Civicist

CIVIC TECH NEWS & ANALYSIS
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SURFACING

SURFACING

Anonymous outs alleged KKK members; Silicon Valley’s philanthropy; and more.

  • Votebnb: The sharing economy is on the ballot tomorrow in San Francisco, where Proposition F, which would limit short-term home rentals, is pitting Airbnb against the San Francisco tenants union, Conor Dougherty reports for the New York Times. He notes that several other ballot propositions “are either directly or indirectly related to the technology industry and housing costs. In addition to ‘the Airbnb thing,’ there are two affordable-housing measures and a proposal to help old-line businesses make rent in neighborhoods that are filling up with boutiques and organic restaurants.”

  • Related: Nancy Watzman of the Internet Archive reports that, as that San Francisco vote nears, ads opposing Prop F are running at a rate of 100-1 compared to ads supporting the measure. “Audio fingerprinting of YouTube-hosted advertising was used to identify the same ads in local station programming and cable news networks available in the region, from August 25 through October 26,” she writes.

  • Unmasking: After months of relative quiet, the hacker network Anonymous is resurfacing this week with “Operation KKK.” Timed to coincide with the first anniversary of the Ferguson protests, the group has started posting personal contact information of people it alleges are KKK members, reports Anthony Cuthbertson of the International Business Times. The group claims Senators Tom Tillis (R-NC), John Cornyn (R-TX), and Dan Coats (R-IN) are Klan members, along with several mayors.

  • Hard not to quote this headline from The Register: “Anonymous hack group plans to out anonymous hate group.” With the 5th of November around the corner, Anonymous is also promising a “Million Mask March” in hundreds of cities worldwide this Thursday.

  • Following the money: Alessandra Stanley packed a lot of truth into this essay on “Silicon Valley’s New Philanthropy” in Sunday’s New York Times. Most telling: for all his talk of “disruption,” the head of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, Emmett Carson, which sits on nearly $5 billion from tech donors, has this to say about the Ford Foundation’s new focus on fighting income inequality: “West Coast philanthropy is not influenced by East Coast pronouncements,” he sniffed.

  • Related: Here’s a progress report from four community foundations (including SVCF) on what they are learning from funding media projects that assist in meeting local information needs, written by Steve Outing and posted on the Knight Foundation’s blog. The four foundations—the Dodge Foundation, Silicon Valley Community Foundation, Incourage Community Foundation and the Chicago Community Trust—were winners of the Knight Community Information Challenge, which offered matching funding to local foundations launching news and information projects.

  • Race and place: After examining millions of records, Vocativ’s Jennings Brown and Gerald Rich found more than 1,400 federally recognized places with names that are racial slurs.

  • Amina Elahi reports for the Chicago Tribune on Women of Color in Tech, which is making free stock photos showing people from underrepresented groups who are software engineers, IT analysts and security professionals in tech settings.

  • This is civic tech: The big news from SeeClickFix founder Ben Berkowitz is that starting in 2016, the city-centric problem-solving platform will making it easy for users to communicate laterally with each other. This will make it possible for neighbors to network with neighbors around common concerns, and government officials to connect directly with each other. Either way, it’s an important qualitative improvement in SCF’s platform, which just tallied its two-millionth user report.

  • The Women Who Tech Startup Challenge NYC is coming up Tuesday November 9. RSVP here.

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