AUTOMATIC

Tweet to donate; the Clinton campaign embraces nostalgia; we killed the sharing economy; and more.

California is on the verge of becoming the second state (after Oregon) to automatically register residents to vote, Andrew Prokop reports for Vox. 
Writing for Politico, Andrew Zaleski uses Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers’ (R-Wash.) comments at Personal Democracy Forum 2015 as a jumping off point to discuss just how bad the state of tech in the Legislative Branch can be—”deplorable,” according to one chief of staff who did time in Silicon Valley. The co-founder of the Congressional Data Coalition, Daniel Schuman, compared what was happening in Congress to a lobotomy, especially when huge steps have been taken to advance technology in the Executive Branch. And Zaleski sites a Sunlight Foundation finding that says only 15 percent of congressional websites are ready for HTTPS.

It turns out Americans don’t want to share power drills, writes Sarah Kessler for Fast Company. The power drill was briefly the universally cited mascot of the sharing economy (“everyone owns one but nobody uses it more than 15 minutes”), but the platform(s) that would allow you to share small household items never took off, or folded completely. Kessler dives into why that is, finding that there really wasn’t much demand for sharing services (one co-founder of a sharing platform could not get THREE users—of the thousands who registered—to complete a transaction).  
Reading now (you know what they say about hindsight) it seems obviously incongruous to talk about charging people for participating in the sharing economy. It just sounds like renting (and Kessler does point out that the most successful “sharing” companies are those that track most closely with traditional companies like hotels, car rental services, or taxis). From personal experience, I think that a post on Facebook would likely turn up a power drill available to borrow—no middle man required.

An impending “tragedy of the commons”?: Thomas Lowenhaupt, the director of the nonprofit Connecting.nyc Inc., writes for City Limits that New York City has disbanded the .NYC Community Advisory Board (on which he served) leaving the development of the city’s online civic commons “rudderless.” Lowenhaupt calls for continued investment in the space and outlines why online common spaces are so important to a rich civic culture.

Writing in his blog Democracy Spot, Tiago Peixoto ponders what it is about initiatives like SeeClickFix: to what extent is it the naming and shaming that gets government to respond to citizens, and how can we make them perform even better?

A win for fair use: Ben Sisario reports for the New York Times on the ‘Dancing Baby’ copyright case.

Annie Karni reports for Politico on the vintage photographs being posted on all of Clinton’s social media channels, in an effort to make her more “relatable.”

Brave new world: Twitter has announced a partnership with Square to allow anyone in the U.S. to donate to a presidential candidate via tweet.

Civicist