Civicist

CIVIC TECH NEWS & ANALYSIS

Author: Civicist

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SCORING

SCORING

Behind the College Scorecard; the bureaucracy hacker at 18F; and more.

  • Government opening: Columbia law professor Tim Wu, “net neutrality” coiner and former candidate for New York state lieutenant governor, is going to work for Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, Thomas Kaplan reports for the New York Times. He will focus on issues involving technology.

  • Related: Tuesday night at Civic Hall, Schneiderman is speaking on “tech & government” at an event sponsored by the NY Tech Meetup.

  • David Zvenyach, self-described “bureaucracy hacker” writes an inspiring post about what his first six months working for 18F, the tech SWAT team inside the federal government, has been like.

  • The chief digital service officer at the Department of Education, Lisa Gelobter, describes the development process that went into the new data-rich College Scorecard just released by the Obama administration.

  • Related: Michael Shear reports for the New York Times on why the administration abandoned its original goal of explicitly rating the quality of the nation’s colleges and universities, which had the aim of “publicly shaming low-rated schools that saddle students with high debt and poor earning potential.”

  • Tech and the presidentials: Hillary Clinton’s private email server was not wiped clean, according to the company that managed it, Rosalind Heiderman, Tom Hamburger, and Carol Leonnig report for the Washington Post. This means the emails could be recovered, they note, and it “could bolster her statements that her actions have been aboveboard, suggesting that she did not take active steps to hide her e-mails.”

  • Ruby Cramer reports for BuzzFeed on the HRC Super Volunteers, a network “of 1,200 or so core members” who are doing much of the work in states outside the first four caucus/primary match-ups. She reports trouble: “in recent weeks, HRC Super Volunteers have taken to their Facebook group to exchange concerns: The problem, according to a scan of the page allowed by a member who requested anonymity, is that while aides in Brooklyn ‘pour resources’ into the early states, they haven’t provided sufficient support to volunteers elsewhere.”

  • Tech billionaire Mark Cuban is hosting a rally for Republican frontrunner Donald Trump tonight at his Dallas arena. As Ben Schreckinger reports for Politico, he is one of several mega-rich guys now considering runs for office, inspired by Trump’s example. “My positions would be far different,” Cuban says.

  • Catherine Thompson of TalkingPointsMemo interviews online security pioneer John McAfee about his extremely odd campaign for president as the candidate of something he calls “the Cyber Party.”

  • Future, imperfect: Issie Lapowsky reports for Wired on the potential and pitfalls of peer-to-peer organizing to aid refugees.

  • Transitions: Hats off to Juliana Rotich, who is stepping down as executive director of Ushahidi after five years.

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First Post

ASSESSMENTS

ASSESSMENTS

Philly finally freed city property records; The Intercept enters the documentary space; and more.

  • This is civic tech: Juliana Reyes of Technical.ly Philly reports on how persistent efforts by open data advocates and civic hackers led to the city finally liberate city property records. In her careful report is the back-story to how changes in personnel and approach apparently won the day. As she details, Philly’s first chief data officer Mark Headd—a Civicist contributor—quit in some frustration at bureaucratic footdragging; his successor Tim Wisniewski managed to finish what he started working with a different and more progressive head of the city’s Office of Property Assessment.

     

  • MIT and Boston University have created a new legal clinic to support cutting-edge student innovation, responding to a series of incidents where students have run into legal troubles including Aaron Swartz’s prosecution. MIT Civic Media graduate student Nate Matias, who helped spearhead the effort, explains how it came to be.

  • The Sunlight Foundation’s Lindsay Ferris attended the Buntwani conference in South Africa last month, which brought together 70 key advocates for open government from across the region, and offers her takeaways from the event.

  • A year ago yesterday, we got the keys to 156 Fifth Avenue, Civic Hall’s home. Here’s a progress report that we just shared with Civic Hall members on our first six months of operation, from February through July 2015.

  • This is civic dreck: California VC and sometime politician Steve Westly, who is considering another run for governor, allegedly helped arrange an expensive retainer for longtime political fixer Willie Brown to get the San Francisco district attorney to intervene in a domestic abuse investigation into the CEO of digital-ad company RadiumOne, Jeff Elder reports for the Wall Street Journal. At the time, RadiumOne was trying to launch its IPO and Westly was on its board; its CEO, Gurbaksh Chahal, was allowed to plead guilty to two misdemeanors. A home-security video of Chahal allegedly striking his girlfriend more than 100 times over a 30-minute period was ruled inadmissible in court.

  • Indymedia: The Intercept and First Look Media are launching a documentary unit led by CitizenFour director Laura Poitras and two partners that will produce 40-50 short nonfiction films a year, Dave McNary reports for Variety. The unit, Field of Vision, will start with a short-form film by Poitras called “Asylum” focused on WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

  • CNN is going to stream the September 16 GOP presidential debate online for free, unlike Fox News which made the first debate in August unavailable to millions, reports Jeff John Roberts for Fortune.

  • Work futures: Discussing the sharing economy and election 2016, Freelancers Union head Sara Horowitz tells Politico’s Emily Guendelsberger that “I think that there are employees who are misclassified [as independent contractors], and that it’s completely right for the Department of Labor to go after those companies….[and]whether we call them employees or independent contractors or come up with some other type of classification—we have to come up with a safety net that supports that new part of the workforce.”

  • MoveOn.org is looking to hire software engineers; you can live anywhere.

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First Post

LEVELERS

LEVELERS

Yelp for jails; Clinton’s email apology: “sorry about that”; and more.

  • This is civic tech: Heat Seek NYC’s executive director Noelle Francois (a member of Civic Hall) has a guest post up on the National Low Income Housing Coalition’s website explaining how she and her team are helping tenants level the playing field when it comes to getting their landlords to fix the heat in their buildings. She writes:

    Our web-connected temperature sensors—essentially a thermometer connected to the internet—provide reliable, objective data to let everyone know when the indoor temperature dips below the legal limit. They automate the data collection process by taking a temperature reading once an hour, storing and analyzing the data on our servers, and calculating exactly when buildings are in violation of NYC housing code. Through our web app, tenants can log in to view their data and download heat logs. Our sensors are a simple, inexpensive solution to a widespread problem.

  • The Citymapper team, which has won open data competitions around the world for its urban transport apps, shares some really cool examples of how it is meeting the challenges of mapping cities where transport data doesn’t exist, such as the informal transportation networks of Mexico City and, most recently, the completely undocumented systems of Istanbul. I also enjoyed their decision to display a “future” tab on their London app, showing what the yet-to-be-completed Crossrail high-speed line will do for people’s commutes.

  • People are using Yelp to talk about jail because there aren’t many other outlets for their experiences, advice, and complaints, Beth Swartzapfel reports for the Marshall Project.

  • In a win for human rights and internet freedom campaigners, the European Parliament has adopted a report by MEP Marietje Schaake on the impact of intrusion and surveillance systems on human rights.

  • Tech and the presidentials: Interviewed by ABC News anchor David Muir, Hillary Clinton finally made a clear apology for using a private email server, saying that it was “a mistake,” and “I’m sorry about that.” Her campaign sent an email to supporters echoing those statements and has set up a page on its website dedicated to the issue, titled, “Hillary’s emails in 4 sentences.”

  • Antivirus software pioneer and “person of interest” in a murder case in Belize John McAfee has filed papers indicating that he plans to run for President, Issie Lapowsky reports for Wired.

  • Government fixers Hillary Clinton’s campaign released a set of proposals “to restore integrity to American elections,” including overturning Citizens United, increasing the transparency of political spending, and public matching funds for small donations.

  • Vox’s Jonathan Allen says that Clinton’s announcement was timed to get ahead of Bernie Sanders’ expected introduction of a bill providing for public financing of political campaigns.

  • Meanwhile, Lawrence Lessig is formally announcing his presidential campaign today, which aims to elevate many of the very issues Clinton just endorsed, in Claremont, New Hampshire, at a site marking the location of a famous 1995 handshake between then-President Bill Clinton and then-Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, where they promised to take action on campaign finance and lobbying reform. “The Clinton-Gingrich handshake was carried live on television and received front page attention in newspapers nationwide,” the plaque marking the spot reads. But somehow all that media attention didn’t translate into action.

  • Some dude named Sifry writes for the New York Times “Room for Debate” section on why the two-party duopoly is bad for American democracy and it would be better if both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders were running as candidates of their own parties.

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Civic Engagement Civic Tech future of work

BEFORE FAIR CHANCE HIRING DECISION, AUSTIN POLLS RESIDENTS BY TEXT

BEFORE FAIR CHANCE HIRING DECISION, AUSTIN POLLS RESIDENTS BY TEXT

“I sensed that we needed to hear from people who were formerly incarcerated and that they might be less likely to have internet access.”

Always ahead of the curve, the city of Austin, Texas, launched an online community engagement portal in 2008. Called SpeakUpAustin, the platform is the cradle of the city’s bike share program and played a part in shaping a plastic bag ordinance. It allows anyone with internet access to publicly share their opinion on upcoming policy decisions without having to attend a public meeting. Although this was a leap forward in terms of accessibility and convenience, participation was still limited by one major constraint: internet access. This summer, however, the city took steps to change that by using a text-based tool called HeartGov in tandem with SpeakUpAustin to poll city residents about a Ban the Box initiative.

The Ban the Box campaign to delete the part of job applications that asks about previous convictions has been around since 2004. The campaign began seeing some success (in Minnesota, for example) in 2009. Since then, cities like Boston, Philadelphia, New York City, Atlanta, Chicago, and others have removed the question.

“The Austin city council decided to follow the lead of several other cities and jurisdictions in looking at what people are calling a fair chance hiring policy,” says Larry Schooler, the manager of Austin’s Community Engagement Division. “The idea behind it is really to try to help those with criminal records, with histories of being incarcerated have a fair chance at getting hired.”

“The policy could mean that employers would need to delay criminal background investigations until a conditional offer was made to an applicant, even a person with a conviction,” Schooler clarifies.

Schooler’s position was created in 2009, when Austin’s communications director decided to invest more resources in engaging the public in innovative ways. “I’ve sort of gone from being a person to come in and facilitate meetings here and there to someone who is really trying to design a new system of public engagement,” Schooler tells Civicist. “I’m spending a lot more time now creating tools and programs and doing trainings than I did at the beginning.”

HeartGov first came to Schooler’s attention after he saw a short piece I wrote last year for techPresident, about testing the tool in Brooklyn. He reached out to Asher Novek, who developed the tool as part of his master’s thesis at NYU’s Gallatin School, and they began discussing ways to use HeartGov in Austin. (Full disclosure: Asher Novek is a Civic Hall member and has done some contract work for Civic Hall assisting with marketing.)

Schooler decided that the public polling period for the fair hiring policy, which ended at the end of August, was the perfect opportunity. “One of the reasons I wanted to use HeartGov on this one in particular is because I sensed that we needed to hear from people who were formerly incarcerated and that they might be less likely to have internet access,” Schooler explains to Civicist.

Working closely with Novek, Schooler came up with three questions, one that asked what kind of companies should be subjected to a fair hiring policy, how the policy should be enforced, and how the city should implement the policy. City residents interested in providing feedback could text a local number and would get the questions one after the other in response.

The city solicited input on the hiring policy via email, text message (HeartGov), and an online discussion board (SpeakUpAustin), although Schooler notes that, because this was a relatively abridged public input period (less than a month), there was limited publicity. All told, the city received 150 online discussion posts, 175 texts (from 60 or so respondents), and a handful of emails.

“Some of [the texters] were obviously people who had been formerly incarcerated and had been dealing with this on a first hand basis,” says Schooler. “I’m not taking sides in the debate over the policy—but it was really gratifying to see people so directly affected by a policy be participating like that.”

A preliminary report Schooler shares with Civicist shows that the majority of text responses were in favor of the fair hiring policy, whereas the online responses were more mixed, even skewing against the policy.

“There were a couple people who posted online who did seem to have some history [of convictions or incarceration],” says Schooler, “but not nearly to the extent that the texters did.” More of the texters were employees, whereas there were greater numbers of employers responding online.

Without HeartGov, the city might have gotten a very different picture of local opinion on the fair hiring policy.

Schooler dreams of one day better integrating the text and online responses, so that participants online can see what people are texting and vice versa. He also has yet to figure out how to handle two-way communication with people using HeartGov. “I didn’t do any personal responses this time. There just wasn’t the bandwidth for me to do that, or the time,” Schooler says. “In an ideal world I would in some way respond—we did respond at the end, when we closed things out, to say thanks.”

The two-way conversation has always been what Asher Novek envisioned for his tool. For example, HeartGov continues to be used in some local officials offices in New York and he says he feels it is his responsibility to “nag” offices to respond to constituents reaching out through the tool, until it becomes a habit.

As for what’s next in Austin? HeartGov has already been pulled back into service, as part of a community forum on building equitable economic development in East Austin.

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First Post

BEACONS

BEACONS

Sending Wi-Fi beacons out to help Syrian refugees; differing opinions on Lawrence Lessig’s bid for president; and more.

  • This is civic tech: One way that the Civil Society and Technology Project at the Central European University in Budapest is helping refugees navigate their difficult journeys: they’re setting up volunteers as “walking Wi-Fi beacons,” reports Aviva Rutkin for the New Scientist. She writes, “For about $100, you can pick up a ready to use Wi-Fi hotspot and prepaid SIM cards, pop it all into someone’s backpack, and send them out into the crowd. The networks last for about six hours before needing to be recharged, and can support around a dozen users at a time.”

  • A “We the People” petition on the White House website calling for a big increase in the number of Syrian refugees resettled here is now halfway to the 100,000 signatures needed to prompt an official response.

  • Our Jessica McKenzie reports for Civicist on how the city of Austin, Texas, is using online engagement tools to poll city residents about an initiative to delete the box on job applications that asks applicants about prior convictions. Featured: HeartGov, a text-based tool developed by Civic Hall member Asher Novek.

  • Tech and the presidentials: Harvard Law professor Lawrence Lessig, a leader of the free culture movement and author of several seminal books on the internet, has announced that he is running for the Democratic nomination for President, having garnered a million dollars in backing Kickstarter-style online. He’s running as a “referendum” candidate seeking to only pass substantial campaign finance and election reform legislation.

  • Lessig’s friend Ethan Zuckerman, the director of MIT’s Center for Civic Media, blogs about his reasons for supporting his run, arguing that he can “win by losing, so long as his referendum attracts sufficient attention.”

  • Taking a somewhat less optimistic (and more realistic?) view of Lessig’s chances, his friend David Weinberger, another Harvard scholar and author of seminal internet books, blogs that he worries that rather than demonstrating widespread support for democracy reforms, Lessig’s bid will “make [campaign] finance reform look more marginal than it actually is.” He calls this the “lose-by-losing outcome.”

  • At least two emails received by Hillary Clinton on her private server while she was Secretary of State contained highly classified information, Michael Schmidt reports for the New York Times.

  • Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina recently told a New Hampshire audience that if elected, she would ask Americans to respond to questions during her weekly radio address, The Economist reports. “For instance, she explained, she might ask whether the federal government should have the right to sack employees who fail to do their jobs, or whether it is important for Americans to know where their federal tax dollars go. Press 1 for Yes, and 2 for No.”

  • Brave new world: Apple and Microsoft are butting heads with government authorities more and more over demands for private and/or encrypted customer data, report Matt Apuzzo, David Sanger, and Michael Schmidt for the New York Times.

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First Post

LEGION

LEGION

Coders for Bernie; regulating StingRays; Facebook developing software for schools; and more.

  • There is a petition to the U.K. government asking them to accept more asylum seekers and increase support for refugee migrants that has more than 350,000 signatures. The U.K. parliament considers debating all petitions that get more than 100,000 signatures, and responds to all petitions with more than 10,000 signatures.

  • Andy Carvin writes at Reported.ly that this is not the moment to debate the place of graphic imagery in news and social media; this is the moment to respond to a crisis and ongoing catastrophe.

  • Bernie Sanders has a “legion” of volunteer coders supporting him, Nick Corasaniti reports for the New York Times, building apps that would cost thousands if they had been commissioned by a paid developer. Most are young—under 35—but they are otherwise a diverse crowd, and Corasaniti writes that nearly everyone interviewed was new to this level of political engagement. Although many volunteers get involved through the subreddit Coders for Sanders, the bulk of the collaborative work is taking place on Slack.

  • The Obama administration has released a new set of online climate data resources as part of an online Climate Resilience Toolkit meant to boost climate resistance in the Arctic.

  • The Justice Department has announced increased regulation of StingRays in federal investigation, Nicholas Fandos reports for the New York Times.

  • John Paul Farmer, the Director of Microsoft’s Technology & Civic Innovation group and co-founder of the Presidential Innovation Fellows program, writes in the Harvard Business Review that the U.S. now needs a Congressional Innovation Fellows program: “In the 21st century, policy doesn’t work unless the technology works. That simple truth is why we need a federal government—including both the executive and legislative branches—that understands technology and innovation and infuses best practices from Silicon Valley into the very fabric of government.”

  • Yesterday a new campaign finance tracking tool developed by Maplight went live on California’s secretary of state website, reports Patrick McGreevy for the Los Angeles Times. Californians (or anyone else) can search by geography, dollar amounts and time periods, back to 2001.

  • Passing for human: TIL that a bot has made it to the front page of Reddit three times, which Hamza Shaban writes at BuzzFeed has implications for future newsrooms. This editor would like to point out that a human still had to write the headlines.

  • President Obama left a Facebook comment on a Humans of New York photo from Iran, which Vox’s Max Fisher writes is significant: “Maybe I’m reading too much into one Facebook comment on a heartwarming photo about fatherhood, but the fact that the president chose the unusual step of leaving this comment, and that he chose to leave it on a photo of a father and son in Iran of all places, seems meaningful.”

  • Remember when schools used to block Facebook? Maybe some still do. But perhaps not for much longer—Joseph Bernstein and Molly Hensley-Clancy report for BuzzFeed that Summit Schools, a charter school network, has let Facebook rebuild its learning software, a tool that Facebook plans on eventually providing public schools for free.

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HITCHHIKING

HITCHHIKING

Rand Paul’s app; why we shouldn’t let the sharing economy monopolize “social serendipity”; and more.

  • This is civic tech: In order to build a polyglot democracy that serves all Americans, including those with limited English proficiency, we need to think beyond translation, writes 18MillionRising.org CTO Cayden Mak.

  • Campaigning? Fundraising? Rand Paul built an app for that, Nick Corasaniti reports for the New York Times. The app includes a game where players try to blow up his competition’s campaign logos, and pushes information about upcoming events in the area. Corasaniti also reports that the app will send push notifications “when he is about to vote on a bill in the Senate, asking his followers how they think he should vote.”

  • Yesterday, Nicholas Carr explained for Politico “How Social Media Is Ruining Politics.” But his reasons for saying so could be deployed in almost any “social media is ruining X” article: “What’s important now is not so much image as personality”; “The more visceral the message, the more quickly it circulates and the longer it holds the darting public eye.”

  • The D.C. start-up incubator 1776 now has a $12.5 million investment fund to dole out to innovative start-ups in D.C. and beyond, Aaron Gregg reports for the Washington Post.“

  • Poderopedia, a project that maps the who’s who in politics and business in Latin America, has announced that they are developing a new version of the platform, and are committing to doing more journalism than they have previously. For more detail, read this tiny manifesto by founder Miguel Paz.

  • In a somewhat whimsical post for The Conversation, Ethan Zuckerman asks “Could the sharing economy bring back hitchhiking?” Zuckerman observes that much of the language used to persuade users to trust companies like Lyft and Airbnb could be used to defend hitchhiking as a normal and healthy practice.

    Zuckerman, for one, says he regularly picks up hitchhikers and appreciates getting to know his community in this way, adding that “social serendipity is too important an activity to be left to the advertising slogans of sharing-economy start-ups in the hope that they will make it happen as a side benefit.”

  • Facebook has submitted a patent application for a tool that would allow loan providers access to one’s social network information for the purposes of deciding whether or not to grant the application, Susie Cagle reports for Pacific Standard.

    From the application: “In a fourth embodiment of the invention, the service provider is a lender. When an individual applies for a loan, the lender examines the credit ratings of members of the individual’s social network who are connected to the individual through authorized nodes. If the average credit rating of these members is at least a minimum credit score, the lender continues to process the loan application. Otherwise, the loan application is rejected.”

    From Cagle: “In short: You could be denied a loan simply because your friends have defaulted on theirs. It’s the kind of digital redlining that critics of “big data” collection have been warning of for years. It could make Facebook a lot of money, and it could make the Web even less safe for poor people. And it could be just the beginning.”

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Democracy Design organizing

TRANSLATION IS NOT ENOUGH: ORGANIZING FOR A POLYGLOT DEMOCRACY

TRANSLATION IS NOT ENOUGH: ORGANIZING FOR A POLYGLOT DEMOCRACY

Translating ballots is just the first of many steps to create an inclusive culture of civic participation.

When it comes to languages, our country is a patchwork. Our civic infrastructure hasn’t kept up with more than one or two. There might be hundreds of languages spoken in our country, but they aren’t spoken by our government. Like the polyglot individual, who is fluent in many languages, government bodies and agencies need to become fluent in many languages in order to serve the people. To become a polyglot democracy, we need to design infrastructure that ensures certain patches aren’t left behind.

A crucial first step is to work toward including all eligible voters in the electoral process.

Translation is often framed as a technical problem that can be solved through effective bureaucracy. The assumption is that if the board of elections in a certain county is able to provide translated materials for every language spoken by eligible voters in their county, then we have perfect language access. In principle, I don’t disagree. However, the mere existence of a ballot in Lao, Hindi, or Mongolian is not a sufficient standard for measuring language access.

Language access is a technical problem, but not one that is solved simply by hiring translators and interpreters. Language access is about designing systems that include people in every step of the process. Language is often one of many barriers that voters face. That’s precisely why expert insight and the wisdom of communities are both crucial foundations for the polyglot democracy.

Tanzila Ahmed, whose organizing acumen is a constant inspiration, has applied a decade and a half of experience in Asian American & Pacific Islander (AAPI) electoral organizing to develop a theory of change model where low voter turnout isn’t caused by “voter apathy,” but rather that AAPI voters experience severe barriers when it comes to casting a ballot. She identifies five such barriers:

  1. a barrier to voting information;
  2. a barrier to the mechanics of voting;
  3. a barrier to engagement;
  4. a barrier to in-language resources; and
  5. a barrier to voting rights.

These five barriers also translate to five critical needs that can’t be ignored when we talk about designing for a sufficient standard of language access.

An expanded standard of access means doing more than providing a written translation of any given ballot available. We also need to:

  1. provide voter guides to help voters understand issues;
  2. streamline the process of voting, so they can navigate its often complex mechanics; and
  3. match them with an actual human from their community who can help make sense of a large volume of brand new information and help troubleshoot problems as they arise.

That’s precisely what we’re trying to do with VoterVOX, the newest tool from the Asian American & Pacific Islander new media organizers 18MillionRising.org. The app, currently in development, will connect Limited English Proficient (LEP) voters with multilingual volunteers to help them understand their ballots.

Communities that include LEP voters already have the expertise needed to include those voters in the democratic process. Creating access isn’t a matter of delivering information from a central source to LEP voters, but a matter of helping communities organize themselves. VoterVOX is as much about community organizing as it is about voting, and one-to-one connections are a vital component. I don’t want to build software that languishes in app stores or online. I want to build a tool that uses the beating heart of our communities to circulate fresh blood to its furthest-flung limbs.

We’re designing VoterVOX to include input from stakeholders—from LEP elders to multilingual high school kids to organizers working at the grassroots level—in order to understand their needs and expectations when it comes to community technology. Regardless of what the outcomes of working with these folks might be, we have some core assumptions about design—and language access more broadly—that guide our efforts to engage them in the first place.

Committing ourselves to language access means committing to providing more than just translated ballots. Translated ballots are just the first of many steps toward trying to change a culture around civic participation. Through a well-designed workflow for ballot translation, we can simultaneously create conditions that foster engagement where discrimination, lack of information, and structural exclusion have previously made participation difficult, if not impossible. When we’re designing to expand access to the ballot box in a landscape of problems, we’re working to right structural wrongs.

Designing for inclusion isn’t easy. In fact, it’s very difficult—otherwise this effort wouldn’t be needed.

Good design won’t restore key provisions in the Voting Rights Act, the key law that has expanded access to the vote for millions of voters, which was gutted by the Supreme Court in 2013. We still need to fight to protect the voting rights of all citizens of this country, in the streets and in the courts. We still need to pressure county boards of elections to do the right thing and obey the law by providing translated voting materials when they’re required to.

That work starts at home, in our communities. By building opportunities for connection between people with expertise and people with need, we’re changing the language around democratic participation. In the one-to-one link between a volunteer translator and a voter, an opportunity for organizing grows. That organizing is the real meat of civic engagement—it’s fuel for the long game of language access in a polyglot democracy. True language access requires a commitment to organizing by design.

Follow the quest to design better tools for a polyglot democracy on Twitter @votervox.

Cayden Mak (@cayden) is Chief Technology Officer at 18MillionRising.org, an organization founded in 2012 to organize Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders online. For the past three years, they have designed, hacked, and deployed tech to better organize people and promote popular education in the AAPI community for civic engagement, racial justice, and transformative structural change.

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First Post

OPEN GATES

OPEN GATES

People are asking their gov’ts to let in more Syrian refugees; why Asians often see a higher sticker price for online test prep; and more.

  • Give me your tired, your poor…: Nearly five percent of Iceland’s population of 320,000 have joined a Facebook page calling on their government to take in more refugees, responding to an official cap of just 50, Christine Hauser reports for the New York Times. The page, Syria is Calling, has an absolutely lyrical call to action: “Refugees are our future spouses, best friends, our next soul mate, the drummer in our children’s band, our next colleague, Miss Iceland 2022, the carpenter who finally fixes our bathroom, the chef in the cafeteria, the fireman, the hacker and the television host. People who we’ll never be able to say to: ‘Your life is worth less than mine.’ ….Open the gates.”

  • Inspired by Iceland’s example: “Americans Supporting Syrian Refugees: Open Homes, Open Hearts” just launched on Facebook. The United States is currently only allowing 8,000 in.

  • Refugees Welcome, a Berlin-based group that connects German citizens with refugees in need of a place to stay, says it has been “overwhelmed by offers of support,” Jessica Elgot reports for The Guardian. It has helped people from Afghanistan, Burkina Faso, Mali, Nigeria, Pakistan, Somalia and Syria.

  • Future, Imperfect: Uber drivers in California may join a class-action lawsuit against the company if they want to be treated as workers, not independent contractors, Judge Edward Chen ruled yesterday, Sarah Jeong reports for Motherboard.

  • Google’s self-driving cars, which are programmed to obey the law precisely, are apparently too safe for actual driving conditions, where other drivers are more aggressive or simply can’t make eye contact with its missing driver, Matt Richtel and Conor Dougherty report for the New York Times.

  • Depending on your zip code, the Princeton Review SAT preparation course charges anywhere from $6,600 to $8,400 when you sign up online, and “Asians are almost twice as likely to be offered a higher price than non-Asians,” ProPublica’s Julia Angwin, Surya Mattu and Jeff Larson report. This kind of price differential is legal as long as there is no intent to racially discriminate.

  • This is civic tech: For GovTech, the always readable Jason Shueh takes a close look at the rise of startups swarming into the “smart city” movement, zeroing in on Shaun Abrahamson’s Urban.us venture fund and its focus on investment areas like mobility and logistics, the built environment, utilities and service delivery.

  • What happens when journalists let the public decide which stories to do? “Stories made from public curiosity perform significantly better than typical news stories,” writes Jennifer Brandel on Medium.

  • Josh Miller, the founder of Branch, has left Facebook to join the White House digital team as its director of product. Explaining the move, he writes: “Wouldn’t it be great if your government had a conversation with you instead of just talking at you? The Obama Administration has already responded to 255 online petitions that had collectively gathered more than 11 million signatures. Imagine if talking to the government was as easy as talking to your friends on social networks? White House officials have started to regularly host Q&As on Twitter. These initiatives represent amazing progress, and there’s so much more good work to be done. I’m excited to apply what I’ve learned in the technology industry to the ideals of our democracy. As a mentor of mine likes to say, ‘It’s gonna be great!’”

  • Your moment of Zen: The only thing missing from this Huffington Post mashup of Donald Trump saying “China” is him breaking into song. What a shift from 2008, when the buzzword du jour was “Change.” Paging Hugh Atkin!

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First Post

STRETCHES

STRETCHES

Tracking positive police-civilian interactions; making Hillary Clinton sound like a techie (a stretch even by her account); and more.

  • Blasts from the past: The State Department has posted a whole batch of Hillary Clinton’s emails (4,368 in all) in searchable format, though the Wall Street Journal’s tool works a bit better. Some fascinating finds to those of us with an interest in Clinton’s policies on Internet freedom:

    • Clinton’s December 29, 2009 response to her staff’s first draft of her 2010 internet freedom speech: “This looks fine and makes me sound like a techie (which is good, albeit a stretch.)”

    • A January 25, 2010 email from Anne-Marie Slaughter, Clinton’s top policy advisor in 2010, sharing the news that a Chinese blogger said Clinton’s speech on internet freedom “was like a song to his heart.” Clinton replies, “That is so gratifying!”

    • Clinton counsel Cheryl Mills forwarding her a September 24, 2010 email from Alec Ross, a top deputy who was working on the Internet freedom agenda, describing the “1st known case of a successful social media campaign in Syria.” (Ross also reflects on his and Jared Cohen’s high-profile trip there in June 2010, writing “When Jared and I went to Syria, it was because we knew Syrian society was growing increasingly young…and digital and that this was going to create disruptions in society that we could potential [sic] harness for our purposes.)”

    • Clinton responds to a Roger Cohen New York Times op-ed praising the good works of the U.S. Foreign Service, which had its internal communications exposed by Wikileaks in the fall of 2010, with two words: “Not bad.”

    • A November 24, 2010 email from New York Times reporter Scott Shane to State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley reading, “In view of wires, etc, and not for attribution please, we don’t think WL [Wikileaks] is going to dump 250k cables on the web anytime soon. We think they will for now follow guidance of other publications and the initial numbers will be small. But multiple people seem to have the whole collection, so who knows.” Crowley forwards the email up the chain, with the comment, “Potentially great news.”

    You can download all the Clinton emails from here.

  • This is civic tech: Meedan, the global journalism/translation company, has unveiled Bridge, a new mobile tool for translating social media posts in close to real-time, and Joseph Lichterman of Nieman Lab reports on its early findings around the recent Suez Canal opening. Looking ahead, Meedan founder Ed Bice says, “We are thinking about how we bring micropayments, virtual currencies, incentive models into an ecosystem where someone can request a translation, a journalist who is breaking a news story and needs an immediate translation can query the network with a request for translation.” Here are some examples of Bridge translations coming out of the #YouStink protests currently underway in Lebanon.

  • Christopher Moraff reports for NextCity on pilot program in Chicago called “RespectStat” that “rates civilian encounters with the police based on indicators such as an officer’s level of respect, helpfulness and competence,” providing the city’s police department with current information on varying levels of community attitudes towards the police.

  • U.S. Open Data’s Waldo Jaquith is joining the Sunlight Foundation as a part-time senior technology adviser. Congrats!

  • President Obama posts to the White House Instagram account as he arrives in Anchorage.

  • Future, Imperfect: A Seattle city councilman is proposing legislation to allow Uber drivers to collectively bargain with the company, Lydia DePillis reports for the Washington Post. As independent contractors, the drivers aren’t allowed to unionize under federal law, but Councilmember Mike O’Brien wants to let them vote on a non-profit organization that would serve as their “exclusive driver representative” and negotiate on their behalf.

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