congress to a lobotomy, especially when huge steps have been taken to advance technology in the Executive Branch. And Zaleski sites a Sunlight Foundation finding that says only 15 percent of congressional websites are ready for HTTPS.


  • It turns out Americans don’t want to share power drills, writes Sarah Kessler for Fast Company. The power drill was briefly the universally cited mascot of the sharing economy (“everyone owns one but nobody uses it more than 15 minutes”), but the platform(s) that would allow you to share small household items never took off, or folded completely. Kessler dives into why that is, finding that there really wasn’t much demand for sharing services (one co-founder of a sharing platform could not get THREE users—of the thousands who registered—to complete a transaction).



    Reading now (you know what they say about hindsight) it seems obviously incongruous to talk about charging people for participating in the sharing economy. It just sounds like renting (and Kessler does point out that the most successful “sharing” companies are those that track most closely with traditional companies like hotels, car rental services, or taxis). From personal experience, I think that a post on Facebook would likely turn up a power drill available to borrow—no middle man required.


  • An impending “tragedy of the commons”?: Thomas Lowenhaupt, the director of the nonprofit Connecting.nyc Inc., writes for City Limits that New York City has disbanded the .NYC Community Advisory Board (on which he served) leaving the development of the city’s online civic commons “rudderless.” Lowenhaupt calls for continued investment in the space and outlines why online common spaces are so important to a rich civic culture.

  • This Gotham Zoning map was inspired by the coloring of Sim City 2000.

  • Writing in his blog Democracy Spot, Tiago Peixoto ponders what it is about initiatives like SeeClickFix: to what extent is it the naming and shaming that gets government to respond to citizens, and how can we make them perform even better?

  • A win for fair use: Ben Sisario reports for the New York Times on the ‘Dancing Baby’ copyright case.

  • Annie Karni reports for Politico on the vintage photographs being posted on all of Clinton’s social media channels, in an effort to make her more “relatable.”

  • Brave new world: Twitter has announced a partnership with Square to allow anyone in the U.S. to donate to a presidential candidate via tweet.

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First Post

SCORING

SCORING

Behind the College Scorecard; the bureaucracy hacker at 18F; and more.

  • Government opening: Columbia law professor Tim Wu, “net neutrality” coiner and former candidate for New York state lieutenant governor, is going to work for Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, Thomas Kaplan reports for the New York Times. He will focus on issues involving technology.

  • Related: Tuesday night at Civic Hall, Schneiderman is speaking on “tech & government” at an event sponsored by the NY Tech Meetup.

  • David Zvenyach, self-described “bureaucracy hacker” writes an inspiring post about what his first six months working for 18F, the tech SWAT team inside the federal government, has been like.

  • The chief digital service officer at the Department of Education, Lisa Gelobter, describes the development process that went into the new data-rich College Scorecard just released by the Obama administration.

  • Related: Michael Shear reports for the New York Times on why the administration abandoned its original goal of explicitly rating the quality of the nation’s colleges and universities, which had the aim of “publicly shaming low-rated schools that saddle students with high debt and poor earning potential.”

  • Tech and the presidentials: Hillary Clinton’s private email server was not wiped clean, according to the company that managed it, Rosalind Heiderman, Tom Hamburger, and Carol Leonnig report for the Washington Post. This means the emails could be recovered, they note, and it “could bolster her statements that her actions have been aboveboard, suggesting that she did not take active steps to hide her e-mails.”

  • Ruby Cramer reports for BuzzFeed on the HRC Super Volunteers, a network “of 1,200 or so core members” who are doing much of the work in states outside the first four caucus/primary match-ups. She reports trouble: “in recent weeks, HRC Super Volunteers have taken to their Facebook group to exchange concerns: The problem, according to a scan of the page allowed by a member who requested anonymity, is that while aides in Brooklyn ‘pour resources’ into the early states, they haven’t provided sufficient support to volunteers elsewhere.”

  • Tech billionaire Mark Cuban is hosting a rally for Republican frontrunner Donald Trump tonight at his Dallas arena. As Ben Schreckinger reports for Politico, he is one of several mega-rich guys now considering runs for office, inspired by Trump’s example. “My positions would be far different,” Cuban says.

  • Catherine Thompson of TalkingPointsMemo interviews online security pioneer John McAfee about his extremely odd campaign for president as the candidate of something he calls “the Cyber Party.”

  • Future, imperfect: Issie Lapowsky reports for Wired on the potential and pitfalls of peer-to-peer organizing to aid refugees.

  • Transitions: Hats off to Juliana Rotich, who is stepping down as executive director of Ushahidi after five years.

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First Post

ASSESSMENTS

ASSESSMENTS

Philly finally freed city property records; The Intercept enters the documentary space; and more.

  • This is civic tech: Juliana Reyes of Technical.ly Philly reports on how persistent efforts by open data advocates and civic hackers led to the city finally liberate city property records. In her careful report is the back-story to how changes in personnel and approach apparently won the day. As she details, Philly’s first chief data officer Mark Headd—a Civicist contributor—quit in some frustration at bureaucratic footdragging; his successor Tim Wisniewski managed to finish what he started working with a different and more progressive head of the city’s Office of Property Assessment.

     

  • MIT and Boston University have created a new legal clinic to support cutting-edge student innovation, responding to a series of incidents where students have run into legal troubles including Aaron Swartz’s prosecution. MIT Civic Media graduate student Nate Matias, who helped spearhead the effort, explains how it came to be.

  • The Sunlight Foundation’s Lindsay Ferris attended the Buntwani conference in South Africa last month, which brought together 70 key advocates for open government from across the region, and offers her takeaways from the event.

  • A year ago yesterday, we got the keys to 156 Fifth Avenue, Civic Hall’s home. Here’s a progress report that we just shared with Civic Hall members on our first six months of operation, from February through July 2015.

  • This is civic dreck: California VC and sometime politician Steve Westly, who is considering another run for governor, allegedly helped arrange an expensive retainer for longtime political fixer Willie Brown to get the San Francisco district attorney to intervene in a domestic abuse investigation into the CEO of digital-ad company RadiumOne, Jeff Elder reports for the Wall Street Journal. At the time, RadiumOne was trying to launch its IPO and Westly was on its board; its CEO, Gurbaksh Chahal, was allowed to plead guilty to two misdemeanors. A home-security video of Chahal allegedly striking his girlfriend more than 100 times over a 30-minute period was ruled inadmissible in court.

  • Indymedia: The Intercept and First Look Media are launching a documentary unit led by CitizenFour director Laura Poitras and two partners that will produce 40-50 short nonfiction films a year, Dave McNary reports for Variety. The unit, Field of Vision, will start with a short-form film by Poitras called “Asylum” focused on WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

  • CNN is going to stream the September 16 GOP presidential debate online for free, unlike Fox News which made the first debate in August unavailable to millions, reports Jeff John Roberts for Fortune.

  • Work futures: Discussing the sharing economy and election 2016, Freelancers Union head Sara Horowitz tells Politico’s Emily Guendelsberger that “I think that there are employees who are misclassified [as independent contractors], and that it’s completely right for the Department of Labor to go after those companies….[and]whether we call them employees or independent contractors or come up with some other type of classification—we have to come up with a safety net that supports that new part of the workforce.”

  • MoveOn.org is looking to hire software engineers; you can live anywhere.

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First Post

LEVELERS

LEVELERS

Yelp for jails; Clinton’s email apology: “sorry about that”; and more.

  • This is civic tech: Heat Seek NYC’s executive director Noelle Francois (a member of Civic Hall) has a guest post up on the National Low Income Housing Coalition’s website explaining how she and her team are helping tenants level the playing field when it comes to getting their landlords to fix the heat in their buildings. She writes:

    Our web-connected temperature sensors—essentially a thermometer connected to the internet—provide reliable, objective data to let everyone know when the indoor temperature dips below the legal limit. They automate the data collection process by taking a temperature reading once an hour, storing and analyzing the data on our servers, and calculating exactly when buildings are in violation of NYC housing code. Through our web app, tenants can log in to view their data and download heat logs. Our sensors are a simple, inexpensive solution to a widespread problem.

  • The Citymapper team, which has won open data competitions around the world for its urban transport apps, shares some really cool examples of how it is meeting the challenges of mapping cities where transport data doesn’t exist, such as the informal transportation networks of Mexico City and, most recently, the completely undocumented systems of Istanbul. I also enjoyed their decision to display a “future” tab on their London app, showing what the yet-to-be-completed Crossrail high-speed line will do for people’s commutes.

  • People are using Yelp to talk about jail because there aren’t many other outlets for their experiences, advice, and complaints, Beth Swartzapfel reports for the Marshall Project.

  • In a win for human rights and internet freedom campaigners, the European Parliament has adopted a report by MEP Marietje Schaake on the impact of intrusion and surveillance systems on human rights.

  • Tech and the presidentials: Interviewed by ABC News anchor David Muir, Hillary Clinton finally made a clear apology for using a private email server, saying that it was “a mistake,” and “I’m sorry about that.” Her campaign sent an email to supporters echoing those statements and has set up a page on its website dedicated to the issue, titled, “Hillary’s emails in 4 sentences.”

  • Antivirus software pioneer and “person of interest” in a murder case in Belize John McAfee has filed papers indicating that he plans to run for President, Issie Lapowsky reports for Wired.

  • Government fixers Hillary Clinton’s campaign released a set of proposals “to restore integrity to American elections,” including overturning Citizens United, increasing the transparency of political spending, and public matching funds for small donations.

  • Vox’s Jonathan Allen says that Clinton’s announcement was timed to get ahead of Bernie Sanders’ expected introduction of a bill providing for public financing of political campaigns.

  • Meanwhile, Lawrence Lessig is formally announcing his presidential campaign today, which aims to elevate many of the very issues Clinton just endorsed, in Claremont, New Hampshire, at a site marking the location of a famous 1995 handshake between then-President Bill Clinton and then-Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, where they promised to take action on campaign finance and lobbying reform. “The Clinton-Gingrich handshake was carried live on television and received front page attention in newspapers nationwide,” the plaque marking the spot reads. But somehow all that media attention didn’t translate into action.

  • Some dude named Sifry writes for the New York Times “Room for Debate” section on why the two-party duopoly is bad for American democracy and it would be better if both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders were running as candidates of their own parties.

Categories
Civic Engagement Civic Tech future of work

BEFORE FAIR CHANCE HIRING DECISION, AUSTIN POLLS RESIDENTS BY TEXT

BEFORE FAIR CHANCE HIRING DECISION, AUSTIN POLLS RESIDENTS BY TEXT

“I sensed that we needed to hear from people who were formerly incarcerated and that they might be less likely to have internet access.”

Always ahead of the curve, the city of Austin, Texas, launched an online community engagement portal in 2008. Called SpeakUpAustin, the platform is the cradle of the city’s bike share program and played a part in shaping a plastic bag ordinance. It allows anyone with internet access to publicly share their opinion on upcoming policy decisions without having to attend a public meeting. Although this was a leap forward in terms of accessibility and convenience, participation was still limited by one major constraint: internet access. This summer, however, the city took steps to change that by using a text-based tool called HeartGov in tandem with SpeakUpAustin to poll city residents about a Ban the Box initiative.

The Ban the Box campaign to delete the part of job applications that asks about previous convictions has been around since 2004. The campaign began seeing some success (in Minnesota, for example) in 2009. Since then, cities like Boston, Philadelphia, New York City, Atlanta, Chicago, and others have removed the question.

“The Austin city council decided to follow the lead of several other cities and jurisdictions in looking at what people are calling a fair chance hiring policy,” says Larry Schooler, the manager of Austin’s Community Engagement Division. “The idea behind it is really to try to help those with criminal records, with histories of being incarcerated have a fair chance at getting hired.”

“The policy could mean that employers would need to delay criminal background investigations until a conditional offer was made to an applicant, even a person with a conviction,” Schooler clarifies.

Schooler’s position was created in 2009, when Austin’s communications director decided to invest more resources in engaging the public in innovative ways. “I’ve sort of gone from being a person to come in and facilitate meetings here and there to someone who is really trying to design a new system of public engagement,” Schooler tells Civicist. “I’m spending a lot more time now creating tools and programs and doing trainings than I did at the beginning.”

HeartGov first came to Schooler’s attention after he saw a short piece I wrote last year for techPresident, about testing the tool in Brooklyn. He reached out to Asher Novek, who developed the tool as part of his master’s thesis at NYU’s Gallatin School, and they began discussing ways to use HeartGov in Austin. (Full disclosure: Asher Novek is a Civic Hall member and has done some contract work for Civic Hall assisting with marketing.)

Schooler decided that the public polling period for the fair hiring policy, which ended at the end of August, was the perfect opportunity. “One of the reasons I wanted to use HeartGov on this one in particular is because I sensed that we needed to hear from people who were formerly incarcerated and that they might be less likely to have internet access,” Schooler explains to Civicist.

Working closely with Novek, Schooler came up with three questions, one that asked what kind of companies should be subjected to a fair hiring policy, how the policy should be enforced, and how the city should implement the policy. City residents interested in providing feedback could text a local number and would get the questions one after the other in response.

The city solicited input on the hiring policy via email, text message (HeartGov), and an online discussion board (SpeakUpAustin), although Schooler notes that, because this was a relatively abridged public input period (less than a month), there was limited publicity. All told, the city received 150 online discussion posts, 175 texts (from 60 or so respondents), and a handful of emails.

“Some of [the texters] were obviously people who had been formerly incarcerated and had been dealing with this on a first hand basis,” says Schooler. “I’m not taking sides in the debate over the policy—but it was really gratifying to see people so directly affected by a policy be participating like that.”

A preliminary report Schooler shares with Civicist shows that the majority of text responses were in favor of the fair hiring policy, whereas the online responses were more mixed, even skewing against the policy.

“There were a couple people who posted online who did seem to have some history [of convictions or incarceration],” says Schooler, “but not nearly to the extent that the texters did.” More of the texters were employees, whereas there were greater numbers of employers responding online.

Without HeartGov, the city might have gotten a very different picture of local opinion on the fair hiring policy.

Schooler dreams of one day better integrating the text and online responses, so that participants online can see what people are texting and vice versa. He also has yet to figure out how to handle two-way communication with people using HeartGov. “I didn’t do any personal responses this time. There just wasn’t the bandwidth for me to do that, or the time,” Schooler says. “In an ideal world I would in some way respond—we did respond at the end, when we closed things out, to say thanks.”

The two-way conversation has always been what Asher Novek envisioned for his tool. For example, HeartGov continues to be used in some local officials offices in New York and he says he feels it is his responsibility to “nag” offices to respond to constituents reaching out through the tool, until it becomes a habit.

As for what’s next in Austin? HeartGov has already been pulled back into service, as part of a community forum on building equitable economic development in East Austin.

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BEACONS

BEACONS

Sending Wi-Fi beacons out to help Syrian refugees; differing opinions on Lawrence Lessig’s bid for president; and more.

  • This is civic tech: One way that the Civil Society and Technology Project at the Central European University in Budapest is helping refugees navigate their difficult journeys: they’re setting up volunteers as “walking Wi-Fi beacons,” reports Aviva Rutkin for the New Scientist. She writes, “For about $100, you can pick up a ready to use Wi-Fi hotspot and prepaid SIM cards, pop it all into someone’s backpack, and send them out into the crowd. The networks last for about six hours before needing to be recharged, and can support around a dozen users at a time.”
  • A “We the People” petition on the White House website calling for a big increase in the number of Syrian refugees resettled here is now halfway to the 100,000 signatures needed to prompt an official response.

  • Our Jessica McKenzie reports for Civicist on how the city of Austin, Texas, is using online engagement tools to poll city residents about an initiative to delete the box on job applications that asks applicants about prior convictions. Featured: HeartGov, a text-based tool developed by Civic Hall member Asher Novek.

  • Tech and the presidentials: Harvard Law professor Lawrence Lessig, a leader of the free culture movement and author of several seminal books on the internet, has announced that he is running for the Democratic nomination for President, having garnered a million dollars in backing Kickstarter-style online. He’s running as a “referendum” candidate seeking to only pass substantial campaign finance and election reform legislation.

  • Lessig’s friend Ethan Zuckerman, the director of MIT’s Center for Civic Media, blogs about his reasons for supporting his run, arguing that he can “win by losing, so long as his referendum attracts sufficient attention.”

  • Taking a somewhat less optimistic (and more realistic?) view of Lessig’s chances, his friend David Weinberger, another Harvard scholar and author of seminal internet books, blogs that he worries that rather than demonstrating widespread support for democracy reforms, Lessig’s bid will “make [campaign] finance reform look more marginal than it actually is.” He calls this the “lose-by-losing outcome.”

  • At least two emails received by Hillary Clinton on her private server while she was Secretary of State contained highly classified information, Michael Schmidt reports for the New York Times.

  • Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina recently told a New Hampshire audience that if elected, she would ask Americans to respond to questions during her weekly radio address, The Economist reports. “For instance, she explained, she might ask whether the federal government should have the right to sack employees who fail to do their jobs, or whether it is important for Americans to know where their federal tax dollars go. Press 1 for Yes, and 2 for No.”

  • Brave new world: Apple and Microsoft are butting heads with government authorities more and more over demands for private and/or encrypted customer data, report Matt Apuzzo, David Sanger, and Michael Schmidt for the New York Times.