Civicist

CIVIC TECH NEWS & ANALYSIS

DOCUMENTATION

NYPD mandates Force Incident Reports; Trump’s social media guy; and more.

  • The NYPD has announced new guidelines for the use of force that now includes a requirement to document each instance in a Force Incident Report, Al Baker and J. David Goodman report for the New York Times. The resulting data will published in annual reports and could be used to analyze trends or change policy.

  • In an email exchange with Hillary Clinton in 2011, Anne-Marie Slaughter—then an official in the State Department and now president and CEO of the New America Foundation—complained that the government agency’s technology was so antiquated it was almost non-functional, and that nobody used it, Laura Meckler reports for the Wall Street Journal. Slaughter suggested drawing public attention to the problem, but another aide advised against it for security reasons.

  • The messages were part of the fifth Clinton email dump, with more than 6,000 new pages for reporters to sift through.

  • Bernie Sanders’ campaign is the first of 2016 contenders to announce getting to one million individual online donations, Natalie Andrews reports for the Wall Street Journal. The announcement was first made on the subreddit /r/SandersforPresident.

  • Ben Schreckinger profiles Donald Trump’s social media guy, who pioneered the 15-second Instagram attack ad.

  • SciDevNet has published a rich interactive feature on the worldwide digital divide written by Kevin Pollock, Adel Fakhir, Zoraida Portillo, Madhukara Putty and Paula Leighton. It is an excellent primer on the ways both old and new technologies are creatively used in under-connected areas for educational purposes, health services, communication, and more.

  • Documents leaked by Anonymous International show that the Russian government is considering building a “national information platform” that would essentially function as an alternative to the worldwide web, Aric Toler writes for Global Voices.

  • Susan Crawford has the story of a bluegrass fiddler spearheading a Predictive Blight Prevention in Cincinnati.

  • “Government agencies must figure out how to elevate the public interest value of making “smart objects” transparent to their owners over the copyright interests of the corporations that manufacture them,” writes Alexander Howard in the Huffington Post in response to the Volkswagen cheating scandal. Hear hear.

  • As Hurricane Joaquin descends on the East Coast, meteorologists fret over how to convey both warnings and uncertainty on social media, and try to apply lessons learned during and after Hurricane Sandy, Andrew Freedman reports for Mashable.

  • Civic Hall member David Moore launched his non-profit project Councilmatic—the “first-ever open-data source for everything in the NYC Council”—at the Code for America Summit yesterday. Congratulations!