Civicist

CIVIC TECH NEWS & ANALYSIS

PARTNERSHIPS

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.