Civicist

CIVIC TECH NEWS & ANALYSIS
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HANDWRINGING

HANDWRINGING

A Twitter conversion; CIA director blames terrorism on post-Snowden handwringing; and more.

  • The crypto wars are back…and with a vengeance in the wake of the terror attacks in Paris. As David Sanger and Nicole Perlroth report for the New York Times, national security and law enforcement officials are renewing their criticism of tech companies that provide end-to-end encryption of their users’ communications, even though “American and French officials say there is still no definitive evidence to back up their presumption that the terrorists who massacred 129 people in Paris used new, difficult-to-crack encryption technologies to organize the plot.”

  • CIA director John Brennan denounced “handwringing” in the wake of Edward Snowden’s disclosures, saying it has allowed terrorists to flourish, Alex Shepherd reports for the New Republic.

  • Jameel Jaffer, the deputy legal director of the ACLU, responds, “As far as I know, there’s no evidence the French lacked some kind of surveillance authority that would have made a difference. When we’ve invested new powers in the government in response to events like the Paris attacks, they have often been abused.”

  • Also on Monday, Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio criticized two of his rivals, Ted Cruz and Rand Paul, for voting “to weaken the U.S. intelligence program” and “leav[e] America vulnerable,” Patrick O’Connor reports for The Wall Street Journal.

  • Rethinking the “sharing economy”: Last Friday and Saturday, more than a thousand people attended the Platform Cooperativism conference at The New School. The event, which was organized by Trebor Scholz and Nathan Schneider (and grew out of an earlier panel event at Civic Hall this past spring), was filled with passionate debate about the prospects of organizing a different approach to the ownership and governance of the emerging “on-demand” economy, as Jay Cassano reports for Shareable.

  • Maybe Uber isn’t that much of an economic juggernaut. That’s the argument of economist Lawrence Mishel, writing in The Atlantic, who points out that “Uber drivers represent significantly less than 0.1 percent of all full-time-equivalent employment.” He adds, “Even using [Uber senior adviser David] Plouffe’s current count of 400,000 Uber drivers, all working 10 percent fewer hours than in 2014, then Uber could account for between 0.1 to 0.14 percent of total full-time-equivalent employment at the end of 2015.”

  • This is civic tech: Mark Cridge, the new director of mySociety, has written an excellent statement on “Why we do what we do.” He writes:

    What links all of our work is the creation of civic technology that enables greater access for citizens to the work of government and the democratic process: Lack of access to elected representatives amongst disadvantaged or underrepresented groups is a key driver of exclusion and inequality, yet governments tend only to become better at serving the needs of citizens when those citizens are capable of demanding better. Simply put, this is our cause.”

  • This can’t wait till the weekend: Adrian Chen’s long feature story for The New Yorker on how Megan Phelps-Roper, one of the daughters of the ultra-right Westboro Baptist Church, came to question her beliefs and ultimately leave the church thanks to friends and relationships that she developed from using Twitter is just mind-blowingly good.

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First Post

INVOCATIONS

INVOCATIONS

Tech titans react to terrorism in Paris; how to join the civic tech movement; and more.

  • Tech vs. terror: BuzzFeed’s Brendan Klinkenberg reports on how several leading tech platforms, including Facebook, Google, Airbnb, Uber, and Twitter responded to the terror attacks in Paris. Facebook activated its “safety check” tool, helping 4.1 million people alert their friends and family that they were safe. Uber turned off surge pricing in Paris. Airbnb urged local hosts to make their homes available for free or low cost. Twitter users crowded around the hashtag #PorteOuverte to help Parisians find sanctuary. And Google made international calls to France free via Hangouts.

  • Facebook faced criticism for not having used “safety check” for other non-Western crises, and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg quickly responded that in the future, the giant social network will implement its “safety check” feature for “more human disasters,” as Alex Howard reports for the Huffington Post. While the option was activated in the wake of the terror attacks in Paris, it had not been offered to users in the wake of suicide bombings in Beirut two days earlier.

  • Facebook’s vice president of growth, Alex Schultz, also said the company will explore giving users options to “show support for other things that they care about through their Facebook profiles,” a reference to the company’s enabling users to add the silhouette of France’s tricolor flag to their profiles. As Howard astutely notes, “The criteria that will be used to determine which issues and events users will be able to ‘show support for,’ however, aren’t clear.” No option has been offered to users to show solidarity with the people of Lebanon or Syria, for example.

  • As you consider Facebook’s emerging approach to “human disasters,” keep in mind that its CEO is still hungry to crack the one global market the company has yet to penetrate: China. He says, “We care about all people equally, and we will work hard to help people suffering in as many of these situations as we can.” We shall see.

  • How many gigs in the gig economy? Lydia dePillis takes a behind-the-scenes look for the Washington Post on how an unusual group of tech companies, labor advocates, and think-tankers came together to call for new benefits for people working in the “gig economy.”

  • One interesting angle dePillis notes: not all economists agree with the Freelancer’s Union’s assessment that 53 million people are independent workers. Official numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics suggest it’s more like 15 million. Ross Eisenbrey of the Economic Policy Institute says, “It’s not true, and I think it’s in service of making people think that things are changing much faster than they are, and that therefore the legal models that we have shouldn’t be applied,” says Eisenbrey. “That’s Uber’s wish, that they escape from employment obligations, that they not have to pay minimum wage and overtime. I think that something like this could be misused.”

  • Debatable: For the first time in my memory, a live presidential debate included a real-time question from someone watching that was in response to something one of the candidates said. As Alexandra Petri points out for the Washington Post, the tweet came in response to Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s assertion that her millions in Wall Street connected donations were because of her hard work helping the financial sector rebuild after 9/11. “I’ve never seen a candidate invoke 9/11 to justify millions of Wall Street donations until now,” wrote Andy Grewal, at 10:07pm the night of the debate. Moments later, his question was posed directly to Clinton. (Grewal, who says he admires Bernie Sanders but thinks his tax plan is too radical, has since jokingly offered to retract his tweet “in exchange for 10% of [Hillary’s] Wall Street donations.”

  • Hidden deep in the Wi-Fi SSIDs and passwords for media attending the Republican and Democratic presidential debates, Upworthy’s Parker Molloy finds meaning.

  • This is civic tech: Omidyar Network investment partner Stacy Donohue writes for TechCrunch on three ways that techies can join the civic tech movement: by solving personal challenges (such as the ones that led some vets to start Unite US, or that led Rose Broome to start HandUp); by taking a career leap into government (like Megan Smith of Google or Alex Macgillivray of Twitter, both now at the White House); or by becoming more active citizens using problem-solving platforms like Citizinvestor or SeeClickFix.

  • Andrew Baron, the founder of Rocketboom and Know Your Meme, has just launched a new project called Humanwire, which aims to connect refugees to donors seeking to support them.

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First Post

ENTERPRISING

ENTERPRISING

#BlackonCampus; why think tanks should become civic enterprises; trusting in the cloud; and more.

  • Today’s must-reads: New America president (and Civic Hall founding partner) Anne-Marie Slaughter and Open Technology Institute senior adviser Ben Scott say it’s time for think tanks to become “civic enterprises.” They explain:

    “Civic” because it engages citizens as change makers—conscious members of a self-governing polity that expects government to be at least part of the solution to problems that individuals cannot solve on their own. And “enterprise” because of the energy and innovation involved in actually making change on the ground. Civic enterprise blends conventional policy research with local organizing, coalition building, public education, advocacy, and bottom-up projects that generate and test ideas before, during, and after engagement in the policymaking process with government.

  • They add: “The pendulum of American political history is swinging toward ‘democratizing technocracy,’ giving people more opportunity to participate in self-government. This is particularly powerful in an era when many citizens doubt the power and value of their vote. Civic enterprise is about knocking down the walls and partitions that have grown up between the policy class and the citizens we purport to serve.” Amen to that!

  • Microsoft President and Chief Legal Officer Brad Smith has posted a long manifesto on technology and privacy, with the intriguing title of “In the cloud we trust. ” In it, he urinates on some of the biggest events of the last year—the Charlie Hebdo attack, the Sony Pictures hack, as well as governments from Russia to China to the United Kingdom and the United States seeking greater access to and control of individual online communications—and wrestles with the conflicting demands of cybersecurity and personal privacy and free expression. He concludes:

    Inspired by the events of the past year, our cloud business will be grounded in four commitments to governments, enterprises, consumers, and people around the world. We will keep their data secure. We will ensure people’s data is private and under their control. We will figure out the laws in each country and make sure data is managed accordingly. And we will be transparent so people know what we are doing.

  • Government openings: The U.S. Treasury Department is working on reinventing USASpending.gov, which tracks all federal spending, and it’s inviting the public to “participate in its development” through this beta site. (h/t @18F)

  • Appearing just in time for Veterans Day, here’s the new alpha version of Vets.gov. And here’s a GIF made by 18F’s Eric Mill showing how the Vets.gov site has evolved over the last 9 months.

  • GOP presidential candidate Rand Paul says he has “mixed feelings” about Edward Snowden, agreeing that he is a “whistleblower” but also arguing that “there probably has to be some” penalty for his revealing classified government information.

  • Speed of Change: The #BlackOnCampus hashtag has exploded with people “who are dissecting examples of white privilege, ‘microaggression,’ and accusations of reverse racism,” reports Katie Rogers for the New York Times. (Topsy analytics show nearly 100,000 uses of the hashtag in the last two days.)

  • This is civic tech: Susan Crawford reports for Backchannel on the work of Smart Chicago Collaborative’s Youth-Led Tech program and how it is “crossing the digital divide.”

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First Post

IMPACTS

IMPACTS

How Americans think tech has impacted politics; how USDS and 18F are changing tech & gov’t; and more.

  • Yahoo is holding a conference on tech and politics today at Drake University in Des Moines, starting at 9:30am Central Time, livestreamed here. Sen. Rand Paul is the one presidential candidate on the agenda.

  • Concurrent with that event, Yahoo has released the results of a major poll exploring Americans’ attitudes towards the impact of tech on politics. Among its findings:

    • While most Americans believe tech has made American politics more inclusive and representative of what people really think, African-American and Hispanics believe that more strongly (74 percent and 73 percent) than whites (60 percent).

    • A majority of whites (57 percent) think social media has made politics more negative, compared to just 41 percent of African-Americans.

    • Most Americans don’t think tech has given them more of a voice, as an individual, in politics. Just 23 percent of Hispanics, 21 percent of African-Americans, 18 percent of whites and 15 percent of Asians believe it has.

  • Reporting from the Fast Company Innovation Festival here at Civic Hall this week, John Paul Titlow highlights three projects coming out of the U.S. Digital Service and 18F that are dramatically changing how government uses tech.

  • Related: Justin Herman, the SocialGov Lead for the GSA, sits down with GovTech’s Jason Shueh to talk about how federal agencies are learning to improve their civic engagement strategies.

  • The Intercept’s Jordan Smith and Micah Lee report that Securus Technologies, one of the leading providers of phone services to prisons nationwide, has been recording tens millions of calls, including thousands between inmates and their lawyers. A hacker was able to obtain access to more than 70 million call records, information that was then provided to the Intercept via its Secure Drop leaking platform.

  • This is civic tech: We’ve been in love with Loveland Technologies co-founder Jerry Paffendorf ever since 2010 when he bought a vacant lot in Detroit and put 10,000 square inches of it up for sale for $1 apiece, and more recently when he and his team led the “Motor City Mapping” project that gave the city its first up-to-date map of every tax property. Now, as Bill Bradley reports for Next City in a long profile, Loveland is branching out beyond its home city to work on opening up land survey information across the U.S., and Paffendort is also one of eight candidates seeking to replace the retiring Wayne County Treasurer, who oversees tax foreclosure auctions.

  • Ever wonder how virtual organizations with staff in far-flung locations develop strong teams? Here’s how Upworthy, with 80 employees, does it, courtesy of Harvard Business Review’s Harrison Monarth.

  • When a video clip blows up online, context is almost always missing. So if you happen to have seen clips of protests at Yale this past week over the university’s failures to address racial discrimination there, read this essay on Medium by Aaron Lewis, a senior there.

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Civic Hacking Hackathon International Development

HOW TO DESIGN A BETTER HACKATHON FOR ALL

HOW TO DESIGN A BETTER HACKATHON FOR ALL

As facilitators working with a vulnerable population, we could have better anticipated and mitigated the chilling effect of the media. Here are seven things organizers can do to better protect privacy during a workshop.

I don't want to be photographed. (Josh Levinger)

Civic hackathons, those technology-driven sprints for good, are both popular and potentially problematic. They can be exciting, stirring passions around important social issues. They offer the promise of improving lives. But they also risk squandering resources, producing tools that are often quickly abandoned, or at worst create unintended harm.

common and valid criticism of hackathons is that they often rely on technologists with little or inaccurate knowledge of the selected cause.

Ask a bunch of upper-middle-class 20-somethings to improve access to healthy food, and you’ll invariably end up with a grocery store map. A person living in a food desert might have instead pointed out that the barriers to healthier eating are logistical, economic, and cultural, not purely informational. A food justice advocate might have suggested advancing substantial policy changes for long term gains. But at most hackathons—which generally run between six hours to a full weekend—time feels too short for such deep dives, and the need to produce a product can take priority over making sustainable impacts.

Making effective use of a hackathon’s focused, skilled, and cheap labor requires a more informed and humble approach. Anticipating this, some organizers recruit and engage participants with experiences that can inform the technical work. This focus on listening, questioning, and context is a great evolution, but, especially when dealing with sensitive issues and vulnerable populations, it introduces new risks.

Last month, I facilitated a portion of the Refugee Hackathon in Berlin, Germany. The event spanned three days, gathering nearly 300 developers and refugees to exchange ideas and create tools that ease the experience of being a refugee in Germany. It was the perfect combination of pertinent politics and optimistic technology; in short, it was a total media spectacle.

A key strength of the hackathon was the involvement of people with actual refugee experience—people who either were themselves refugees to Germany or who volunteer with newcomers. Theirs’ was a unique and powerful story, and its retelling has influence beyond one humble hackathon. But as the event unfolded, it became clear that maintaining a safe space for these vulnerable people to fully participate conflicted with the media presence.

The image of the noble technologist uplifting the helpless refugee (to apply a lazy stereotype) supports valuable narratives for many. The technologists get to look like heroes, with a new project for their portfolios. The event organizers receive attention for their popular event, which bolsters their credentials. Members of the media profit directly from collecting interviews and photos, as this is their job. But also indirectly, the mainstream German community benefits as it consumes this positive coverage, allowing them to feel like the crisis is being addressed.

Media coverage for a feel-good event is good for many, but how does it affect the people this event was intended to support—in this case, the refugees? Many participated on the explicit understanding that they would not be named, photographed, or filmed. These people came to Berlin to escape violence, leaving friends and family back home. I heard from several individuals worried that if those violent actors could identify them as having fled, friends and family they left behind would become targets. As facilitators, it was our duty to manage these priorities and craft an appropriate space.

We offered a “photo opt out” system. We provided red stickers, which, if put on a name tag, identified the individual as someone who did not consent to being photographed. We posted several signs explaining this system at registration and around the workshop spaces in four languages and with language-agnostic iconography. The facilitators took several opportunities to remind the room not to photograph people with red stickers. We asked the individuals with privacy concerns to raise their hands so everyone would know to avoid them in photos.

We also instructed the group that we would be following Chatham House Rules:

When a meeting, or part thereof, is held under the Chatham House Rule, participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker(s), nor that of any other participant, may be revealed.

These rules are very popular at workshops where delicate information is to be shared, because it allows people to engage fully in the conversation.

In spite of these precautions, we still encountered several instances of worrisome media behavior. Some reporters were very respectful, chatting easily and maintaining a comfortable atmosphere. Others either missed the precautionary notices, or simply chose to disregard them. Eventually, two core issues emerged: obtaining informed consent and minimizing disruptions.

With so many media seeking group photos, the red sticker opt-out system quickly became difficult to enforce. When photographers did seek consent, the consent was not always informed.

One incident occurred when a reporter invited a French-speaking refugee to be photographed. Echoing a broader issue of underestimated diversity among Germany’s refugees, we had not anticipated the need to support French translation, so communicating with these refugees was problematic. The refugee asked where the photos would appear, the volunteer translator used his basic French to communicate an answer, and the refugee left with the reporter. Interestingly, the translator was not invited, because the journalist had no interest in what his subject had to say. Instead, the reporter posed the man outside for a few generic photos of a downcast refugee. Later, the refugee became concerned: he had understood that the photographer worked for the event organizers and did not want his photos published by a reporter. The translator flagged down a facilitator, and the photographer ultimately relented and deleted the photos. Effectively, the refugee hadn’t known what he was consenting to do, and the photographer hadn’t been clear about the potential consequences.

Even among the main language groups, the conspicuous cameras and frequent requests to “borrow” refugees and project managers led to constant disruptions. Remember: the explicit purpose of this workshop was to learn about the refugee experience firsthand from the refugees, identifying specific requirements and possible interventions. Allowing press to coerce participants into being “shared” soured the mood for many, and reduced the effectiveness of the event overall. The refugees weren’t the only ones visibly uncomfortable with the media presence—twice I overheard conversations among developers abruptly conclude or shift when a large television camera rolled up.

As facilitators, we could have better anticipated and mitigated the chilling effect of these reporters, writers, and photographers. Learning from these experiences, here are seven things organizers can do to protect privacy during a workshop.

      1. Offer an opt-out indicator that is very visible. We gave out stickers. We asked people opting out to raise their hands in front of the group. We gave polite but firm reminders when we saw violations. But still, we ended up spending a lot of time enforcing this system, instead of focusing on facilitating better outcomes. Our tiny stickers could have been much bigger. We could have given out red t-shirts, or at least a different color lanyards.

         

        These identifiers should be visible if their wearer is across the room or turned away, and they should stand out in accidental photographs to ensure proper deletion.

      2. Ensure consent is both sought and informed every time. If there’s a risk the meaning isn’t wholly understood, take the time to find a better explanation. All photos can wait.
      3. Discourage people from opting out of photos for solidarity. This one is controversial, and deserves discussion. Everyone should want to support people who need to opt-out from photography, but as I experienced it, we can’t do that by diminishing the seriousness of those requests. I attended an event years ago where only one person opted out. We paused to wave at him, and he stood behind the camera for group photos. Because he was easy to remember, we all scanned the room to find him before taking any photo, ever. We made it easier to take safe photos by reducing the number of people to actively avoid photographing.
      4. As a participant, support opt-out requests. If someone prefers not to be photographed, actively locate them as being outside your frame before snapping a photo. Keep an eye out for cameras at the event, and help review photos on social media later. If you see a consent violation, either intervene politely and firmly, or seek out a facilitator.
      5. As a facilitator, empower your team both to enforce privacy requests and minimize disruptions. You want your participants to feel comfortable handling or reporting issues, and you want your team to feel comfortable taking appropriate action.
      6. Allow for non-disruptive media engagement. If you expect a media presence, carve out time, space, or people where press can safely participate. Media access does not need to be a default.
      7. Anticipate how skewed media access could misrepresent your event. A few of our participants arrived with fully formed projects, and put the time we dedicated to listening to refugees towards courting the media. As a result, projects with the least refugee input came to occupy a disproportionate amount of exposure from the refugee-legitimized event.

Hackathons can be fun, inspiring, or challenging, and it’s natural for people to want to capture these experiences. As the hackathon model continues to evolve, and acknowledges the diversity of experiences needed for success, privacy and safety must become key operating principles.

Ruth Miller is a facilitator, interaction designer, and researcher based in Oakland, California.

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First Post

CRUSHING IT

CRUSHING IT

Bush would redo internet regulation; calling for an Independent Order of Oddfellows; and more.

  • Tech and the presidentials: Tech policy hasn’t really surfaced yet as an issue in the presidential campaign, but during last night’s Republican debate, rising contender Marco Rubio did say this: “It took the telephone 75 years to reach 100 million users. It took Candy Crush one year to reach 100 million users. [Laughter.] So the world is changing faster than ever, and it is disruptive.” Rubio, who opposes net neutrality, wasn’t asked how he thought the next Candy Crush would grow that rapidly if we lose the open internet.

  • Rival Floridian Jeb Bush had this to say about that issue, kind of: “On the regulatory side I think we need to repeal every rule that Barack Obama has in terms of work in progress, every one of them. And start over. For those that are already in existence, the regulation of the internet, we have to start over, but we ought to do that.”

  • As a co-sponsor of last night’s debate, Facebook got mentioned ten times, either as a source of an anodyne question from a random user or as the source of some vague data about obvious issues Americans are talking about. Each time, though, Facebook got mentioned, making the evening a successful night for product placement.

  • “Internet startup founders represent an entirely distinct, libertarian-like ideology within the Democratic party,” writes Gregory Ferenstein in The Guardian. “Tech startup founders see the government as an investor in citizens, rather than as a protector from capitalism.”

  • This is civic tech: Writing for Civicist, Ruth Miller draws on her experience facilitating part of the Refugee Hackathon in Berlin to urge that more attention be paid to the impact of media attention on the vulnerable populations civic hackers may be trying to help.

  • Writing for Quartz, Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry riffs on Nick Grossman and Elizabeth Woyke’s new (and free to download) e-book, “Serving Workers in the Gig Economy,” and suggests that new platforms that help gig workers band together don’t go far enough. Instead, he argues for a return to a pre-New Deal solution to the insecurities of work: forming mutual aid societies “such as the Independent Order of Oddfellows or the United Order of True Reformer. Members paid dues in exchange for access to a wide range of services, based on the principle of reciprocity: today’s donor might be tomorrow’s recipient.”

  • Opening government: The U.S. Commerce Department now has its own Data Service, Hallie Golden reports for NextGov.

  • OpenDataSoft has built a list of 1600-plus open data portals around the world.

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PULSES

PULSES

The US agency that spent 10 years & a billion dollars on one online form; Facebook on the GOP; and more.

  • Why can’t we be friends? President Obama just launched his own Facebook page, because, apparently, the Barack Obama Facebook page isn’t his, it just belongs to a politician with the same name and 45 million followers.

  • Tech and the campaign: Data from Facebook about interest in the GOP presidential candidates shows, more or less, what someone not looking at Facebook but paying attention to the conventional wisdom about the race might surmise, as Natalie Andrews, Dante Chinni and Brian McGill report for the Wall Street Journal: Donald Trump’s dominating position is weakening somewhat; Ben Carson is “a steady second”; Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio got a bump in interest after the last Republican debate; and Jeb Bush is struggling to catch on.

  • Paging 18F: The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has spent more than ten years and over a billion dollars trying to switch over to a digital system for managing immigration applications and records, and so far has just one online form to show for it, Jerry Markon reports for the Washington Post.

  • New on Civicist: Jessica McKenzie reports on the growth of GovDelivery, which just passed the 100 million users mark, with an in-depth exclusive interview with CEO Scott Burns.

  • The future of work: A coalition of start-ups, VCs, labor advocates and policy wonks have published a joint letter calling for new approaches to supporting contract workers—the type of people working in the “on-demand” economy—that would enable them to get benefits like worker’s compensation, retirement savings or sick leave through more portable vehicles, Cecilia Kang reports for the New York Times. The signers include Brad Burnham of Union Square Ventures; Chad Dickerson, the CEO of Etsy; Marina Gorbis and Natalie Foster of the Institute for the Future; Logan Green and John Zimmer, the co-founders of Lyft; Nick Hanauer of Second Avenue Partners; Sara Horowitz, the founder of the Freelancers Union; Michelle Miller, co-founder or Coworker.org; Tim O’Reilly, founder of O’Reilly Media; Carmen Rojas, CEO of The Workers Lab; Anne-Marie Slaughter, President of New America; and Andy Stern, the President Emeritus of the SEIU.

  • Today’s “whither democracy” must-read: “Pollsters rose to prominence by claiming that measuring public opinion is good for democracy. But what if it’s bad?” That’s the core question running through historian Jill Lepore’s trenchant report for the New Yorker on the rise of the polling industry. “Polls don’t take the pulse of democracy,” she writes, “they raise it.” You’ll want to read Lepore’s essay for nuggets like this one: “In 1977, the R.N.C. acquired a mainframe computer, while the D.N.C. got its own mainframe in the eighties….Democratic technological advances awaited the personal computer; the R.N.C. is to I.B.M. as the D.N.C. is to Apple.”

  • It’s rare to see good in-depth writing about the actual challenges of political organizing in the mainstream media, let alone two days in a row, so go read David Roberts essay in Vox on “What critics of the Keystone campaign misunderstand about climate activism.”

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LIABILITIES

LIABILITIES

Injury or death at your home-share? Airbnb isn’t at fault; how predatory payday lenders hide online; and more.

  • First, the bad news: While home-renting “home-sharing” start-up Airbnb has taken steps to protect hosts from unruly guests, it’s done little to protect guests from unsafe hosts beyond inviting them to down-rate them after a bad experience. Writing for Medium’s Matter section, Zak Stone tells the harrowing story of his father’s untimely death trying out a tree swing at an Airbnb rental (the tree was rotten to the core and fell on him), pointing out that the company “disclaims all liability” and does nothing to insure that its hosts’ properties are safe, unlike traditional B&B services. Stone makes a damning indictment, pointing out that the company has been willing to spend money on improving what their hosts do when it fits its business model. He notes that it figured out early on that ugly photos of its listing in New York City were keeping guests away, so it invested in hiring professional photographers to document properties for free. He writes:

    Of course, were Airbnb to invest in safety requirements by offering home inspections or by analyzing photo content to target higher-risk properties and features (pools, saunas, trampolines, etc.) with site-specific safety recommendations, such a program could be far more costly, and might jeopardize Airbnb’s covetable neutrality as a platform. The irony is that amateur innkeepers who couldn’t be trusted with the banal task of photographing and marketing their properties are expected to excel at hospitality’s most important rule: keeping guests safe and alive. The result: Airbnb is willing to send someone to make sure your trees look beautiful in their photos, but won’t deal with whether or not those trees will fall on your head.

  • While predatory payday lenders have been pushed into the shadows by statewide crackdowns, Jack Smith IV of Mic.com reports on a new study from the civil rights data consulting firm Upturn that how “they hide on the other end of Google searches, waiting for terms like ‘need help paying rent’ to offer their services.” He notes that Facebook bans all payday loan ads, while Google’s approach is more porous.

  • A new joint report from the Center for Public Integrity and Global Integrity finds that “secrecy, corruption, and conflicts of interest pervade state governments” in America. The report scored each state across hundreds of variables related to the transparency and accountability of its government. (Full disclosure: I was a reviewer for the New York state section.)

  • Next, some good news: If anyone tells you that outside-the-Beltway grassroots organizing doesn’t work anymore, read this very timely piece by Ben Adler on how climate change activists from Canada’s First Nations and Nebraska’s rancher community and the 350.org digital network built the five-year campaign that on Friday, with President Obama’s announcement, stopped the Keystone XL pipeline.

  • Writing for the Harvard Business Review, longtime tech guru Doc Searls explains why ad blocking is on the rise and the adtech industry (read: microtargeting) is about to crash.

  • Little noticed victory from Election Day: 44 cities, towns and counties in Colorado passed referenda giving themselves the authority to build their own community broadband networks, Jon Brodkin reports for Ars Technica.

  • A new Democratic voter registration group called iVote, led by Obama campaign organizing veteran Jeremy Bird, is pushing to make voter registration automatic when people update their driver’s licenses, Michael Shear reports for the New York Times.

  • The New York Times rolled out its “virtual reality” journalism initiative Sunday, delivering free Google Cardboard viewers to its paper subscribers and publishing a multimedia report on child refugees around the world. The effort is very impressive, but am I the only person who wishes they called it “immersive reality”? (This ain’t Second Life, after all.)

  • President Obama’s digital team, led by Jason Goldman and Kori Schulman, is hard at work building a personal online identity for the president, Julie Hirschfeld Davis reports for the New York Times.

  • This is civic tech: Civic Hall member Joel Natividad and his company Ontodia has announced the launch of its “Civic Dashboards” product, which includes a data portal, performance management tools, analytics-as-a-service with built-in templates for tools like crime maps, economic activity tracking and open source civic-tech projects.

  • Accela’s Mark Headd offers some deep thoughts on the development of “government as a platform” ten years after Tim O’Reilly first popularized the concept, and argues that rather than expecting governments to plan, develop and maintain big, expensive APIs, we should focus instead on building microservices.

  • The new director of the Sunlight Foundation’s Sunlight Labs is Kat Duffy, who was previously at the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor where she designed and oversaw a grant portfolio that emphasized “data visualization, tool development for independent media organizations, customized application adaptation and end-user assessments, software localization, and support for internet freedom and open data advocacy initiatives,” the foundation announced Friday. Welcome Kat!

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MIND SHARES

MIND SHARES

The most militarized universities in America; Prop F loses in SF & Airbnb rejoices; and more.

  • Warning shot: Proposition F, the controversial San Francisco ballot measure that would have curbed short-term home rentals, lost with 45 percent of the vote Tuesday, as did a proposed 18-month moratorium on new market-rate development in the Mission neighborhood, Emily Badger reports for the Washington Post. But as she notes, the issue of housing affordability in San Francisco isn’t about to go away.
  • Airbnb’s Chris Lehane, who spearheaded the company’s massive lobbying effort against Prop F, lauded the vote on the company’s policy blog as “A victory for the middle class.” The longtime Democratic political operative’s language notably refers repeatedly to “middle class families’ right to share their home” and the “home sharing community,” though as best as I can tell very few hosts on Airbnb actually share their homes with anyone, according to the word’s old-fashioned dictionary definition. George Orwell would be proud of Lehane.

  • As Conor Dougherty and Mike Isaac report for the New York Times, companies like Airbnb and Uber are fighting local regulators “by turning their users into a vast political operation that can be mobilized at any sign of a threat.” With that in mind, they describe Lehane’s Prop F victory press conference in San Francisco “as a warning shot to other cities thinking about proposing new regulations.”

  • Indeed, it’s hard not to read Lehane’s blog post without thinking of Airbnb as a political campaign—one that is steeped in the data-driven field organizing techniques honed by the Obama campaigns. He writes: “This election was a victory for the middle class and it was made possible by the 138,000 members of the Airbnb community who had individual conversations with over 105,000 voters, knocked on 285,000 doors, including 55,000 today, and worked to generate support from more than 2,000 small, family-owned businesses in the city. This effort shows that home sharing is both a community and a movement.”

  • While we’re on the topic of Orwellian language (aka “Spinglish“), David Plouffe, President Obama’s former campaign manager and now the chief adviser and board member of Uber, recently shared this post on Uber’s “Under the Hood” policy blog, titled “Racing to rideshare.” It too makes no mention of anyone charging anyone else for anything and brags repeatedly about Uber as a “ridesharing” service.

  • Campaign tech: Matt Lira, the former deputy executive director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee (and a friend of PDM), says the reason why Republicans are getting beat by Democrats in the small-donor fundraising game isn’t something technological, like the lack of “unifying one-click donation platform” like ActBlue: “This is a cultural challenge. The largest Republican campaigns and organizations simply are not synced up on this issue; greater cooperation in this area would have an outsized influence on the problem.”

  • User rights: Responding to Monday’s release of the Ranking Digital Rights report, Yahoo’s Business and Human Rights Program has blogged that it is “actively studying the results of the Index and will be discussing the findings with our teams. We are also looking forward to the important conversations that RDR’s Index will spark about company disclosures and policies affecting users’ free expression and privacy.”

  • It’s not an explicit response to the report, but yesterday Twitter announced a new policy hub where the company plans to centralize information about the company’s political efforts as well as policy issues affecting its users. We heart that.

  • Culture wars:The long-running reality TV show Mythbusters just announced that next year’s season will be its last, and on the New York Times oped page, James Meigs, the former editor of Popular Mechanics, pens a lovely piece praising it for having “taught a whole generation how science works and why it matters.”

  • Deep, deep lobbying: If you wonder where so much bad thinking about cyber-security policy comes from, set aside time to read William Arkin and Alexa O’Brien’s detailed report for Vice News on “The Most Militarized Universities in America.” The rankings are based on a dataset of more than 90,000 individuals who have worked in the intelligence community since 9/11, which is just six percent of all the people in the US with a Top Secret clearance, and they document a vast expansion in national security academic funding. They write:

    The gloomy result is that the academy (and by extension the philanthropic world) has failed to establish a post-9/11 academic program to cultivate the next generation of scholars who can offer a genuinely civilian counter-narrative to the national security state similar to the civilian arms control community created during the Cold War. Even at the most elite schools that rank in the top 100, the many centers and research institutes focusing on warfare and terrorism are predominantly adjuncts of the national security state

  • Eric Raymond, the author of the influential open-source bible “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” has turned to the bizarre world of “manospheric derangement,” Jesse Singal writes for New York magazine. How so? By elevating a totally unsourced allegation that women-in-tech feminists have been trying to entrap men using “honey pots” and then accusing them of attempted assault, and that their chief target is the founder of Linux, Linus Torvalds. Singal’s eloquent take-down is worth reading not just for its depressing content but also for its style: “The peristaltic movement of the misogynist web finally nudged the story to its inevitable destination…” Now that is writing, my friends.

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ROUNDS

ROUNDS

Where New Yorkers can weigh in on the congestion issue; the TPP and the #IoT; and more.

  • U.S. Chief Technology Officer Megan Smith tells Alex Howard of the Huffington Post that she thinks civic tech is the next big thing: “I was there at the beginning of the smart phone, the beginning of open source. I think this is like that. It’s the start of something much bigger.”

  • New on Civicist from our Jessica McKenzie: How researchers at Cornell University have built a “smart participation” tool to improve public comment processes, which is now being used to invite the New York City public to weigh in on congestion and the ongoing dispute between City Hall and transportation network companies like Uber.

  • “Many people are driving on the Uber platform to get the pay raise they have not received in their other jobs,” writes David Plouffe, the company’s senior adviser. In other words, Uber does what unions used to do.

  • Becky Hogge looked at six case studies of open government data usage in the U.K. for the Omidyar Network, and found that “Private actors have taken government data, and they have transformed it in ways that are useful and valuable to citizens and consumers. Far more time and money has been invested in government data than it is possible to imagine the government ever having done by itself. The impact of this investment, though not always quantifiable, is in most cases tangible and scalable, if not already ‘at scale.’”

  • In San Francisco, grants are called “philanthropic rounds.” That’s what health-care crowdfunding nonprofit Watsi is celebrating, as donors including Ron Conway, Tencent, and Paul Graham have just given $3.5 million to fund its operations for the next two years, as Josh Constine reports for Techcrunch.

  • Cory Doctorow reports for BoingBoing on how the just-released text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade treaty seeks to prevent governments from requiring that “internet of things” products like cars and other regulated devices make their software open for inspection.

  • It’s not too late to register for the annual Nonprofit Software Development Summit, hosted by Aspiration November 18-20 in Oakland.

  • Aimee Lee Ball reports for the New York Times on the rising trend of “all-gender bathrooms,” including our own here at Civic Hall. And, yes, there’s an app for that: Refuge Restrooms, which shows the location of all-gender bathrooms nationwide.