Civicist

CIVIC TECH NEWS & ANALYSIS

Author: Civicist

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elections First Post

FIRST POST: TRUMP CARDS

FIRST POST: TRUMP CARDS

Why to take Donald Trump seriously; Lawrence Lessig’s open source campaign; and warnings about the Internet’s future.

  • Tech and the Presidentials: Just as the Obama campaign collected the mobile phone numbers of tens of thousands of supporters attending his mass rallies, candidates like Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton are looking to the text message channel as the best way to communicate with their core supporters, Nick Corasaniti reports for The New York Times.

  • Politico’s Annie Karni reports on concerns among Clinton allies that her response to the ongoing questions about her private email server is too legalistic.

  • Wondering why Donald Trump is doing so well in Republican primary polling? Political scientist Lee Drutman argues in Vox that its because he’s in tune with a sizable chunk of the public: populists who want to reduce immigration AND protect Social Security, who may be as many as 40% of the overall electorate. What holds these two positions together is a “turning inward” mood led by Americans fearful that their middle class standard of living is disappearing. (Republican business elites who favor cutting Social Security while taking a more liberal view of immigration are deeply out of touch with their party’s base, he adds.)

  • If you subtract Trump’s demagoguery on immigration from the picture, he’s somewhat more moderate than most of the other Republican contenders, Josh Barro argues for The Upshot. He cites Trump’s statements and positions on taxes (he hasn’t signed Grover Norquist’s pledge to never raise them) abortion (he favors allowing it in cases of rape or incest), and trade (he’s not a free trader) as example.

  • My view: If Trump starts talking up his call to eliminate the inheritance tax in exchange for a one-time mega-tax on the mega-rich (14.25% on individuals and trusts worth $10 million or more), which he made in his 2000 book, The America We Deserve [h/t to Daily News columnist Errol Louis for the long memory], and keeps talking about how all the other top GOP candidates are too beholden to their billionaire Super PAC backers to call for anything similar, he could take the Republican base away from the party establishment entirely and win the GOP nomination. And if he fails at that goal, the Commission on Presidential Debates will be hard pressed to exclude him from the general election debates if he runs as an independent, since he’s highly likely to be above 15% in the polls if he keeps campaigning.

  • All of the software that Lawrence Lessig’s 2016 presidential campaign makes will be released “under the GPL 3.0 open-source licence [sic]”, and all creative materials will be released “under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 4.0 licence [sic]”, his exploratory committee announced. We have no idea why his organisation is honouring Her Majesty’s English.

  • Ross Choma reminds us in Mother Jones that most online political advertising is essentially unregulated compared to TV or print ads, where the names of the organization paying for them have to be disclosed.

  • Future, Imperfect: Jennifer Granick, the director of civil liberties at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society, gave a powerful keynote at the Black Hat 2015 conference earlier this month. She’s posted a modified version of her talk on Medium, entitled “The end of the Internet dream.” She warns: “For better or for worse, we’ve prioritized things like security, online civility, user interface, and intellectual property interests above freedom and openness. The Internet is less open and more centralized. It’s more regulated. And increasingly it’s less global, and more divided. These trends: centralization, regulation, and globalization are accelerating. And they will define the future of our communications network, unless something dramatic changes.” (h/t David Isenberg)

  • Hackers who stole user information from the adult cheating site AshleyMadison.com have now posted the data on the dark web, Kim Zetter reports for Wired.com.

  • This is civic tech: Congrats to Civic Hall member company Citymart, which has been hired by New York City to help make its procurement processes more flexible and open to smaller vendors and new technologies, as Miranda Neubauer reports for Capital New York.

  • The FCC has fined Smart City $750,000 for blocking people attending conventions from using their personal mobile WiFi hotspots and forcing them to pay for Smart City’s Wi-Fi, Sarah Lawson reports for Fast Company.

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Civic Tech elections First Post

FIRST POST: SUBVERSIONS

FIRST POST: SUBVERSIONS

Is it really a “social media election”? How #BlackLiveMatters is engaging Hillary Clinton; and the White House Presidential Innovation Fellows program grows up.

  • Tech and the Presidentials: “Welcome to the social media election,” writes David McCabe for The Hill. Really? Does anyone have any evidence that shows that the presidential campaigns putting a lot of effort into their candidate’s social media postings are doing better than their less-savvy peers? McCabe’s examples include both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, who are doing better than expected in the polls, and Hillary Clinton, Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, and Scott Walker, who are all doing as predicted or worse, despite their social media prowess.

  • Here’s the video of Hillary Clinton’s August 11 meeting with five #BlackLivesMatter activists in New Hampshire last week, posted by GOOD Magazine’s Gabriel Reilich. The activists press Clinton on her support for the massive increase in “tough on crime” measures in the 1990s, championed by her husband while he was President. Interestingly, Clinton appears to admit that she is a “sinner” in the context of the rise of mass incarceration of black people. As MSNBC’s Ari Melber tweeted, “Candor & tension in Clinton-‪#BlackLivesMatter‬ mtg shows why citizen Qs for pols are powerful.”

  • Spending on online political ads is projected to top the $1 billion mark in the 2016 cycle, Jon Lafayette of Broadcasting & Cable reports. That would be a first, but at the same time most political dollars, $8.5 billion, will go to broadcast TV ads.

  • Opening Government: A new executive order from President Obama has made the White House Presidential Innovation Fellows Program, which pulls technologists from the private sector into government for one-year stints, a permanent federal government program, as this post on Medium explains.

  • The winner of the Federal Trade Commission’s “Robocalls: Humanity Strikes Back” civic hacking competition is a mobile app appropriately called RoboKiller, which uses audio-fingerprint technology to identify and block likely robocalls. As they explain on their Kickstarter page, “Before a user’s phone rings, we trick robocallers to start playing their recorded messages so that we can start our analysis. Live callers hear traditional ringing during this process. If RAE [their “rob analytics engine”] determines that a call is from a robot, it never rings through; we send it straight to the user’s SpamBox in the RoboKiller app. Humans, on the other hand, ring through to the user as soon as their legitimacy is confirmed.” (h/t Consumerist)

  • This is civic tech: Google engineer Carl Elkin used his 20% time to build Project Sunroof, which uses Google Earth mapping to help people figure out their home’s solar energy potential. It’s available in the San Francisco, Fresno and Boston areas now. As Elkin explains, the tool “first figures out how much sunlight hits your rooftop throughout the year, taking into account factors like roof orientation, shade from trees and nearby buildings, and local weather patterns. You can also enter your typical electric bill amount to customize the results. The tool then combines all this information to estimate the amount you could potentially save with solar panels, and it can help connect you with local solar providers.”

  • New on Civicist: Contributing editor Mark Headd notes the increasingly cozy relationship between civic hackers and government, and argues that “a little subversion is still necessary.”

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Civic Tech elections First Post future of work

FIRST POST: FEEDBACK

FIRST POST: FEEDBACK

Is Amazon’s grueling workplace the future? Can Lawrence Lessig fire up the Internet? How tech can help Asian language speakers navigate the voting process.

  • The Future of Work? In case you missed it, Amazon is a pretty hyper-competitive place to work, according to Jodi Kantor and David Streitfeld’s long investigative piece for Sunday’s New York Times. Perhaps the creepiest revelation in their story is the “Anytime Feedback Tool,” an internal communications widget that “allows employees to send praise or criticism about colleagues to management” which “many workers” call “a river of intrigue and scheming.”

  • Amazon employee Nick Ciubotariu offers his rebuttal on LinkedIn. I found his faith in the company kind of charming. As he writes, “We’ve got our hands full with reinventing the world.”

  • And company CEO Jeff Bezos says, in an email to his employees first reported by John Cook of GeekWire, “I strongly believe that anyone working in a company that really is like the one described in the NYT would be crazy to stay. I know I would leave such a company.”

  • Tech and the Presidentials: BuzzFeed’s Rosie Gray reports on how Republican front-runner Donald Trump is renting conservative email lists to fundraise for his campaign. She notes that Trump has said he doesn’t need to fundraise, but it’s just as likely that the billionnaire’s rental of lists from PJ Media, Newsmax and the Daily Caller may also be a way for him to buy favor with their owner’s.

  • Brigade is hosting a forum this Thursday in San Francisco with Democratic presidential candidate Martin O’Malley and several civic tech leaders, focusing on “how public and private sector stakeholders can adapt digital tools to improve the impact of government, elevate marginalized communities, and tackle our country’s most pressing shared challenges.”

  • Jimmy Wales, the cofounder of Wikipedia, explains on Medium why he is chairing Lawrence Lessig’s exploratory presidential campaign committee.

  • In my humble opinion, Lessig’s plan for getting elected president and serving only long enough to pass fundamental pro-democracy reform through Congress (a laudable goal) reminds me a lot of the South Park gnomes episode–Step 1: Collect underpants. Step 2: ???? Step 3: PROFIT.

  • This is civic tech: Code for Africa has just received a grant of $4.7 million for the next three years from the Gates Foundation to extend its work supporting data journalism, focusing on three hub nations: Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa, the organization’s chief strategist Justin Arenstein writes on Medium.

  • Asian-American e-activist group 18 Million Rising is raising money on Indiegogo for VoterVOX, an app that will connect multilingual Asian Americans with voters needing language assistance to navigate the voting process. According to a 2012 exit poll from the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, nearly 1 in 4 Asian Americans prefer to vote with help from an interpreter or translated materials.

 
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First Post

VOLUNTEERS

VOLUNTEERS

A holistic techno-activism coding program in Ferguson; when Internet filters block too much; and more.

  • FiveThirtyEight’s Jody Avirgan interviews Donovan X. Ramsey, a journalist and a fellow at the progressive think tank Demos, and Samuel Sinyangwe, an activist and data scientist, for a podcast about the volunteer-led effort to gather data and statistics about police violence.

  • I wrote about a free coding workshop for black and brown youth in Ferguson, Missouri, that teaches tech, activism, and building community. Participants receive support and nourishment (mentorship, new skills, healthy meals) during the program, and in return they build a website for local businesses. At graduation, they receive a small stipend and a personal laptop, so they can put their new skills to use.

  • Internet filters in schools have gone too far according to the American Library Association, Cory Doctorow notes in Boing Boing.

  • Apple just released the second annual diversity report, with new statistics on recent hires, Max Nisen reports for Quartz.

  • A Harvard student got his internship at Facebook rescinded after he created an app that pointed out a major privacy hole, Allison Pohle reports for Boston.com.

  • A piece by Chris Latterell for The Next Web asks what Facebook’s responsibility to Internet.org users is.

  • To say Uber is not wheelchair friendly would be putting it mildly, according to this Wired article by Issie Lapowsky.

  • If you thought it couldn’t get worse than Hillary Clinton’s campaign asking for feedback in emojis, you were wrong. 
 
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First Post

COUNT/QUANT

COUNT/QUANT

Three emojis or less; how social change is shaping the internet; and more.

  • Hamza Shaban reports for BuzzFeed on Countable, an app that translates proposed legislation into plain English and then helps you email your representatives so that citizens can wield more political agency. Shaban points out that Countable boasts 100,000 registered users, whereas invite-only Brigade only has 13,000 at the moment.

  • The Observer has an interview up with Ben Wellington, the blogger behind I Quant NY. Among other things, he tells Hunter Harris which city agencies aren’t doing a good job at releasing open data, and why it’s important to make your work reproducible.

  • Hillary Clinton asked supporters to articulate how student loan debt makes them feel in three emojis or less, and Issie Lapowsky reports for Wired that it didn’t go well.

  • Report: The Center for Media Justice has released a new report, written in partnership with ColorofChange.org and Data & Society, titled The Digital Culture Shift: From Scale to Power. How the Internet Shapes Social Change, and How Social Change is Shaping the Internet. Keep an eye out for thoughts from Civic Hall’s Micah Sifry.

  • David Auerbach writes about the imperfect anti-harassment use of blocklists on Twitter for Slate.

  • The article prompts an interesting back and forth (you have to click around a bit to see all of the responses) between Alex Howard, Anil Dash, and Zeynep Tufekci on Twitter.

  • Laura Hudson writes for Wired about the comic that explores the reality and impact of online harassment.
 
Categories
Civic Engagement Direct Action movements

FERGUSON CODING WORKSHOP TEACHES TECH, ACTIVISM, AND COMMUNITY

FERGUSON CODING WORKSHOP TEACHES TECH, ACTIVISM, AND COMMUNITY

“We’re creating tech-savvy, conscious leaders, who so happen to be radical black and brown youth.” —Abby Bobé

  • Twitter. Facebook. SEO. The so-called digital divide. Everything covered during the six-week, 100-hour Roy Clay Sr. Workshop is an opportunity for political discussion. Run by the St. Louis-area activist collective Hands Up United, the workshop teaches area residents between the ages 16 and 30 how to code, and they put their new skills to use by building websites for black-owned area businesses and nonprofits.

    There are plenty of programs that have set their sights on diversifying the technology industry—Girls Who Code, Black Girls Code, Telegraph Academy—but the Tech Impact initiative is arguably even more ambitious. Alongside instruction on HTML and JavaScript, participants in the Roy Clay Sr. workshop—named for a Ferguson-area man who became a prominent black entrepreneur and engineer in Silicon Valley—receive a political education.

    “We’re creating tech-savvy, conscious leaders, who so happen to be radical black and brown youth,” Idalin “Abby” Bobé, a volunteer with the initiative, tells Civicist.

    Tara Thompson, a director at Hands Up United and point person on the Tech Impact initiative, concurs. “Changing the ratio is obviously important,” she tells Civicist, referring to programs that focus on diversifying the tech industry, “but if you’re changing the ratio solely to change the numbers and not to to have a greater impact, I wonder how effective that is.”

    The workshop meets three times a week: from 5pm – 9pm on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and on Saturdays from 10am – 6pm. But Bobé says that sometimes participants will hang around for a couple extra hours on Saturdays. Instruction is provided by mentors, mostly from the technology sector in St. Louis, who donate their time and energy to the program.

    Hands Up United was inspired to start this program last year during Ferguson October, when local activists called for a boycott of major corporations in the area. Unfortunately, it quickly became apparent that many St. Louis area residents were unaware of locally-owned alternatives in their community because they had no web presence. A problem with a relatively simple solution had presented itself, and Hands Up United created a program to tackle it.

    The workshop empowers students with new knowledge and skills, and it helps support local businesses.

    “Lastly and perhaps most importantly, it’s about building community,” says Thompson. “I impress on them every day that there is no honor in being the best coder in this class if there is someone who is struggling.”

    Participants are expected to stay connected after graduation. They need to keep in touch with the businesses they helped, in case the owners have problems with the website. And, according to Thompson, at least three students from the first cohort have come back to help mentor the second.

    At graduation, participants receive a $500 stipend and a laptop valued at $700. (Thompson says that of the 12 participants preparing to graduate on Sunday, only two have access to a personal computer outside of class.) The program also feeds the students every day they hold workshop, a not-insignificant expense.

    Thompson says the biggest hurdle is always money. The first workshop, held in February, was crowdfunded last November. Hands Up United launched another crowdfunding campaign last week to raise enough money to cover stipends and laptops this Sunday. ThoughtWorks, the consulting firm (and Abby Bobé’s employer), will match the funds up to $15,000.

    “We have a lot of work to do,” Thompson says towards the end of the interview. “I mean society as a whole…if you care at all about these issues and really just as a human I encourage you to get engaged.”

    She points out that protest is not all standing in the street, facing off with the police. “There’s a way for everyone to plug in if you care about other humans.”

    Read next: How Black Girls Code plans to teach one million black girls to code by 2040.

    BY: JESSICA MCKENZIE AUG 12, 2015
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First Post

SOCRATES

SOCRATES

USAID’s first drone; the Socrates of the NSA; and more.

  • The Department of Homeland Security has monitored the social media accounts of prominent civil rights activist DeRay Mckesson, Jason Leopold reports for Vice.

  • Speaking of surveillance, The Intercept has an excellent piece by Peter Maass about the “Socrates of the National Security Agency,” their in-house ethicist.

  • The notices contained in New York City’s City Record newspaper—including schedules for public hearings, land-sales and contract awards—will now be available online in a searchable and downloadable format. “Cracking open unstructured data is always an adventure. Cracking open NYC’s most valuable newspaper has been historic. Never before has the public had this level of access to the City Record team and its underlying data,” said Noel Hidalgo, executive director and co-founder of BetaNYC (and Civic Hall member), who helped develop the tool.

  • Google’s new umbrella organization, Alphabet, does not include the statement “Don’t be evil,” Brian Merchant reports for Motherboard.

  • Patrick Meier wrote a blog post about the USAID’s first project that deployed a drone, which they used to map artisanal diamond mining sites in Western Guinea.

  • The privacy policy for Microsoft’s interactive bot-with-feelings we mentioned recently? Kashmir Hill points out in Fusion that it includes the phrase “Please do not worry.” Well, okay then.

  • This. (a Civic Hall member) announced $600,000 in seed funding yesterday and has starting building version 2.0. Congrats!

Categories
First Post

GENTRIFIED

GENTRIFIED

Paint with Donald Trump; why we open data; NH library may or may not support Tor; and more.

  • Everyone knows that Silicon Valley has made over San Francisco in its techno-utopian image, but Brett Scott writes in aeon that another victim of gentrification is the intangible thing one might called the ‘hacker ethos’:

    The countercultural trickster has been pressed into the service of the preppy tech entrepreneur class. It began innocently, no doubt. The association of the hacker ethic with startups might have started with an authentic counter-cultural impulse on the part of outsider nerds tinkering away on websites. But, like all gentrification, the influx into the scene of successive waves of ever less disaffected individuals results in a growing emphasis on the unthreatening elements of hacking over the subversive ones.

    Although he focuses mostly on the debasement of hacker values for profit, it’s impossible not to also think of the state or business-sponsored “hackathon,” which focuses the techno-activist’s energy on sanctioned solutions to society’s problems. However, hacker culture—unlike the physical spaces we normally think of when we say gentrification—is not a zero-sum game. While the language of the hacker might have been co-opted for profit, the “true” hacker spirit (whatever that may be) is still out there. As Scott writes:

    It’s in the emergent forms of peer production and DIY culture, in maker-spaces and urban farms. We see it in the expansion of ‘open’ scenes, from open hardware to open biotech, and in the intrigue around 3D printers as a way to extend open-source designs into the realm of manufacture.

  • Related: In Kernel, an interview by Jesse Hicks with one of the authors of The Misfit Economy, Alexa Clay. Clay describes the book as “basically a manifesto for people to really embrace their own inner misfit, their rogue or their counter-cultural personality.” Hacking is featured prominently. Although she sings the praises of whistleblowers like Snowden or hacker collectives like UX in Paris, that operate outside of market forces, she concludes, “I don’t think the misfit economy is a blueprint for a new economy…but I think it’s really a set of skills for an economy in transition, which is where we’re at right now.”

  • More dispatches from Silicon Valley: Dylan Matthews went to the Effective Altruism Global conference and wrote about it for Vox, finding that attendees were pretty uninterested in addressing the problems we have here and now, like global poverty, in favor of talking about distant and indistinct threats like artificial intelligence.

  • In this behind-the-scenes style video by Brent McDonald and John Woo for the New York Times, activists from the Movement for Black Lives read aloud tweets from the past year. Two of the three activists featured, DeRay Mckesson and Johnetta Elzie, were arrested during a sit-in outside the U.S. attorney’s office in St. Louis yesterday, Ryan J. Reilly and Julia Craven report for the Huffington Post.

  • We wish we were kidding: Alabama State Senator Paul Sanford created a GoFundMe campaign to close the state’s budget shortfall, since raising taxes is out of the question. The campaign specifies that you can earmark your donation for a particular government function, prompting one donor to say, “From the Gay Confederate Flag Burning Society of Alabama! Please earmark for rainbow flags atop all government buildings,” and another to write, “Please use this money for cab fare to your local library and check out any economics text book by Friedrich Hayek.”

  • Nancy Scola reports for Politico that Harvard Law professor Lawrence Lessig is exploring a bid for the presidency.

  • GovTech: 18F has released a beta deck of Design Methods, “a collection of research and design practices that we use to better understand and serve the users of our products.”

  • Yesterday, Wikimedia passed the 2.5 billion edits marker.

  • Opportunities: The MIT Media Lab Digital Currency Initiative has announced $75,000 in scholarships for 50 young women and underrepresented people of color to attend the CoinDesk Consensus 2015 digital currency conference in NY on September 10th. Apply here.

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First Post

END GAMES

END GAMES

Paint with Donald Trump; why we open data; NH library may or may not support Tor; and more.

  • We remember: If you read one thing about the anniversary of 9/11 today, may I humbly suggest Jeff Jarvis’ recounting on Twitter (helpfully Storified by Mary Bjorneby) of what it was like for him to survive that day.

  • This is civic tech: Civic Tech USC, a project of the Annenberg Center on Communication Leadership and Society, has released a findings reports on “Empowering the Public Through Open Data” focused on Los Angeles County’s 88 cities. Among their findings:

    • Since 2013, 18 cities within the county have launched some form of open data initiative.

    • Lack of funding remains a “major barrier” to many cities’ involvement in launching open data portals, along with a need for more expertise and buy-in from city departments.

    • “There should be mechanisms for regularly tracking and publicizing stories of how open data is creating value, which can both increase public engagement with city data and help to make a case for meaningful ROI.”

  • Related: Mark Headd responds to Technical.ly Philly’s report on the liberation of the city’s property database, arguing that the end goal of open data programs should be more than just producing more open data. He writes: “The end game on open data has always been about something larger than simply filling up an open data catalog—open data is a pathway to creating a new way of operating in government.”

  • The Center for Technology, Society & Policy at Stanford is launching a new blog called Citizen Technologist, and in its inaugural post, the center’s co-directors Nick Doty and Galen Panger offer several definitions of what a citizen technologist might be, including:

    …a software engineer who considers ethical principles in building her new app; a designer who volunteers his services to improve the user experience of a local non-profit or government agency website; a legislator who works closely with the technical community to design laws and regulations affecting the Internet; a researcher who studies the effects of new communication technologies on employment, inequality or happiness; a citizen who participates in technical projects to map their neighborhood or advocate for their community.

  • Matt Mahan, co-founder and CEO of Brigade, talks to TechCrunch’s Andrew Keen about his startup’s ongoing efforts to give the public a more meaningful way to engage on the issues they care about. About halfway into the video, Mahan admits Brigade has no sure idea how it will make money, but suggests native advertising or selling information to political recruiters.

  • Inside Philanthropy’s Kiersten Marek reports on how Ruth Ann Harnisch (a Civic Hall member) and her foundation are tackling gender equality. She notes that Harnisch is “a big believer in the power of social media and technology to bring together women into powerful giving networks.”

  • In Slate, Civic Hall member Dan Gillmor makes the case for Brewster Kahle, the founder of the Internet Archive, as the next Librarian of Congress.

  • Faced with pressure from the Department of Homeland Security and local police, a public library in Lebanon, New Hampshire, has decided to at least temporarily stop supporting the Tor anonymous web surfing service, Julia Angwin reports for ProPublica. The library’s board of trustees will vote next Tuesday on whether to turn it back on. The Library Freedom Project, working with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and local ACLU chapters, has released a letter of support urging the library to do so.

  • A growing coalition of international human rights and open government groups are joining Access Now’s call on Twitter to reverse its decision to close down Politwoops and similar uses of the company’s API to track the tweets of politicians.

  • Tech and the presidentials: Showing that his communications team are indeed the rulers of all social media, President Obama answered questions about the Iran deal on Quora yesterday.

  • Arun Chaudhary, Bernie Sanders digital creative director (and former Obama videographer), shares a gallery of photos documenting the first 100 days of the Sanders campaign on Medium.

  • Some dude named Sifry tries to explain the confounding rise of Trump and Sanders inside the Republican and Democratic parties as the bubbling up of the “shadow parties” inside each, and ponders whether instead of a two-party system we could have a four- or five-party system, including the folks in the civic arena who work on the stuff that matters as the “Getting-it-done” Party.

  • Work futures: The city of San Francisco is looking to hire an open data services engineer.

  • Congrats to longtime PDM friend Jacob Soboroff, the founder of “Why Tuesday?“, who has been hired by MSNBC as a correspondent. (Do you know why we vote on Tuesdays?)

  • Got a job you are looking to fill at the intersection of tech and politics/government/civic life? Email me at micah-at-civichall-dot-org with a link.

  • For your weekend amusement: PaintWithDonaldTrump.com.

Categories
First Post

MILESTONES

MILESTONES

Protester Progress; Brigade adds voter verification badges; and more.

  • Yesterday was the anniversary of Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, Missouri. In an op-ed for The Guardian, activist and organizer DeRay McKesson recalls the importance of Twitter and Instagram to the Movement for Black Lives:

    If not for Twitter and Instagram, Missouri officials would have convinced you, one year ago, that we simply did not exist. Or that we were the aggressors, rather than the victims. That we, and not they, were the violent ones.

     But social media was our weapon against erasure. It is how many of us first became aware of the protests and how we learned where to go, or what to do when teargassed, or who to trust. We were able to both counter the narrative being spun by officials while connecting with each other in unprecedented ways. Many of us became friends digitally, first. And then we, the protestors, met in person.

  • After a day of protests, an 18-year-old man named Tyrone Harris was shot by police in Ferguson and is now in critical condition, Lisa Brown and Tim Bryant report for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. An activist and protestor named Tony Rice, who filmed the aftermath of the shooting, was arrested shortly after for refusing to move back, Jon Swaine reports for The Guardian.

  • Data scientist Samuel Sinyangwe built this “Protester Progress” timeline of events and milestones in the Movement for Black Lives since Michael Brown’s death last year.

  • Sinyangwe also tweeted “980 protests have happened since August 9th. There were 240 in 1965.” With his sources.

  • Brigade has released a new version of their app that includes voter verification badges. As Alex Howard observes on Twitter, “Voter verification is something politicians care about; keep an eye on this.” 

  • Natasha Singer articulates for the New York Times what rubs her (and many others) the wrong way about the “sharing” economy. “Ditto the peer economy, the people economy and the collaborative economy.”

  • Meanwhile, in California, Sarah Jeong reports for Motherboard that Uber’s defense for an employment lawsuit is that they actually empower their contractors.

  • “I describe this office as the smallest state agency that actually does anything and leave the rest to people’s imagination,” Robert Freeman, the executive director of the New York Committee on Open Government, says in an interview with ProPublica (transcript and audio).

  • Here is a browser extension that replaces “political correctness” with “treating people with respect.”

  • Civic Hall co-founder Micah Sifry is one of many thanked by Tom Steinberg in his last post at mySociety.

 
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