Today’s civic-tech must read: Continuing his series of posts on the future of civic tech, Civicmakers founder Lawrence Grodeska offers a smorgasbord of ideas centered on what he sees as the unrealized civic tech opportunity: transforming the “broken public input process for government at all levels.” He writes: “In the end, I feel the biggest opportunity is not technology, but the process by which we make decisions together.” Hear, hear!

MoveOn.org is hosting an online presidential candidates forum that has been endorsed by the DNC, which is under fire for limiting the number of televised debates, Sam Frizell reports for Time magazine. So far Senator Bernie Sanders has agreed to participate; all the other candidates have also been invited.

Access Now (a Civic Hall member) has started an online campaign against the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act now being debated in the Senate.

Lauren Bacon talks to mathematician Greg Martin about why all-male conference line-ups are statistically impossible if speakers are chosen by NOT treating gender as a factor. In fact, he argues that if speaker lists were actually selected without bias, we would be 18 times more likely to see women over-represented than under-represented.

With San Francisco hotly debating a ballot proposition that would curtail the short-term housing rental market, a bunch of tone-deaf billboard ads by Airbnb, which is spending heavily to defeat the referendum, came under fire yesterday, Roberto Baldwin reports for Engadget.

Mike Bracken and the core of his digital team at the Government Digital Service in the UK have gone to work for the Cooperative Group, a set of mutual businesses owned by more than eight million members.

The Knight News Challenge has announced the 45 semi-finalists in its current cycle, which is focused on “how we might make data work for individuals and communities.”

So, it turns out that #BoycottStarWarsVII was invented by anonymous trolls, reports Fruzsina Eordogh for Motherboard.

Google knows what people are thinking of dressing up as for Halloween.

Creepy!