Civicist

CIVIC TECH NEWS & ANALYSIS

Author: Civicist

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First Post

Karassed

Karassed

When smart objects “can lie and cheat”; Nirvana band member et al. launch U.S. Open Source Party; and more.

  • Our brave new future: “As the Volkswagen case demonstrates, a smart object can lie and cheat,” writes technosociologist Zeynep Tufekci in the New York Times. And, she notes, we shouldn’t worry just about smart objects like cars, but also take note of the dangers of non-auditable voting machines.
  • Related: Jim Dwyer of the New York Times turns to Columbia University’s Eben Moglen, a longtime advocate of software transparency, to explain the lesson of the Volkswagen scandal: “Intelligent public policy, as we all have learned since the early 20th century, is to require elevators to be inspectable, and to require manufacturers of elevators to build them so they can be inspected,” Moglen said. “If Volkswagen knew that every customer who buys a vehicle would have a right to read the source code of all the software in the vehicle, they would never even consider the cheat, because the certainty of getting caught would terrify them.” The code in cars is, in fact, “tightly protected under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act,” Dwyer notes.
  • Hacking elections: With the Canadian national elections approaching, many citizens are turning to vote swapping sites in order to maximize the chances of their party winning the most seats, Samantha Rideout reports for Civicist.
  • The U.S. Commission on Presidential Debates announced the locations of next year’s general election events, and included this intriguing item: “An additional campus, Dominican University of California, will lead an initiative to use technology and social media to engage young voters in a discussion of major issues in the 2016 debates (#DUdebate16).”
  • Krist Novoselic (Nirvana band member and political activist), R.U. Sirius (techno/countercultural author), Nathan Wilcox (former political consultant) and Jon Lebkowsky (internet maven) have launched the United States “Open Source Party.” It is, they write, to be based on four simple principles: “Laws, policies, and political processes are seen as a body of code. The code, and any changes to the code, are visible and understandable: i.e., transparency is a fundamental. The code is accessible and modifiable. Anyone who shares our needs and values can access the code and propose modifications, which may be accepted by democratic consensus, or by executive decision in a framework decided democratically.” We’ll keep an eye on this effort.
  • The Asia Foundation reports on the ongoing progress of the MaePaySoh (Let’s Vote) Hack Challenge, which has rallied 130 developers in 30 teams who are working to build apps that will help Myanmar’s 32 million voters in its November 8 elections.
  • These may be the jobs that you are looking for: Civic Hall’s civic imagination fellow Andrew Slack is looking to hire a communications director and an operations director for a five-month campaign called “MayTheForceBeWithUs” focused on Star Wars and money in politics.
  • The Center for Government Excellence at Johns Hopkins University is currently looking to hire an analyst, a senior analyst, and an administrative coordinator. The center is helping the What Works Cities program create a culture of evidence-based decision making in midsize U.S. cities.
  • Network weaving: At the Change.org memorial for Jake Brewer in Washington, D.C., Monday night, his mother held the post-it he had on his monitor at the White House, recounts Jennie Kim Eldon in this moving post. It read “Cultivate the Karass.” For those of us who need a Kurt Vonnegut refresher, she explains that a “karass” was a term he invented in Cat’s Cradle for “a group of people who kind of get mixed up in each other’s lives in order to do God’s will.” I never heard Jake use this term but boy does that three-word phrase describe what he did. Now the #RebelAlliance will have to continue that work.
  • Related: Movement organizer Marianne Manilov suggests, on Twitter, the following “Idea: hashtag #brewered Def (v) to fully believe in someone’s possibility and tell them w/yr heart.”
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Canada Democracy elections

ONLINE VOTE SWAPPING BOOSTS CITIZENS’ SAY IN CANADIAN ELECTIONS

ONLINE VOTE SWAPPING BOOSTS CITIZENS’ SAY IN CANADIAN ELECTIONS

Vote swapping is reinvigorating some citizens’ interest in elections by offering them a greater say, and perhaps a greater influence on election outcomes.

Although it would come as news to a sizeable chunk of Canadians, they do not elect their head of government—at least not directly. Like some other nations that used to be British colonies, Canada is governed by the Westminster system, meaning the prime minister is appointed by the Queen’s local representative, the governor general. Normally, this official appoints the leader of the party that wins the most seats in the House of Commons, making the prime minister a democratically chosen leader in practice, if not on paper.

However, this democratic choice is arguably distorted by the first-past-the-post (FPTP) voting system, in which the candidate who gets the most votes in an electoral district wins a seat. FPTP is usually (though not always) consistent with the popular vote when there are two dominant parties, as in the United States, but because most Canadian ridings (electoral districts) now have three or more non-“fringe” candidates, somebody can easily win a seat without earning the majority of the votes, just so long as he or she still has more votes than each of the competitors.

As a result, Canada’s government is often elected by a minority of the citizens. The current prime minister’s party, the Conservatives, had 39.62 percent of the popular vote in the 2011 election. The geographical distribution of these votes also happened to give the Conservatives a “false majority”: they hold over half of the seats in the House of Commons despite having earned under half the vote—and are therefore able to pass legislation without support from any of the other parties.

Given the potential for this kind of scenario, it isn’t unusual for Canadians to cast a ballot, not for the candidate they like the most, but instead for the person they believe has the best chance of defeating the candidate they like the least.

Leading up to the Canadian election scheduled for October 19, web-based vote-swapping hubs are offering another tactical option. Instead of simply voting for second- or third-choice candidates, vote swappers aim to pair up with somebody who lives in a riding where their preferred party has a real chance of winning a seat according to poll data and statistical modeling. Each partner in the swap agrees to vote for the other partner’s preferred party.

Dr. Mai Yasue, a conservation scientist in Vancouver, thinks her priorities are most in line with those of the Green Party, but her riding is a close three-way race between the Conservatives, the Liberals and the New Democratic Party (NDP). “Although I’d like to show my support for the Green Party and help them gain a reputation of being a real Canadian political party, the idea of helping to give a seat to the Conservatives is abhorrent to me,” she says. She is looking to swap her vote with a Liberal Party supporter in a riding with a strong Green candidate.

Preserving the overall vote count of small parties like the Greens is one of the advantages of vote swapping. “It’s a way to get their leaders into the house, and these parties bring important conversations to the table,” says Craig Hubley, one of the administrators behind Vote Swap Canada 2015, a Facebook group where would-be swappers can post want ads to find a partner.

Another purported advantage of swapping is that once you’ve committed to vote on behalf of somebody else, your conscience is more likely to send you to booth on election day—even if you’re busy or tired. “It creates a feeling of solidarity between myself and the person I’m swapping with,” says Marena Brinkhurst, an NDP supporter voting in Nova Scotia who found a Liberal partner in Quebec through Vote Swap Canada 2015. “We’re in different provinces and we support different parties, but we’re both in the same bind and we can help each other. It’s a refreshing moment of connection and trust to find during an election.”

In addition, swapping offers the option of voting for a candidate whose track record or ideas you admire but who isn’t running where you live. “Maybe you can’t stand any of the people in your riding,” says Hubley. “But there must be someone, somewhere in the country, whom you can respect.”

PILOTED IN THE USA

Informal vote swapping between family and friends has probably existed for decades if not longer. Even before Canadians took to the web in 2008 to swap votes with strangers, a similar endeavor had been tried during the American presidential election in 2000, when Ralph Nader supporters in swing states agreed to vote for Al Gore in exchange for Nader votes in predictable states. One of the websites facilitating these arrangements, voteswap2000.com, was threatened with criminal prosecution by California’s secretary of state, frightening it (and others) into shutting down. Seven years later, it was vindicated by a circuit court’s decision that these threats had violated the website creator’s freedom of speech. Online vote swapping has continued playing a minor role in the United States ever since.

The Gore-Bush race was so close that Gore-Nader swaps held the potential to change the outcome, but since 2000, the margins of victory in presidential elections have been wider. In Canada, by contrast, it’s recently been the rule rather than the exception that a few thousand vote swaps could theoretically make the difference between a majority government (that can largely do as it pleases) and a minority one (that must cooperate to a certain extent with other parties)—and once you get into tens of thousands of swaps then you could even give the government to an entirely different party and prime minister.

The challenge is making these swaps in effective places. “Local riding polls are expensive,” says Hubley. “They’re mostly done by parties and kept secret.” In 2011, some of the publicly available riding projections were off, so that vote-swapping hubs’ recommendations were off, too. “That’s part of the reason why, in the end, there was no seat that we could point to and say, ‘That was us,’” Hubley says.

Former Green Party leader and author Jim Harris is trying to address this problem by crowd-funding polls in key swing ridings via voteswapping.ca. “Statistical modeling is something to go by, but it’s not as reliable as an actual poll,” he explains, adding that the results of any polls he manages to fund will be made available to everyone, not only to the people formally registered to swap votes on his site.

HOW IT WORKS

There are several different ways a website can facilitate vote swapping. It can be a forum for posting want ads, it can host a partner-matching app, or it can be a place to register for swaps that will be orchestrated by humans behind the scenes. Each method has been tried out at least once, and each has its pros and cons. Want ads offer no privacy, but they let you zero in on exactly the type of swap you’d like to make for whatever reason. Different swappers might have different strategies in mind, and they can all simultaneously pursue them in a free-for-all.

The other two methods allow, if desired, for a more coordinated strategy—and administrators will ideally be transparent about what that strategy is. Voteswapping.ca, for example, is explicitly an anti-Stephen Harper site: its foremost goal is to prevent him from staying on as prime minister. Harris says this initiative is aiming to “concentrate swaps in fewer ridings and make a difference, rather than spread them out where their effect would be diluted.” To this end, only people who live in ridings that are known to swing between the Conservatives and another party can get a partner through voteswapping.ca. Those who live in “safe” ridings are encouraged to participate by spreading the word.

In the Canadian context, vote swappers tend to be anti-Conservative because the other four seat-holding parties—despite their differences—are all left-leaning by comparison. So far, formal swappers also tend to be people who are more politically engaged than the average citizen, according to Hubley, although most of them would of course like to see swapping take off as a mainstream practice.

Neither Harris nor Hubley are game for predicting how many people will take part this year. In previous elections, the numbers have been modest but not so small that a real impact has been out of the question. In 2011, around 78,000 visitors perused votepair.ca, the largest vote-swapping hub at the time, and over 7,500 of them formally signed up. (As a point of comparison, the Conservatives won a majority government in that election by 6,201 votes.) There’s also evidence that discussing swapping—or hearing that it’s going on—motivates more people to vote tactically, with or without a swapping partner.

The leader of the Green Party of Canada, Elizabeth May, might partially owe the seat she won in 2011 to this effect, Hubley says. The Green supporters trying to find a swap in her riding outnumbered the potential partners who had signed up there, and canvassers mentioned this when they were going door to door. Although they garnered only around 120 formal swaps this way, May defeated the Conservative incumbent by a landslide, against expectations. “A lot of people there in Saanich-Gulf Islands might have said to themselves, ‘Why should I vote in a narrow, partisan way when all these Greens are willing to look at the big picture and make a compromise? And why should a party with nearly a million supporters not have a single seat?’” says Hubley. “Maybe it tapped into a primate fairness/reciprocity instinct.”

PRESSURE-RELEASE VALVE OR PUSH TOWARDS PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION?

Elections Canada, the agency responsible for running federal elections, has weighed in on vote swapping only once, back in 2008. They said there is no law against it so long as no money is exchanged, but they also warned of the danger that your partner will not keep his or her promise to vote for your party of choice. Since it’s illegal to follow anyone into a voting booth and watch what they do, swapping must rely on an unverifiable handshake.

There would be less reason for vote swapping—and for assuming its risks—if elections were based at least in part on proportional representation (PR). Canadian citizens’ groups are advocating for this on Twitter under the hashtag #PR2015, and much of the chatter in vote-swapping web forums is about the kind of electoral reform that would make the practice obsolete.

Harris believes that vote swapping will accelerate the drive for reform, because parties and candidates would rather win or lose straightforwardly than have their fates decided by voter dealing. Also, the practice’s very existence—regardless of participation numbers—attracts media attention and highlights certain absurdities in the first-past-the-post system.

There’s reason to believe that adding an element of proportional representation to the voting system is not just a pipedream. The Canadian constitution does not stand in the way, the New Democratic Party has committed to it and Liberal leader Justin Trudeau has made it part of his election platform. Both the New Democrats and the Liberals currently have as good a chance of forming the next government as any party does.

Deciding exactly what types of reforms would best suit the country is another kettle of fish, and for his part, Hubley says he would rather stick with FPTP—with vote swapping as a “pressure release valve” for voter frustrations—than end up with any of his least favorite of the possible forms of proportional representation.

Whether from active campaigns by groups like Fair Vote Canada or merely from personal experience, plenty of Canadians are aware that many votes count for nothing under FPTP. Voter turnout in 2011 was 61.1 percent, 2008 saw a record-low 58.8 percent, and “the current system breeds apathy,” argues Yasue. If nothing else, vote swapping is reinvigorating some citizens’ interest in elections by offering them a greater say. “People who were feeling helpless have told me they’ve stopped feeling that way,” says Hubley. “The psychology of the swap is empowering.”

Samantha Rideout is a freelance writer and editor in Montreal.

Categories
Automation First Post

ARRAY OF THINGS

ARRAY OF THINGS

What $3 million in sensors will do for Chicago; Google hires part of “Netflix for books” team; and more.

  • Women are being asked inappropriately personal and family-related questions on stage at major tech conferences, Margaret Gould Stewart writes in Medium, and it is a waste of an opportunity for the participants on and off stage alike. Stewart argues that interviewers should either pose the same questions to men, or to stop asking them full stop. She also complains that the conference gift bags are sometimes tailored exclusively to men, which would annoy me, too.

  • Array of Things: Susan Crawford reports for Medium’s Backchannel on the sensor network that will soon be taking up residence in Chicago, tracking and reporting air quality, pedestrian traffic, ambient noise levels, and more. With $3 million in funding from the National Science Foundation, Chicago plans to deploy 500 devices by the end of 2017.

  • “I’ve seen innovation every damn day of my life and very little of it gets love from the likes of Silicon Valley,” writes Samala, in a piece published on Medium that touches on the tech culture in San Francisco and the greater Valley, neglected civic tech endeavors, and why she personally no longer believes that the Bay Area is “a mecca of innovation”:

    Put simply: “The industry is not building products and services that will change all lives for the better.”

  • Speaking of Silicon Valley, Geoffrey A. Fowler’s Wall Street Journal review of the iPhone 6s calls it the “stickiest iPhone yet,” a trap meant to wed us to Apple services and software and keep us there ’til death do us part.

  • And Google has hired most of the Oyster—the “Netflix for books”—team, Peter Kafka and Mark Bergen report for ReCode. This could mean that Google wants to launch a similar service down the line; if so, they’d be competing with Amazon.

  • Donald Trump shouts down reporter who asks about Fred Trump’s 1927 arrest during a Ku Klux Klan meeting, according to this interview transcript from New York Times reporter Jason Horowtiz. The story was first broken by Matt Blum in Boing Boing, which Trump dismissed in the Times interview as “one little website.” One little website can be one big thorn in one’s side.

  • Hollie Russon Gilman explains for Civicist how the new U.N. Sustainable Development Goals have civic participation written right into them. For more evidence that the hacktivist/build-with-not-for ethic has penetrated the U.N., see this U.N. Foundation-sponsored piece by Rosie Spinks in Good Magazine on “How Hackathons Could Make World Peace a Reality.”

  • After a year as the Chief Data Officers of LA, Abhi Nemani is ready to move on. These are his initial reflections on his time there.

  • Opportunity: The Knight Foundation is launching its second Cities Challenge in October, in which anyone can submit their idea for improving their city. The best ideas will receive some portion of the $5 million set aside for this challenge. See winning ideas from last year here and start thinking about your own proposal now. Applications will be available starting October 1.

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First Post

DIRECT SERVICE

DIRECT SERVICE

Kickstarter has reorganized as a Public Benefit Corporation; lessons from the Smart Chicago Collaborative; and more.

  • Our Jake: One of Jake Brewer’s White House colleagues likened him to the “mayor of the building” despite only having been on the job for 15 weeks, Sarah Wheaton of Politico reports as part of a round-up of tributes to our fallen friend.

  • Brewer’s behind-the-scenes work co-founding and building the pro-immigration group Define American is lovingly detailed by Elise Foley for the Huffington Post.

  • “We are mourning all that he had yet to do,” writes Jennifer Pahlka, the founder of Code for America. She includes two beautiful tributes to Jake in her post, one from his close friend Clay Johnson, and one from Ryan Resella, a Code for America Fellow. Read the whole thing.

  • Luke Fretwell, the founder of GovFresh, shares his memories of Jake Brewer.

  • The Jake Brewer memorial education fund has raised more than $264,000 from over 3,400 donors.

  • This is civic tech: Dan O’Neil of the Smart Chicago Collaborative explains why it’s “not your typical civic tech outfit.” He writes: “What we’ve learned at Smart Chicago is that direct service to regular residents beats any technology that any single developer can make by slogging along alone. We’ve learned that direct action—being in rooms with real people, working together, sharing our money and our food and our love—works.” Amen, brother!

  • Kickstarter has reorganized as a Public Benefit Corporation, its co-founders announced yesterday.

  • Food for thought: how the rise of the conversational user interface will re-orient how we interact with computers, by David Pierce for Wired.

  • Fusion’s Kashmir Hill offers a tour of anti-surveillance artist Trevor Paglen’s new gallery show in New York City.

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First Post

JAKE BREWER, 1981-2015

JAKE BREWER, 1981-2015

The civic tech community mourns Jake Brewer.

  • The civic tech community is in mourning at the untimely death of Jake Brewer, senior technology advisor to the White House, who was killed Saturday while on a charity bike ride in Virginia. Here is President Obama’s statement on his passing. It reads, in part:

    We set out to recruit the best of the best to join their government and help us harness the power of technology and data to innovate new solutions for the 21st century. Simply put, Jake was one of the best. Armed with a brilliant mind, a big heart, and an insatiable desire to give back, Jake devoted his life to empowering people and making government work better for them.

  • U.S. Chief Technology Office Megan Smith said, in part, “He had a generous heart and a vision for engaging with technology, data, and most importantly each other, to create opportunity and find solutions together. Jake lived and loved more in his 34 years than some people do in their whole lives.”

  • Jake’s wife, Mary Katharine Hamm, a Fox News contributor, shared her feelings on her Instagram account.

  • The Washington Post’s Moriah Balingit and Faiz Siddiqui spoke with several of Jake’s close collaborators, including Michael Silberman, who was on the charity ride with him Saturday and Jose Antonio Vargas, with whom he co-founded Define American.

  • Here is Define American’s statement on Jake’s death.

  • Conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, a friend of Mary Katherine Ham, Jake’s wife, shares his respects in the Washington Examiner.

  • Guy Benson, Mary Katherine’s co-author, has created a GoFundMe campaign setting up an education fund for their children.

  • Jake’s friends Adam Conner and Nicco Mele have put together JakeMemories.org. Send them your additions.

  • Change.org is hosting memorial gatherings tonight for Jake at its offices in New York City, Washington and San Francisco. Jake was its director of global policy before he went to the White House.

  • Here is my remembrance of our friend Jake.

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First Post

FINDINGS

FINDINGS

OpenStreetMap founder launches OpenGeoQuestion; the repercussions of #IStandWithAhmed; and more.

  • This is civic tech: The founder of OpenStreetMap, Steve Coast, has created a nifty new mobile app called OpenGeoQuestion that anyone can use to collect data in the field. He writes: “You can answer questions about where you are in a quick-fire way. You can also ask new questions for anyone else to answer, all over the world. What will be really interesting is—what questions will you ask everyone else about the environment. The data is aggregated together and then hopefully we can do meaningful things with it.”

  • Laurenellen McCann writes in praise of VoterVox’s effort to open American political participation up to a more polyglot population.

  • If you’d like to add your name to a “net neutrality” amicus brief drafted by Sascha Meinrath and Zephyr Teachout, which they are submitting to the DC Circuit Court of Appeals in the lawsuit by the U.S. Telecom Association challenging the FCC’s new rules for protecting the open internet, go here.

  • Vauhini Vara raises a great question in The New Yorker about Ahmed Mohamed’s cause celebre and the new age of flash celebrity: “…after a trending topic has been forgotten, people still have to live where they live. What, [Anil] Dash [a key amplifier of Mohamed’s story] wondered, would the child’s relationship with his principal and teachers look like in the future—and what about his family’s standing in Irving itself? Isn’t it conceivable, he asked me, that all the negative attention to the school and the town will, in the long run, harm the Mohamed family rather than help them?”

  • Tech and the presidentials: Remember during the Republican National Convention in 2008 when Sarah Palin belittled Barack Obama’s role as a community organizer, and a rapid-response email from the Obama campaign pulled in $10 million in donations from supporters in response? It’s not quite the same scale, but more than a year earlier in the process, an attack on candidate Bernie Sanders by Correct the Record, a SuperPac aligned with Hillary Clinton, that compared him to the new leader of the British Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, has generated more than $1.2 million in rapid donations to Sanders’ campaign, Sam Stein and Samantha Lachman report for the Huffington Post.

  • “We’ve never seen an immediate donor response like what the Sanders campaign received on Tuesday. At one point, it drove 180 contributions through our platform per minute,” Erin Hill, executive director of ActBlue, told Stein and Lachman. “Over its 11-year history ActBlue has sent money to over eleven-thousand campaigns and committees—and the Bernie Sanders campaign holds the record for the two biggest donor days ever for a campaign on our platform.”

  • The Bing Pulse analysis of Wednesday night’s GOP debate, while not a scientifically representative sampling of viewer responses, offers some fun findings nonetheless. Of self-identified Republicans who used the tool to register their responses to what the candidates were saying, the most negative response came to Jeb Bush’s declaration that “40 years ago, I smoked marijuana.” There were nearly 1.5 million viewer responses collected during the debate.

  • Mentions of Donald Trump in both traditional and social media are dropping, Ben Schreckinger reports for Politico. “He has stalled, potentially,” Echelon Insights’ Patrick Ruffini somewhat equivocally states.

  • Future, imperfect: Nilay Patel has a great explainer up on The Verge about the ongoing war between Google, Apple, and Facebook for your attention, and why the open web is losing.

  • For your weekend consideration: The new issue of Science includes this article, titled, “An ultrathin invisibility skin cloak for visible light.” Harry Potter fans, rejoice!

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First Post

SIGNS OF HOPE

SIGNS OF HOPE

Community-based solutions to ticketing and fines; 18F and the Department of Defense collaborate, saving millions; and more.

  • The Internet Public Speaks: Since yesterday, more than 1,000,000 tweets have included the hashtag #IStandWithAhmed, according to Topsy.

  • As Manny Fernandez and Christine Hauser report for the New York Times, the massive wave of support for the 14-year-old Texas boy arrested for bringing his clock invention to school included President Obama, who tweeted his support for Ahmed Mohamed and invited him to the White House.

  • The police now say they won’t pursue charges against Mohamed, the Dallas Morning News’ Avi Selk reports. The boy’s new Twitter account has 72,000 followers. As Selk reports:

    The joke to his big sisters, Ayisha and Eyman, is that Ahmed was invisible on social media before an outcry over his arrest made him an online sensation. Their tech whiz of a brother had no Twitter account, no Facebook, no Instagram or Snapchat. So the sisters set him up on Twitter as @IStandWithAhmed—a slogan that the world had given the boy as his story spread overnight. The young women stared at their phones Wednesday morning, stunned as the phrase became one of the most popular memes of the day.

  • These two photos of “an Arab-looking man of Syrian descent in a garage w/his accomplice building what appears to be a bomb” also got a lot of retweets.

  • This is civic tech: The winner of St. Louis’ GlobalHack V last weekend, which focused on creating solutions to improve the working of the city’s court system, was Inveo, which, according to Matt Meniette, Global Hack’s executive director, “developed a platform called CommuniSee that allowed residents to easily look up and resolve tickets through a variety of methods (e.g. by name and birthdate or through a simple map). Their solution also introduced a new way for residents, municipalities, and the private sector to collaborate to reduce the number of outstanding fines and fees: a tool for corporations or nonprofits to pay off outstanding fees in exchange for volunteer work and help hard-working individuals (many of whom may already be volunteering in their community) get a fresh start.”

  • A recent consulting project between the Department of Defense and 18F saved the DOD $150 million by taking a “more technically informed approach to procurement,” Federal Times’ Aaron Boyd reports. That’s more than the entire $105 million currently requested for the whole U.S. Digital Service.

  • April Glaser and Alison Macrina report for Slate on how the citizens of Lebanon, New Hampshire, came out in force Tuesday night in support of their library reinstating its Tor relay for safe, anonymous web browsing, which had been suspended after an inquiry from the Department of Homeland Security. By evening’s end, the library’s board voted to restore the relay. Glaser and Macrina report that “dozens of libraries” have contacted the Library Freedom Project as a result of the controversy, “hoping to set up their own Tor nodes.” They add, “This week’s victory for Lebanon Libraries is a sign of hope in a post-Snowden world.”

  • The Open State Foundation has uploaded its full Politwoops archive of more than 1.1 million deleted tweets by more than ten thousand politicians in thirty-five counties to the Internet Archive.

  • Tech and the presidentials: If you want to see how people watching last night’s GOP debate responded in real-time on Bing Pulse, check out this page. The three questions that came “from social media,” as CNN anchor Jake Tapper put it, raising the issues of medical marijuana, guns, and climate change, were a refreshing break from typical debate questions that tend to focus on personalities and the horserace.

Categories
First Post

SCHOOLED

SCHOOLED

A homemade digital clock gets a 14-year-old Texan arrested; it is crazy easy to buy a good online reputation; and more.

  • Teach our children well: New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio is announcing today that within ten years all city schools will be required to offer computer science to all students, Kate Taylor and Claire Cain Miller report for the New York Times. Only one percent of the city’s students now get to take computer classes. Half of the $81 million to be spent to achieve this ambitious goal will come from private donors, including the AOL Charitable Foundation, the Robin Hood Foundation, and Fred and Joanne Wilson.

  • De Blasio might want to dispatch a few of his yet-to-be-hired computer whiz teachers to Irving, Texas, where a 14-year-old high schooler named Ahmed Mohamed was arrested Monday after his teachers called police because he brought a homemade digital clock to school and they mistook it for a bomb. As Avi Selk reports for the Dallas Morning News, the school’s principal threatened to expel him if he didn’t make a signed statement while being interrogated by cops and he’s now been suspended for three days. Mohamed has “vowed never to take an invention to school again,” Selk writes.

  • The boy’s case is now blowing up online, Nicole Stockdale reports for the Dallas Morning News, with many supporters using the hashtag #IStandWithAhmed.

  • This photo of Ahmed Mohamed as he was walked through school in handcuffs, surrounded by cops, was shared by his sister. Yes, he’s wearing a NASA t-shirt.

  • The city of Irving was last in the national news after its mayor claimed to be blocking the establishment of a “sharia law” court in the city. Politifact investigated that claim and found it to be false, noting that all that happened was “a few Muslim individuals teamed up to offer Sharia-governed, non-binding mediation services in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, including in Irving, with the declared intent of complying with state and federal laws.”

  • “A perfect shitstorm of Islamohobia and technophobia appears to have congealed outside Dallas,” writes Markus Wohlsen as the lede of his article responding to the case, telling readers of Wired how to make their own homemade clock that isn’t a bomb.

  • Isn’t it interesting what the internet public rallies around? Ahmed Mohamed’s case, which has instantly galvanized nerds and social justice warriors alike (some of whom are the same people—I’m thinking of the amazing Anil Dash, who is at the center of organizing support for Mohamed), is arguably the polar opposite of the Donald Trump phenomenon: smart instead of dumb, embracing the “other” instead of demonizing him.

  • Future, imperfect: “For less than an expensive dinner out at a 5-star restaurant,” Kashmir Hill of Fusion was able to give “a completely invented business a sterling online reputation.” Her expose of how she created and popularized something called the “Freakin’ Awesome Karaoke Express” should stop you in your tracks.

  • A drone belonging to an animal rights group was shot down over a fundraiser for Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) that included a pigeon hunt, reports Elise Viebeck for the Washington Post.

  • Civic tech news: “The rise of civic tech was the main topic at the morning session of Techonomy Detroit,” reports John Gallagher of the Detroit Free Press. He writes: “Beth Niblock, [Mayor] Duggan’s chief information officer, said the city has benefited from strong civic tech movements launched by private or non-profit entities such as Data Driven Detroit, which helped create the Motor City Mapping database of Detroit properties. ‘This is such a strong civic tech presence in Detroit,’ Niblock told about 200 attendees in the audience. ‘They had to be strong because government wasn’t functioning’ in Detroit’s pre-bankruptcy days.”

  • The Citizen Engagement Lab has announced the OPEN-US Kairos Fellowship to “address the racial disparity that exists within the digital movement by pairing robust recruitment with a training and mentorship program that creates a new cohort of tech-savvy campaigners of color.” Eleven fellows will be placed for six month apprenticeships at leading national and state organizations

Categories
Mexico

IN MEXICO, COLLABORATING ON A CIVIC ENGAGEMENT APP

IN MEXICO, COLLABORATING ON A CIVIC ENGAGEMENT APP

Our thesis is that everyone in the city is an expert. Residents have an intimate understanding of the spaces they frequent within the city and have unique perspectives on associated challenges and possibilities.

Mexico City is huge. Over 21 million people live in the metro area, the most populous in the Western Hemisphere. Nearly 9 million people live in the federal district alone. There are pockets of immigrants from all over the world and of course the full spectrum of Mexican ethnicities. This means there are myriad interesting issues to tackle and a wide mix of opinions on how best to go about it.

From August 31–September 4, 2015, the MIT Center for Civic Media traveled to Mexico City for a workshop organized by the Laboratório para la Ciudad and MIT Media Lab. Gabriella Gómez-Mont, the Laboratório’s founder and director, is a Director’s Fellow at the Media Lab this year.

The workshop was an experiment in collaboration and innovation, part of the Laboratório’s mission. Considering how we at the Center for Civic Media strive to design civic interventions collaboratively with local partners, this was an exciting opportunity for us.

 

In a few intense days, we worked with Laboratório staff and local experts, as well as select students from nearby universities, to prototype projects worthy of Mexico City’s scale and complexity. Teams were organized by topic area—learning, data and mobility, and civic tech—and relied on a mix of existing and speculative technologies brought to the table by participants. Our team chose to focus on how to integrate new forms of citizen input into the planning and transformation of public spaces around the city using both digital and non-digital strategies. Our solution: EncuestaCDMX.

 

MAPPING CITIZEN INPUT IN REVITALIZATION

 

Our team’s thesis is that everyone in the city is an expert. Residents have an intimate understanding of the spaces they frequent within the city and have unique perspectives on associated challenges and possibilities.

 

On our first day, we spoke with two sets of experts to get a better understanding of the problem space. We met with members of Neri Vela, a community organization, to learn about citizen voice in the context of Mexico City and community organizing around redevelopment. We also sat down with representatives from the Public Space Authority, a government entity responsible for revitalization projects in public spaces throughout the city, to learn how they incorporate citizen input into their decision making. 

 

We identified opportunities to increase citizen voice and engagement in the planning process through the following channels:

 

  1. a multi-modal data collection system inclusive to citizens with different levels of digital access (in-person interviews + smartphone app use), and

  2. a public dashboard to provide analysis and visualization of collected feedback for both government officials and citizens

Our design goals for these channels emphasized securing buy-in from both officials and participating citizens. We considered the question: how might we incentivize engagement on both sides of this planning dialogue by making the input and analysis components accessible and relevant?

 

TEST SITE IDENTIFICATION

As a test location, we chose Libertad de los Pueblos, also known as Ho Chi Minh Park. Located two blocks away from the Laboratório in a high traffic area, the park was an ideal pilot space due to its proximity. The space was also under consideration for revitalization according to city staff, making the feedback we were soliciting from citizens relevant and authentic. Finally, it offered the opportunity to engage with a diverse mix of citizens as it attracts all manner of commuters, vendors, bus drivers, and residents.

 

COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT DESIGN

 

Before developing our survey, we did initial viability testing with citizens in the park to hear some of their initial impressions of the area.

 

One man we spoke with lives far to the north of the City. He works as a plumber and comes to the park to rest on a daily basis. His true passion is dancing and he said he would be interested in joining dance events if put on in the park. This helped us confirm cultural activities as a resonant category.

 

SURVEY DEVELOPMENT

 

We built on the Public Space Authority’s basic structure of prioritizing problems and opportunities by adding more experiential questions meant to assess how the space made residents feel and what words they associated with it. Through these fields we hoped to get a quick impression of what the park represents to people, rather than simply its specific problems or potential.

 

In order to ensure an inclusive range of feedback, we developed both digital and non-digital outlets for citizens to participate. Working with a team of surveyors, we used a tool already being deployed in Mexico City (Flocktracker) to record interview responses with over 50 users of the park during a 40 minute window.

 

We found citizens were happy to be asked their opinion and offered detailed feedback on how they currently used the park and what they would like to see implemented in the space.

 

 

Screenshot courtesy MIT Center for Civic Media

Screenshot courtesy MIT Center for Civic Media

 

THE ENCDMX APP

 

To complement in-person surveys, we extended the Action Path app developed by the MIT Media Lab’s Center for Civic Media to allow smartphone users to submit their feedback directly. The Android app sends push notifications to users as they walk by the space, asking the same questions as the in-person interviews.

 

Using this location-based smartphone service, we are able to engage citizens who might be in the space when official surveyors are not present. The app can also reach those who may avoid in-person surveys and might prefer to offer their opinion in a private context.

 

PUBLIC DASHBOARD

 

In the interests of providing both city planners and citizens with real-time feedback on the information coming in, we developed a public dashboard that aggregates and visualizes the results from both channels.

 

In the case of our survey of Ho Chi Minh Park, the primary concern identified by citizens was trash and overall cleanliness. About a quarter of those surveyed said that free Wi-Fi would be one of the best additions to the park. The majority, however, suggested programming we had not included in our list, such as activities for kids and vocational training—underlining the value of citizen expertise. The word cloud provides a quick look into the impression most people have of the park. 

When future surveys are administered, we plan to distribute cards with the dashboard URL so that citizens can see how their responses fit into the bigger picture informing the Public Space Authority’s planning. This helps incentivize participation by closing the feedback loop, and creates an opportunity for public accountability.

FUTURE WORK

 

This week was a first step toward our big picture vision for engaging citizens in the planning of public spaces and capitalizing on their expertise. In the future, we want to:

 

  1. Make the app and survey process more playful, experimenting with different incentive structures among citizen survey takers and official surveyors

  2. Develop an installation like a kiosk or interactive signage that can increase the modes of engagement and thereby the inclusivity of the system

  3. Work with the Public Space Authority on a revitalization process from start to finish to create a system that truly expands and transforms the use of citizen voice in planning and policy-making

  4. Replicate the model with other partners and issues both within and beyond Mexico City

EncuestaCDMX was itself an incredible collaboration of citizen experts. We are thrilled to have had the opportunity to work with such a wide range of actors throughout the week and hope this deployment represents the start of a fruitful collaboration between the MIT Center for Civic Media and Laboratório para la Ciudad.

A version of this post was originally published on the MIT Center for Civic Media blog. Emilie Reiser contributed to the writing of this report.

Categories
First Post

AUTOMATIC

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.

  • This Gotham Zoning map was inspired by the coloring of Sim City 2000.

  • 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.

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