Author: Civicist

SHAMS

Post author By Civicist
Post date August 7, 2015
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SHAMS

JESSICA MCKENZIE
August 7, 2015
9:37 am

How the Facebook debate was different from the YouTube debates of 2008; the videos BuzzFeed makes for the GOP; and more.

Although co-hosted by Facebook, last night’s Republican debate was not easy to watch online last night unless you have a cable subscription, as Matt Novak outlined for Gizmodo. I, for example, briefly watched some guy on Meerkat watch the debate, holding up a whiteboard scorecard when one of the candidates scored a point.
Jennifer Stromer-Galley opines for Newsweek that the solicitation of audience participation in the debate via Facebook is “sham democracy”:
Tonight, Facebook and Fox News will again let the public pose questions to the presidential hopefuls. As in the 2008 YouTube debates, the public can post a video question to the Fox News Facebook page. Unlike in 2008, if the public visits the page, they can’t view the questions submitted—they simply go into a black box.
Alex Howard tweeted that the integration with Facebook was “often awkwardly phrased.”
Last night, interest in Carly Fiorina, one of the Republicans left out of the mainstage debate, spiked, at least on Google search, surpassing Donald Trump.
BuzzFeed is producing slick and goofy videos for GOP presidential candidates, Brendan James reports for International Business Times. The question is, why? “But by producing videos with candidates,” James writes, “all of them hungry for access to the younger audience roaming the internet, is BuzzFeed blurring the line between covering politics and dabbling in them?”
Edward T. Walker comes out strongly against the “Uber-ization” of Activism in a opinion piece in the New York Times, arguing that Uber, among other companies, is “weaponizing their apps” for political gains. He concludes:
Technology may be neutral, but grass roots should mean bottom up, not top down. The #blacklivesmatter movement is a genuine grass-roots civil rights campaign, mobilized through social media. So is the environmentalist Bill McKibben’s 350.org, with its blend of online organizing, social media strategy and in-person campaigning around climate change. But Uber’s corporate populism is not. We should learn to recognize the difference.
At the digital inclusion summit held at Civic Hall on Wednesday, New York City City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito and the Mozilla Foundation announced a joint program to increase digital literacy and civic engagement through technology initiatives, reports Gloria Pazmino for Capital New York.
The headline says it all in this piece for Vice by Virgil Texas: “How I Infiltrated a White Pride Facebook Group and Turned It into ‘LGBT Southerners for Michelle Obama’”
Scott Burns, the CEO and co-founder of GovDelivery, gives an overview of the three major investments his company has made in civic tech projects this year. He writes that the key to working with government is to “think small” for “big impact.”

First Post

PARTNERSHIPS

JESSICA MCKENZIE
August 6, 2015
9:39 am

ProPublica and Yelp announce partnership; protecting our digital papers and effects; and more.

ProPublica has always partnered with larger news organizations to get their public interest stories in front of as many eyes as possible, but yesterday they announced a partnership with Yelp. “Scott Klein, ProPublica’s assistant managing editor, said millions of Yelp users will also have access to the news organization’s data,” Lena H. Sun reports for the Washington Post. “In return, the news organization will have bulk access to all of Yelp’s health-care reviews to use in research for news stories.”

The Electronic Frontier Foundation and MuckRock have put out a call to the crowd for suggestions on where to investigate the collection of mobile biometric data by the police, part of their Street-Level Surveillance Project.

Mathbabe Cathy O’Neil has a simple but hilarious and brilliant idea for how Uber drivers can game the system by creating artificial surge pricing.

Jenna McLaughlin reports for The Intercept that the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals found that warrantless tracking by cell phone violates citizens’ fourth amendment rights. The court split 2-1 and a Supreme Court hearing is likely, McLaughlin adds.

For more on what protections our “papers and effects” deserve in the digital age under the fourth amendment, see this article by Laura Moy and Matt Baker for the Open Technology Institute.

Inspired in part by the Code for All summit at Civic Hall last week, which featured a panel about gauging success, the Sunlight Foundation is soliciting stories of civic tech failures.

At the first White House Demo Day, Phone2Action announced a $250,000 fund for educating D.C. youth about civic technology, Lalita Clozel reports for Technical.ly.

After posing for an ad campaign for her employer, OneLogin, Isis Wenger unwittingly became a center of attention in the bay for daring to be a female engineer. She sparked an anti-sexism campaign online under the hashtag #ILookLikeAnEngineer, which Bill Chappell reports for NPR has seen an avalanche of response. (h/t Andrew Slack)

Reddit has updated its content policy and banned some of the most offensive subreddits on the site. But as Noah Kulwin points out for ReCode, Reddit is trying to have it both ways: to free themselves from content that offends “both advertisers and common decency” without trampling their “free speech” ideals.

First Post

POLICY-LITE

JESSICA MCKENZIE
August 5, 2015
9:42 am

Half of the GOP candidates don’t have an “issues” page on their website; smart teddy bears; and more.

Tech and the presidentials: A Politico review of the 17 GOP candidates’ websites found almost half lacked an “issue” page, where they can outline their stances on things Americans care about, including Donald Trump, Jeb Bush and Scott Walker. “For the rest of the pack,” Darren Samuelsohn writes, “the policy pages of their websites are largely afterthoughts, light on significant detail.”
The New York Times’ Ashley Parker has this glimpse into the Republicans’ social media-centered war rooms, writing that, “in the battle for public opinion, the presidential debates will be won or lost on social media, possibly before the 10 Republican hopefuls have even answered the last question.”
Shane Goldmacher tackles the same subject for National Journal, zeroing in on how campaigns will target political journalists on Twitter specifically.
Congress has cut funding for the U.S. Digital Services, Jason Shueh reports for GovTech, raising questions about its future.
Speaking of tech in the White House, yesterday the New York Tech Meetup participated in the first White House Demo Day. A full description of the participants and their creations, from space robots to smart teddy bears, is here.
Our contributing editor An Xiao Mina has co-written a piece for Civicist with Julia Ticona on thinking past the digital divide. They find that thinking about internet access as a binary—you have it or you don’t—misses many of the ways Americans get online. That limited view could prevent the government from investing in short-term, inexpensive solutions that could be as or more impactful than simply expanding broadband access.
In the spring, I wrote about an experiment in participatory democracy in Provo, Utah, run entirely on Loomio and NationBuilder. Well, the results are in and although participation was low, the process concluded successfully with three specific policy recommendations, generated and agreed upon by Provo residents, that were then submitted to the City Council. A second round will run again in September. Read more in my report for Civicist.
For the Australian Financial Times, Claire Stewart profiles Pia Waugh, open government advocate and the director of Gov 2.0 in the Department of Finance.
Mark Bergen reports for ReCode that Facebook has begun advocating for its Internet.org campaign in India, where the initiative has faced backlash for breaking the principles of net neutrality. On Facebook, obviously.
In the Boston Business Journal, Sara Castellanos writes that a Dynamite Labs app lets users create anonymous videos by masking their face and altering their voice, freeing them to tell stories of bullying or racism. Dynamite Labs (co-founder Larry Lieberman is a Civic Hall member) has recently announced seed funding that will allow them to release a public beta version.
Apply: Blue Ridge Labs@Robin Hood has just launched Catalyst, a six-month incubation program for social entrepreneurs who are building technology-enabled solutions to help low-income New Yorkers. Selected teams receive mentorship support as well as a cash stipend.

Civic Engagement Democracy Participatory Democracy

SMALL BUT SUCCESSFUL PARTICIPATORY DEMOCRACY EXPERIMENT TO CONTINUE IN UTAH

Post author By Civicist
Post date August 4, 2015
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SMALL BUT SUCCESSFUL PARTICIPATORY DEMOCRACY EXPERIMENT TO CONTINUE IN UTAH

JESSICA MCKENZIE
August 4, 2015
7:59 pm

The People’s Lobby is run entirely online using the digital tools NationBuilder and Loomio.

Last month, the City Council in Provo, Utah, voted unanimously to continue the Provo People’s Lobby, an experimental process in participatory democracy in which city residents collaborate online on a policy recommendation that is then submitted to the City Council for consideration and possible implementation. The process, which I first wrote about in March for techPresident, is run entirely online using NationBuilder and Loomio.
Participants in Provo’s first People’s Lobby were selected at random from a pool of approximately 75 people who submitted or voted on the “pressing issues” they want addressed in their city. Invitations were sent to one person from each of the 25 neighborhoods represented in that pool; ultimately 14 residents participated in the deliberations on the decision-making platform Loomio. Their efforts were guided with minimal moderation from People’s Lobby creator Jeff Swift, Loomio consultant MJ Kaplan, and two political science students at Brigham Young University.
Recruitment, Swift and his fellow moderators write in a report on the Provo People’s Lobby, required a lot of “handholding” via email and phone calls to get people on board:
Future efforts will benefit from seeing the results of the first, and we have learned what information is important to transmit at this stage to ensure that participants will understand what they are signing up for and be ready to participate. We also anticipate that there will be a certain level of drop off no matter what we do, and this is acceptable. We are recruiting a small jury of residents and do not need a fully representative body in order for the Lobby to work as designed.

Passing the deadline extension on Loomio. (Screenshot courtesy of the Provo People’s Lobby)
Originally slated to last two weeks, the process had to be extended to four because both stages took longer than Swift anticipated. First, participants were provided with the list of pressing issues collected in the month prior and instructed to choose an area to focus on; then, they deliberated over the specific recommendations they wanted to make to the Council.
“They spent almost two weeks picking a topic; [the process was] extended another two weeks for a total of four, and they still barely had time to craft policy recommendations,” Swift tells Civicist. “It was at the very end of the second two weeks where they were able to agree on a final proposal.”
“I think I didn’t anticipate how difficult it would be to settle on a topic,” Swift adds.
At the end of the four weeks, after five discussions consisting of 205 comments by the participants, three priorities for supporting agriculture and public green spaces in their community were submitted to the City Council. Jeff Swift says he was at first disappointed in these policy particular recommendations because it turns out that these initiatives were already on the City Council’s agenda in some form.
“I would have wanted something exciting,” Swift tells Civicist.

Comment made during the first Provo People’s Lobby. (Screenshot courtesy Provo People’s Lobby)
But that’s the inherent danger in creating democratic processes: making space for people to push for initiatives one thinks are unnecessary (one of the original suggestions submitted by the public in the earliest stage of the Lobby asked for a big box store in Provo, a proposal Swift was relieved they didn’t pursue) or flat out disagree with. “I have political opinions and there’s a good chance that the People’s Lobby will go in the other direction [in future iterations], and that’s ok,” Swift says.
What the results do show, Swift points out, is that either the City Council is acting on their agricultural agenda but not sharing their progress with the community, or that they have stalled on their work in that area. Hal Miller, a Councilman and the liaison with the Lobby, tells Civicist that the results were received as a sort of “endorsement” of the work of the Council, and that these items have been pushed higher on the Council’s agenda.
Swift says he is working on changing the mechanisms of the Lobby to prevent this kind of redundancy in the future. It is one of many small changes Swift will make after the People’s Lobby inaugural run. To start, the process will be allotted more time from the beginning.

Not every resident will have deep knowledge of all or even most issues the Lobby might tackle. (Screenshot courtesy Provo People’s Lobby)
Then, he will also increase the guidance by the moderators. Swift’s instinct was for them to be as hands off as possible, but that ultimately led to a handful of voices—many of which belonged to current or potential political actors in the community—essentially intimidating less politically experienced participants out of the process. One way Swift hopes they can change this is by beginning the Lobby by meeting—again, still entirely online—in small groups where people are hopefully more likely to feel comfortable voicing their opinions. The small groups will then take their ideas to the others.
“We’re going to be more conscious about keeping the conversation moving forward,” Swift says.
Although the numbers in the report on the Provo People’s Lobby are low, Hal Miller and Jeff Swift are both optimistic. Miller points out that Utah, and Provo in particular, suffers from low voter turnout. While a process like the People’s Lobby has the potential to increase civic engagement, it also means there is a steep learning curve as residents find out what it means to be civically engaged.

Voting on proposals. (Screenshots courtesy Provo People’s Lobby)

“It exceeded my expectations,” Miller tells Civicist. “I thought there would be more difficulty composing the lobby, more difficulty to bring them together in an ongoing way, and that it would prove difficult to harness the respective energies of the members of the lobby given that it included members who are well known for their activism.”
Swift and the other moderators were pleased with the results considering how foreign an idea the Lobby is:
Considering three facts, this level of engagement was heartening. First, this was the very first time anyone in the world had tried this process. It was frankly a bit confusing to understand and we have gotten better about explaining it. Second, we started with an email list of zero people and grew our list to 90 people. This foundation will magnify our efforts for future efforts. And finally, that marketing was limited to Karen Tapahe’s [Community Relations Coordinator for the City Council] tireless promotion on Facebook and to PR channels. In the future the People’s Lobby team will do more marketing and promotion to get the word out.
A second experimental round of Provo People’s Lobby will begin in September. After that, the Council will have to decide whether to incorporate the process into their budget. The cost of the first two rounds were covered by an anonymous donation.

First Post

WINNING

MICAH L. SIFRY
August 4, 2015
9:44 am

Mike Bracken to step down; Civic Hall hiring a writer/researcher for Rethinking Debates project; and more.

Tech and the presidentials: Here’s Donald Trump’s self-referential question to his fellow Republican presidential contenders, as posted in response to Facebook’s call for questions for the candidates appearing in the first GOP debate this Thursday. If you look closely, you’ll see that the article he has printed out on his desk for reading is headlined, “Donald Trump Winning Facebook by a Landslide.”
This headline has more cliches per word than most: “Exclusive: Republicans Launch Game-Changing Data Center That Will Forever Change Politics.” The story, by Mark Fidelman in Forbes.com, isn’t a scoop since people have been reporting on the GOP’s Data Center for years. But it does share some new data about what’s in Data Center, including the number of people in the national voter file that they’ve matched with email addresses (22 million) and the number of “micro targeting data points” they’ve amassed (7.7 billion).
Cryptowars, continued: Longtime British investigative journalist Duncan Campbell, author of much of the best reporting on Britain’s secret surveillance programs going back decades, reflects in The Intercept on how Edward Snowden’s disclosures have not only affirmed his earlier work, but also how the debate over rampant government eavesdropping has finally shifted.
While the German authorities have backed off their threat to investigate two journalists who write for Netzpolitik.org, the country’s leading political and digital rights blog, people there are still angry that they were threatened with a treason charge for publishing reports on domestic surveillance, Melissa Eddy reports for the New York Times.
Government opening: Mike Bracken, the pathbreaking director of digital for the U.K. government’s Cabinet Office, has announced that he’s stepping down after five years in that position.
As Code for America founder Jennifer Pahlka blogs, Bracken’s impact on digital government was transformative. Not only did he lead a massive overhaul of service delivery in the U.K., his work inspired her and other counterparts in the United States and led directly to the launch of the U.S. Digital Service. As Pahlka writes, “Now, a pilgrimage to the GDS that Mike and his team have built has become a rite of passage (and a shot of energy and inspiration) for every serious digital government reformer in city, state, and federal government in the U.S. and around the world. Each of us is hoping to learn from and borrow Mike’s model and capture even a fraction of the team’s success.”
Everything Pahlka says about Bracken’s influence is true (and this great talk by him at PDF 2014 showcases his thinking). I’d like to add one more personal comment, about his courage. When the gifted young coder and democracy activist Aaron Swartz took his life in January 2013, suffering under intense pressure from an over-zealous government prosecutor who thought his copying of academic journal articles was some kind of horrific crime, Bracken posted an eloquent tribute to Swartz (and an equally skilled British hacker, Chris Lightfoot, who was a pioneer of e-democracy at mySociety), titled “Standing on the shoulders of giants,” on Government Digital Service’s official blog. To my knowledge, not a single one of Bracken’s counterparts in the U.S. federal branch who work on open government did anything equivalent to mourn Swartz’s untimely death.
Hidden pleasures: Melody Kramer has pulled together an impressive list of “every hidden journalism-related social media group I could find.”
The Datadrive.com is a crazy, funny satire of Facebook, made by Daniel Kolitz. Its premise: “The year is 2016. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has absconded to parts unknown, making off with the data of Facebook’s millions of users. Texas mattress mogul Buck Calhoun has purchased the gutted social network in a fire sale and has now launched a data drive to replenish its depleted stores of valuable personal information.” Check it out during your lunch break.
Job opening at Civic Hall: We’re looking to hire a researcher/writer for our new Rethinking Debates project. Please help spread the word!
And with that, I’m off for some vacation—my able colleague Jessica McKenzie will be holding down the fort here at First Post while I’m away.

Democracy GovTech Open Government

In Brazil, Championing the US Digital Services Playbook

Post author By Civicist
Post date August 3, 2015
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In Brazil, Championing the US Digital Services Playbook

JESSICA MCKENZIE
August 3, 2015
8:03 pm

A civic tech start-up in Brazil has translated the U.S. Digital Services Playbook into Portuguese and wants to distribute it to elected representatives and government agencies.

Last year, a civic tech start-up in Brazil called Núcleo Digital (Digital Core) translated the U.S. Digital Services Playbook into Portuguese and began trying to distribute it to elected representatives and government agencies. Recently, through a colleague in a civic hacking community called HackersBR, they have succeeded in getting the playbook in front of a government administrator in Ceará, Brazil’s eighth most populous state.
Digital Core first began working together as a digital lab in Sao Paulo’s City Hall. In 2013, the Urban Development Secretariat Chief Officer, Weber Sutti, invited Vini Russo, Digital Core’s CEO, to build a digital platform to support citizen participation in the review and revision of the Department of Urban Development’s Master Plan. To build his team, Russo reached out to activists he had known and worked with since 2008, all of whom had an interest in civic tech and updating democracy through technology.
The website they went on to build made available “all the information related to the participatory process, such as schedules, results, news, and files…[as well as] innovative participatory tools, such as an online proposal form, a shared map and a collaborative draft bill, where any citizen could post specific comments and suggestions for each article.” The city of Sao Paulo’s website states that the platform made possible “unprecedented” levels of citizen participation.
“We made it very fast,” says Maria Shirts, who helps with public relations and project management at Digital Core. “With free software and open codes. We like to say that we hacked City Hall. In a legal way.”
After the successful implementation of the urban policy platform, the team stayed on at City Hall to build digital tools for other government agencies, facing considerable opposition in their quest to made government more open and transparent. “The City Hall, and our government in general, is very closed to new digital initiatives,” Shirts tells Civicist. “Two years ago it was very taboo [to share code on Github, for example]. We kind of changed this thinking.”
Shirts says that her team was at City Hall for more than a year, and that they were starting to change the culture around technology. But in late 2014, Shirts says, “the data agency [PRODAM] began kind of a conflict with us because they have another kind of thinking.” According to Shirts, the agency refused to give her team the data they needed to build their platforms, so they began to think about leaving City Hall.
It was at that time, September 2014, that the team translated the U.S. Digital Services Digital Playbook:
It was our last month in city hall. We were already thinking that we were leaving, thinking ‘how can we leave city hall but also keep doing this job of opening government.’ We had a horizon but we were not sure where this horizon was going to take us…At the time we could think [only] about spreading this digital word in other sectors, for other parties, other candidates.
The presidential election took place that month. “We were trying to show politicians that they should follow some kind of digital guidelines,” Shirts says.
The U.S. Digital Services Playbook is a list of 13 “plays” that government can make for better technology policy and practices, beginning with “Understand what people need” and ending with “Default to open.” The reasoning behind each play is explained and the playbook includes a checklist of things to do successfully carry out the play, and questions to ask to ensure you’re making the right choice.
For example, the checklist for “Default to open” includes the command to “Ensure that we maintain the rights to all data developed by third parties in a manner that is releasable and reusable at no cost to the public.” The key questions include “If there is an API, what capabilities does it provide? Who uses it? How is it documented?”
The Maria Shirts and her colleagues left City Hall and started Digital Core in October. They have not had much luck getting the playbook in government hands. Their biggest coup, getting it in front of a staffer in Ceará, only occurred in the past few months, through one of their connections in HackersBR, a national network of civic hackers in Brazil. (HackersBR, while only four months old, has spread to more than ten cities already.)
Shirts says that they also have a close relationship with the opposition, the Sustainability Network party, and they shared the playbook with some of their candidates in 2014, but none of them were elected.
“Baby steps, but we are getting there,” says Shirts.
Jennifer Pahlka, the founder of Code for America and former U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer, tells Civicist that there was no attempt made to track international adoption of the USDS playbook but that she has heard it is being used in Puerto Rico.
Although she says “I hope that everyone uses it,” Pahlka acknowledges that the playbook “was intended to validate an approach.”
“It’s not possible to suddenly start following these practices without a lot of work,” she adds.

First Post

DISRUPTIONS

MICAH L. SIFRY
August 3, 2015
9:50 am

Mob justice and Cecil the Lion; a popular chatbot that can ask how you’re doing post-breakup; and more.

Governmental disruption: Steven Levy reports for Medium’s Backchannel on the rise of the U.S. Digital Service. Since USDS is already delivering measurable results for government IT development, here’s the money quote, from its deputy director Haley van Dyck: “Our institutional innovation strategy is, if we can prove our value over the next 18 months, we believe it will be asinine for the next administration to not continue to invest in this resource.” She also adds, speaking of the service’s recruits from high-tech companies: “about 66 percent of the people that came out for three months ended up going home, quitting their job and coming back full time. And it’s on the rise. I think it’s over 80 percent now.”
Presidential disruption: Political scientist Lee Drutman of New America has a nifty suggestion for how to test presidential contenders worthiness for the White House. Instead of holding debates, have them handle a simulated crisis, like a terrorist attack or a bank failure. He writes, for the Washington Post, “Film crews could record the entire simulation, then television producers could turn it into a reality-TV special. Make all the footage public, and journalists could comb through it and analyze who handled the situation best and why. Candidates could critique each other’s responses. We’d also learn about the quality of advice the candidates get.”
Speaking of quality advisers, the Donald Trump campaign has fired a political consultant, Sam Nunberg, whose racist statements on Facebook were first uncovered by Hunter Walker of Business Insider.
Social disruption: Writing for Vox, Max Fisher takes note of the recent online campaign against American dentist Walter Palmer, who killed a beloved lion named Cecil, and argues that “mob justice is not justice.” Indeed, it looks like the “human flesh search engines” of China are now here.
Writing for the Atlantic, Rose Eveleth asks a really good question: “Why Aren’t There More Women Futurists?”
Speaking of the future, in China millions of young people are hooked on a realistic chatbot named Xiaoice, made by Microsoft, that has mined the Chinese internet for human conversations, John Markoff and Paul Mozur report for the New York Times. The program “remembers details from previous exchanges with users, such as a breakup with a girlfriend or boyfriend, and asks in later conversations how the user is feeling.”
Uber disruption? Cory Doctorow tweets from FOO Camp: “Building a co-op Uber alternative that returned Uber’s share of the $$ to riders/drivers is ‘as hard as making Linux…” and adds, “Therefore, the existence of GNU/Linux proves that building a co-op, open alternative to Uber is eminently do-able.”
One of Uber’s top New York political consultants, Bradley Tusk, Mike Bloomberg’s former campaign manager, is starting Tusk Ventures, “a political consulting firm geared toward helping start-ups work with—and in some cases, beat back—government regulators,” reports Dino Grandoni for the New York Times.
Ideological disruption: If you’ve ever wondered what exactly is so grating about the “Aspen Ideas Festival” and all the other happy chatter that warbles down from places like the Aspen Institute all summer long, read the text of a speech author Anand Giridharadas gave at the Aspen Institute’s Action Forum last week. A tidbit:
The Aspen Consensus, in a nutshell, is this: the winners of our age must be challenged to do more good. But never, ever tell them to do less harm. The Aspen Consensus holds that capitalism’s rough edges must be sanded and its surplus fruit shared, but the underlying system must never be questioned. The Aspen Consensus says, “Give back,” which is of course a compassionate and noble thing. But, amid the $20 million second homes and $4,000 parkas of Aspen, it is gauche to observe that giving back is also a Band-Aid that winners stick onto the system that has privileged them, in the conscious or subconscious hope that it will forestall major surgery to that system—surgery that might threaten their privileges.
Civic disruption: Chicago has announced a new system using public data to prioritize inspections restaurants most likely to have health code problems, “helping them resolve any issues as quickly as possible and prevent foodborne illnesses before they ever begin,” according to a press release from Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s office. The system was created as party of a $1 million grant to Chicago from the Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Mayors Challenge.
The NYC City Council Speaker’s Office is hosting this week’s Civic Hacknight here Wednesday at Civic Hall with BetaNYC, with a focus on participatory budgeting and civic engagement.

First Post

REACHING

MICAH L. SIFRY
July 31, 2015
9:55 am

Sanders streaming into a house party near you; there were no privacy advocates in House subcommittee meeting on the Internet of Things; and more.

Cryptowars, continued: A coalition of privacy, civil liberties, and internet freedom groups have generated more than 6.1 million faxes to Members of Congress from internet users opposed to the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA), Fight for the Future announced yesterday. (The faxes are being sent electronically, so no trees are being harmed in the process, FFTF says.)
On Medium, Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) explains why CISA won’t protect anyone from hackers.
Kate Kaye of AdAge reports on a House subcommittee hearing earlier this week on the Internet of Things that “consisted entirely of representatives from industry groups,” without even one privacy advocate. “it comes as no surprise,” she writes, “that the general consensus among witnesses was that innovators should be free to innovate without the threat of overreaching privacy legislation getting in the way.”
Tech and the presidentials: Classified emails on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private server had information from five U.S. intelligence agencies, Marisa Taylor, Greg Gordon, and Anita Kumar report for McClatchy DC.
The Clinton campaign is pretty upset at the New York Times for how it bungled its coverage of the non-“criminal referral” story last week, as this letter from its communications director Jennifer Palmieri to Times executive editor Dean Baquet shows.
Senator Bernie Sanders’ campaign says more than 100,000 supporters attended more than 3,500 house parties Wednesday night, all listening to the candidate via a video live-stream, Nick Corasaniti reports for the New York Times. “Attendees at the house parties were asked to text a number to opt in and show interest,” he notes.
Money talks: Former President Jimmy Carter tells talk radio host Thom Hartman that thanks to unlimited money in politics, America is “just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or to elect the president. And the same thing applies to governors and U.S. senators and congressmembers.”
GenderAvengers: Ainsley O’Connell reports for Fast Company on Quibb founder Sandi MacPherson’s 50-50 pledge effort to get conference organizers to commit to equalize their numbers of male and female speakers.
Government opening: Boston Mayor Martin Walsh announced his city’s new “Open and Protected Data Policy,” opening more city data to the public including parking meter usage info, firearm recovery data, wifi usage data, recycling info and library user counts.
This is civic tech: Happy Birthday to Crisis Text Line, which turns two tomorrow. It now processes more than 20,000 messages per day.
The city of Palo Alto, California, is starting to use a new digital commenting tool built by Peak Democracy to further engage residents in helping update its comprehensive plan, Susan Schena reports for Patch.

First Post

SOCIAL ORDERS

MICAH L. SIFRY
July 30, 2015
9:57 am

Uber’s promise to maintain social order; easier targeting of voters on Facebook; and more.

Cryptowars, continued: Implicitly rebuking their current colleagues, three former top American national security officials, Mike McConnell, Michael Chertoff and William Lynn, write in the Washington Post in support of “ubiquitous encryption at the device, server and enterprise level without building in means for government monitoring,” saying this most serves “the greater public good.”
Annals of disruptive tech: In the Washington Post, the Fletcher School’s Bhaskar Chakravorti explains how Uber is navigating the challenge of winning the Chinese market. This paragraph is key: “no prescription for success in the Chinese market can be complete without a plan for managing the true source of political power: the Chinese government. As protests by taxi drivers erupted in multiple cities across China, Uber recently acknowledged its commitment to ‘maintain social order’ by using its GPS data to track drivers and their locations near protests and canceling their Uber contracts if they were near such protests—a strong signal to the government that its cache of data could be used for the ‘social order maintaining’ objectives of the state.”
Alex Rosenblat of the Data & Society Institute has a fascinating piece up on Motherboard detailing some of oddities of Uber’s ecosystem, including phantom cars that a user often sees when they open the app (to entice them to think drivers are close by?), and the strategies drivers and passengers alike use to take advantage of (or avoid) surge pricing.
Baby you can drive my car: Andy Greenberg of Wired has another scoop on a security researcher who has figured out how to perform a “man in the middle” attack on GM’s OnStar RemoteLink system, enabling him to track a target car, unlock it, trigger the horn and alarm and even start its engine. GM confirmed to Greenberg that it is working on a fix.
Tech and the presidentials: Ashley Parker reports for the New York Times on how Facebook “has been working to expand its digital domination in the political realm.” One critical innovation sure to be useful in 2016 “allows a campaign to upload its voter file—a list of those they hope will turn out to vote or can be persuaded to do so—directly to Facebook, where it can target those users.”
Government opening: The Library of Congress has added several useful new features to Congress.gov, including a tool that reads a bill summary out loud to a user and the ability to search within member profile and committee pages, librarian Robert Brammer blogs.
Open government groups in South Africa are challenging their country’s role in the international Open Government Partnership. In October, South Africa will become chair of the OGP, but civil society groups are facing “increasing surveillance, intimidation and censorship of activists and the media,” several leading organizations argue in an open letter.
Activistas: GenderAvenger is out with a new video (and mobile app) aimed at combating the all too frequent excuses conference and panel organizers give for failing to include meaningful numbers of women in their events. Here’s a recent example of GenderAvenger engaging Launch Festival founder Jason Calacanis for only have 24 percent women at his March event. And here’s a more promising interchange with John Koetsier of MobileBeat, who tells GenderAvenger “Thanks for the eyes on it. We’re trying, and yes, we still suck.”

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MICAH L. SIFRY
July 29, 2015
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“They don’t give a damn about governing”; civic tech applications of the blockchain; and more.

Petition 2.0: On first taking his job earlier this year, White House chief digital officer Jason Goldman said he would look into the backlog of unanswered WeThePeople e-petitions, and yesterday he produced results, Alex Howard reports for Huffington Post, announcing that from this point forward qualified petitions would get official answers within 60 days, and sharing responses for 20 long-unanswered petitions, including one from two years ago (!) calling for Edward Snowden’s pardon (which was unsurprisingly rejected).
Here’s Goldman’s post on Medium (his former employer), explaining the updates to WeThePeople.
Writing for Civicist, Dave Karpf argues that the most important news here isn’t the promise of a response within 60 days, it’s Change.org’s decision to partner with WeThePeople on petitions aimed at the administration. As he notes, “most people sign one WeThePeople petition and never come back. Only two or three petitions are started per day on WeThePeople. Change.org receives hundreds per day.” Not only does the partnership mean that Change and WeThePeople are no longer competing for users’ attention, Karpf adds, “The more that WeThePeople integration is baked into the functionality of other large petition sites, the harder it will be for the next President to shutter WeThePeople’s doors.”
Writing for Politico, Sarah Wheaton puts the WeThePeople news in context of the White House’s longer up-and-down history of experimenting with and using digital tools. And she quotes some guy named Sifry who suggests that if Goldman and team really want to score some digital engagement points, they should try some more free-wheeling ideas, “like a Wiki for suggestions about how Obama should spend his post-presidency, or a crowdsourcing site for pointing out government waste.”
Tech and the presidentials: Sen. Rand Paul’s campaign is struggling with “deep fundraising and organizational problems,” Alex Isenstadt reports for Politico. Among Paul’s problems: he hasn’t succeeded at cultivating a “sugar daddy.” Peter Thiel, the libertarian Silicon Valley VC, helped his father’s 2012 run, but Isenstadt says he is “now unlikely to be a major contributor” to the younger Paul. The senator also canceled a planned appearance at Auren Hoffman’s Dialog Retreat, another opportunity to tap tech libertarian types.
Paul’s digital director, Vincent Harris, went to Google’s VidCon conference last week and came back convinced that his party is doing online video “wrong.” He writes on Medium, “Republican campaigns, institutions, and advocacy groups are doing a great job of ‘tv-ing the internet’, while missing the key differences in the style, substance, and type of content that needs to be created for younger audiences.”
In a new paper, “They Don’t Give a Damn About Governing,” published by Harvard’s Shorenstein Center, journalist Jackie Calmes reports on how conservative media exerts enormous influence on the Republican party. For anyone wondering why Donald Trump is doing so well at the moment, Calmes’ paper is must-reading. Here’s a taste of what she found:
“It’s not just talk radio, but the blogosphere, the internet—they’re all intertwined now. You’ve got this constant chorus of skepticism about anything the quote-unquote establishment does,” said a longtime former top aide to House Republican leaders, Dave Schnittger. And, he said, the chorus is loudest in opposition to those actions that are fundamental to governing: meeting basic fiscal deadlines for funding the government and allowing it to borrow. “Those are the things that leaders have to get done as part of governing,” the Republican said, “as much as conservative media may hate it.”
And this:
Tom Latham, a longtime House Republican who retired in January, said, “All the social media, Facebook, all this stuff has had a huge impact, in that there’s a group of people out there for whom everything is immediate. It isn’t necessarily verified as being true; there’s a lot of opinion stated as fact. And they [conservative media] can arouse a lot of people just instantaneously.” When Latham came to Congress with the big Republican class elected in 1994, “We didn’t have internet, didn’t have that type of instantaneous communication,” he said. Twenty years later, constituent contacts to his office “went from maybe 7,000 a year up to, when I left, to 35,000 to 40,000 contacts a year, just because of the ease of communication and people popping off the emails every day. A lot of that is generated by the conservative talk show people and media people.”
Calmes also made smart use of Media Cloud’s news search tool, finding a dramatic difference between conservative and liberal media in coverage of the “Common Core” education curriculum.
Annals of open government: Waldo Jaquith of U.S. Open Data explains how they created a simple, free, open source software product that will help states publish verifiable legal data, and thus are heading off a rising tendency to lock it up in the hard-to-access .pdf format in order to comply with the Uniform Electronic Legal Materials Act.
Future present: Frank Pasquale and Siva Vaidhyanathan, two of academia’s sharpest tech critics, write for The Guardian that when “disruptive” companies like Airbnb and Uber posture as righteous champions of freedom while they flout standing employment and anti-discrimination laws, they are actually invoking a different history: the choice by reactionary Southerners to “nullify” federal laws they didn’t like. In doing so, they argue, these companies “undermine local needs and effective governance.”
Nick Grossman of Union Square Ventures, always a little ahead of the curve, says he sees the emergence of a whole swath of new networked services that “will fill the gaps left by the unbundling of the job” giving independent workers a variety of supports from help with job discovery and equipment to administrative help and insurance benefits.
Blockchain technology could be useful in protecting user-generated video of official misbehavior, distributing welfare payments, and providing people with official IDs, reports Emily Spaven of CoinDesk.
This is civic tech: Eilis O’Neil reports for us on Civicist about the efforts of Black Girls Code, where girls learn not only how to code, but how not to “feel like a weirdo” for wanting to.

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