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Civic Engagement New York Participatory Budgeting

NEW YORK CITY TESTS DIGITAL BALLOT IN PARTICIPATORY BUDGET VOTE

NEW YORK CITY TESTS DIGITAL BALLOT IN PARTICIPATORY BUDGET VOTE

In New York City’s fourth year of participatory budgeting, five city council districts pilot a digital ballot and experimental voting interfaces designed to make “the best decision possible.”

On a warm Saturday afternoon in April, a mother perched on the steps of a public library with her two children, holding an iPad. “I want to do the last one,” one of the kids said. “Wait,” the woman replied, “I’ll tell you what to push.” On the sidewalk in front of the library stood the local city council member, Brad Lander, pitching people as they walked by: “Want to help decide how to spend one million dollars?” It was one of the last days to vote in New York City’s fourth year running participatory budgeting, but for the first time people could vote on a laptop or iPad.

Participatory budgeting is the practice, originating in Brazil, of letting community residents decide how municipal funds should be allocated in their neighborhood. In New York City, it is an almost year-long process, beginning with the development of proposals in the fall, followed by a consultation with city agencies on budget and feasibility in the winter, and finally voting on projects in the spring. The participatory budgeting vote is a far more inclusive process than local elections: Immigration status is of no import, as long as the person is a resident of the council district in which they vote, and, depending on the district, residents as young as 14 or 16 can participate. This year, New York’s fourth, more than 51,000 people voted on how to spend $32 million dollars on capital projects.

“The level of engagement and enthusiasm in this year’s Participatory Budgeting process was unprecedented and deeply democratic,” Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito said in a public statement. “Across the city, thousands of residents of all ages and backgrounds came together to make their neighborhoods a better place to call home. Participatory Budgeting breaks down barriers that New Yorkers may face at the polls—including youth, income status, English-language proficiency and citizenship status—resulting in a civic dialogue that is truly inclusive and representative of the diversity of this community and this city.”

There is also more space for innovation in the participatory budgeting process than in regular elections, which made it possible to test digital ballots and experimental interfaces in five of the 24 city council districts that ran a participatory budgeting vote this year (of 51 total districts). To make the digital ballot a reality, the city partnered with Stanford University’s Crowdsourced Democracy Team and Democracy 2.1, an international project to change community decision-making. The Stanford team led the development of the digital ballot, consulting with Democracy 2.1 and the city on the user interface, and Democracy 2.1 led the ballot implementation during the vote in April. (Full disclosure: Democracy 2.1 is an organizational member of Civic Hall.)

“Make it as easy as an ATM—that was our goal,” says Lex Paulson, a professor of political theory at Sciences Po-Paris and an international counselor at Democracy 2.1. At the core of the Democracy 2.1 project is a voting algorithm developed by a mathematician and anti-corruption activist, Karel Janecek, that privileges consensus over majority-wins.

Deploying the digital ballot in New York City this spring was an opportunity to test some of the alternative ways of voting developed by Janecek and the Stanford team. In each of the five districts where the digital ballot was piloted, participants were asked to vote on an experimental ballot after their real vote had been cast.

On the actual ballot, voters were asked to select five projects, regardless of size or cost, no more, no less. In contrast:

One of the experimental ballots tried to solve the knapsack problem, a mathematical problem of combinatorial optimization. In layman’s terms, that means getting the most bang for your buck. This experimental ballot allowed voters to choose up to one million dollars worth of projects. Unlike the actual ballot, which restricted voters to no more than five projects, this allows voters to choose many more projects, because they find they have space for smaller budget items left over after choosing big ticket items.

Lex Paulson says this can give arts projects an edge, since they usually have small budgetary needs but, because they are seen as inessential (as opposed to installing air conditioning in a school cafeteria), are less likely to be among a pick of just five projects.

“When people vote they should see the same trade-off that a city planner sees,” says Ashish Goel, who leads the Crowdsourced Democracy Team. We spoke in April at a voting site on the Upper East Side.

“Our design principle,” Goel said, “[is] how to build for people so they can make the best decision possible.”

A second variation of that ballot allowed people to choose up to two million dollars worth of projects, even though the budget was less than that. Giving people more options raises the likelihood that someone will pick a winning project, a key factor in Democracy 2.1’s “satisfaction index,” a metric that they developed to assess the success and impact of democratic processes.

“Our premise is that the higher the percentage of voters who end up supporting a winner, the greater the level of consensus and satisfaction with the process will be,” Paulson explains. “Our argument—which our pilot data from 2015 is continuing to strengthen—is that the D21 voting system, through the effect of more votes per voter, is the most efficient way to maximize overall satisfaction with any democratic process.”

One of the other experimental ballots gave voters “down” votes in addition to “up” votes, which allows the city to see which projects are the most divisive or controversial. Another ballot showed voters randomized pairs of projects, and the voter had to decide which of the two projects they would prefer to fund.

During a brown bag lunch at Civic Hall last week, Paulson explained the many benefits of using a digital ballot, in addition to increased opportunities for experimentation and innovation.

To start, digital is mobile. Staff and volunteers were able to take iPads into parks, to go where the people are instead of expecting them to come to the voting site.

Digital ballots can also be more information-rich than paper. It’s easier to add visual elements, and the ballot this year could be translated into Chinese and Spanish. The New York Times reported that in one district last year, two-thirds of the ballots were cast in Spanish and Chinese. While printing foreign language ballots is possible, going digital means that you don’t have to guess at how many to print and risk having too many or too few in a particular language.

While we’re on the subject, digital ballots save trees and ink. Fewer paper ballots also means fewer votes need to be hand-processed; digital means getting real-time results.

Digital ballots also allow for project order randomization. Studies have shown that the placement of a proposal at the top of the ballot improves the likelihood that the proposal will be funded. Although printed ballots are all identical, digital ballots, when randomized, can eliminate that small placement bias.

This year, Democracy 2.1 and Crowdsourced Democracy Team only got involved in the final stage of the participatory budgeting process, the vote. However, they will be involved from the beginning in next year’s process, which will begin in the fall.

Lex Paulson hopes to experiment using the Democracy 2.1 platform as a deliberative tool in the proposal stage of the process, not just a decision-making tool.

Sondra Youdelman, the executive director of Community Voices Heard, a community organization dedicated to making civic processes more inclusive, tells Civicist that she would like to take a look at the statistics gathered from the voter survey to identify areas with underrepresented communities. Community Voices Heard has been integral to developing New York’s participatory budgeting process since it launched three years ago.

“I mentioned to Lex and the group that I actually like the idea of having iPads and having people go out in the community and get people to vote if it’s targeted properly,” Youdelman explains. Her concern is that digital ballots, without additional outreach in underrepresented communities, could further increase the civic engagement divide in the city.

This year, in advance of the idea-generating phase of participatory budgeting, Community Voices Heard sent canvassers to knock on 4,000 doors in public housing buildings to poll people on the projects they would like to see proposed, and ask if anyone would want to be a delegate in the participatory budgeting process. The cards that those polled filled out had to be entered in by hand. A digital ballot, deployed properly, could make this process faster and more information-rich.

It’s one of many possible engagement processes that the city could “upgrade,” so to speak, with a digital ballot.

“We’ll have a longer runway to experiment this year,” Lex Paulson tells Civicist. “And council members say they want to do more.”

 
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Civic Tech Commons

TOWARD (A) CIVIC TRUST

TOWARD (A) CIVIC TRUST

A new model—the Civic Trust—may help protect the public’s interest as civic tech evolves.

This is the second installment of three pieces on the business of civic tech and how we should be rethinking that business. You can find Sean McDonald’s first piece here.

Trust in institutions, globally, is at an all-time low. Government, business, journalism, and even nonprofits, are all losing the public’s faith. The U.S. government, in particular, has hovered near its lowest approval ratings in history for an uncomfortably long time. And, given recent history, it’s hard to blame us.

One reason is that we’re using the same organizational models we’ve used for decades. The way that we legally structure organizations (Corporations, 501(c)3s, Limited Liability Companies, etc.) defines their incentives, values, decision-making structures, and priorities. Incorporation models are the DNA of organizations—even those with revolutionary approaches to collective action—and that DNA replicates the same structural flaws and risks as traditional organizations. We are trying to build the future with the same organizational structures that gave us the present and—as Einstein said, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used to create them.” It’s fair to say that decision making structures are, collectively, how we think.

Amidst the global fallout in trust, there are many trying to build technological solutions to our trust deficit—both better verification and “trustless” systems. The most recent (and, arguably, credible) technology solution is the blockchain—the distributed administration and ledger architectures made famous by Bitcoin. The blockchain offers a huge amount of potential—in particular, it decentralizes administration (and administration costs), improves transparency (for those capable of understanding it), and increases the reliability of complex interactions. As a way to contextualize blockchain’s potential impact on the ecosystem and evolution of technology adoption, Nick Grossman’s “Venture capital vs. community capital,” is a great overview.

However, as Rachel O’Dwyer’s “The Revolution Will (not) Be Decentralized: Blockchains” points out—the primary challenges in collective action, while interesting technologically, still come down to mediating relationships, managing governance structures, and being able to set common standards. Blockchains create huge opportunities to transparently design and manage distributed processes, but they don’t enable us to evolve norms, resolve disputes arising from the transactions they administer, or meaningfully solve the definitional issues that lie at the core of our representative governance models (more on those here). To take the inverse of the “law cannot solve technology’s problems,” trope—we can’t expect technology to solve our organizational problems. 

One of our most challenging organizational problems is how to balance the financial needs of information channels and the integrity of the information and relationships the channels represent. Publishing platforms make it even more complicated—they use their content and engagement structures to claim and monetize our behavior and relationships. The majority of privately owned platforms—even well intentioned ones—sell some form of access to users, data, services, and servants—all of which distorts the integrity of the underlying relationships. As respected, anonymous cybersecurity expert @SwiftonSecurity tweeted recently:

 

And that’s where it gets really concerning—the more civic groups and governments rely on commercial technologies as intermediaries, the more potential there is to strain or distort the already struggling trust relationships between the public and institutions. As Erica R.H. Fuchs noted in a research paper about DARPA, institutions that develop technology require embedded network governance, meaning that the network should have an built-in role in making decisions. According to Fuchs, that means more than just technology—it includes bridging the policy, business, and legal implications of technology. That, as Stanford’s Lucy Bernholz notes, means not only changing what civil society groups do, it means changing how they work. 

So. How do we build trust in organizations? More importantly, how do we make organizations more trustworthy? I’m a big believer in progress through open, participatory processes. Still, they’re big questions that will require a lot of experimentation to answer. Finding socially conscious ways and spaces to experiment will be incredibly important, especially in an intellectual property climate that allows companies to own the ways that we engage with each other. A fundamental part of building trust in those organizations will involve ensuring that the underlying ideas that redefine collective engagement don’t disappear or irreparably change when the companies that build them do. And, like most forms of both collective action and technology, we’ll probably end up with more than one answer.

One answer of how to build those socially conscious, safe spaces may be a new approach to an old structure: the Civic Trust*. Traditionally, trusts are privately created legal agreements that create systems of management and governance over a particular set of assets, according to a set of values or desired goals. Trusts also create a legally enforceable fiduciary duty to the beneficiary, which can be defined when they’re created. For a broad overview of Trusts, this article from Findlaw is helpful. 

The use of Trusts to protect a set of common resources or values isn’t new. Natural resources are often donated to governments through Public Trusts, which can set standards around the maintenance and care of that resource. Similarly, many Trusts are created to ensure the integrity and sustainability of institutions—in his recent farewell to readers, the Guardian’s Alan Rusbridger cited how important the Scott Family Trust has been in helping maintain the newspaper’s independence. Similarly, in this article, Keith Porcaro lays out an incredibly smart approach to how Trusts could be used to protect user interests in the use of their data. Even venture capitalists form trusts to manage risk. But, in their present form, Trusts—like almost every other incorporation model—focus on specific inputs (resources, financial investment, votes) and less well-defined outputs (conservation, independence, profit, democracy). 

That’s where a Civic Trust are different. Civic Trusts focus on ensuring that transparent and meaningful participation processes are built into the way that technology products evolve. As most social platforms prove, well designed engagement processes are resources—and in publicly supported technology design, how they’re governed matters. 

Here’s how it works: A Civic Trust would be created by an organization that wants to be able to make meaningful guarantees to protect its users and customers. The Civic Trust would create an independent organization that owns the code and data resources created by the creator, using limited, revocable licenses to give for-profits, nonprofits, and governments the right to use, adapt, and sell products based on the underlying code. These licenses would give the Civic Trust the ability to audit and ensure that basic standards of participation were met in the way both the technology and organizations evolved (things like rate of versioning, feature development, security defaults, dispute resolution processes, data use, etc.). As opposed to focusing on the value of the outcomes, Civic Trusts would focus on the values embedded in the decision making processes of the user organizations. 

This approach isn’t without precedent. Civic Trusts work the same way that Apple and Google are structured, except that instead of using the structure to avoid taxes, it would use it to build and steward truly open and participatory governance processes (in technology). Civic Trusts could create safe spaces to experiment with governance and decision making processes, hardcoding a public advocate into the organizational DNA of the companies and technologies that connect us. Civic Trusts would help us define embedded network governance in the public interest.

My next post will dive into the nitty gritty of a Civic Trust, including sample contractual provisions and ideas. At its core, though, Civic Trusts are a recognition of the importance of ingraining participation in public interest technologies. Ultimately, we have yet to figure out how to design organizations that can balance the public interest with the expectations and requirements of their funders—as Paul Klein notes, even nonprofits struggle.

While I’m sure that there are many who disagree, that disagreement is exactly why we need Civic Trusts. We don’t have to agree, but we need the space to experiment and disagree in public. After all, as long as we, the public, invest in privately owned platforms—with our time, data, money, or anything else of value—we should have a meaningful voice about how they treat us, grow, and change. Otherwise, who would trust them?

Sean Martin McDonald is the CEO of FrontlineSMS. Frontline helps governments, businesses, technology providers, and nonprofit organizations translate what they do into text messaging microservices, enabling them to reach more people, more efficiently.

Categories
#PDF

POST-PDF QUESTIONS

POST-PDF QUESTIONS

  • I spent last Thursday and Friday in New York City at the Personal Democracy Forum and left with three big questions to ponder.

    1) How do we make apps more civic? Andrew Rasiej quoted Nick Grossman in a session saying, “We don’t need more civic apps, we need apps to be more civic.” Rather than creating a neighborhood-organizing applications, how do we get Airbnb to introduce neighbors to each other; enlist Uber to provide free rides to the polls on Election Day; or analyze Twitter to inform politicians of constituent sentiment?

    2) What happens when the public square becomes private? Millennials increasingly use social networks to communicate with friends, get their news, and build businesses. But private companies own these immense social networks.  They can restrict access at any moment—potentially eliminating David Troy’s incredible maps of online social networks or the Sunlight Foundation’s Politwoops tool, to name just two examples.

    3) Does the nonprofit model work for civic tech? Nancy Lublin told a powerful story about the challenges she faced to take the Crisis Text Line from an idea to its incredible success processing 6.7 million messages, and how her team struggled to gain funding from foundations. In contrast, Jim Gilliam, the CEO of NationBuilder spoke to an audience with Change.org lanyards hanging around their necks about the benefits of having both Andreessen Horowitz and the Omidyar Network behind the company and their for-profit model.

    Andrew Rasiej and Micah L. Sifry have created something special with the Personal Democracy Forum and it is an important convening of the civic tech community that luckily answers many more questions than it raises.

    Alex Wirth is the co-founder of Quorum, Washington’s next generation legislative strategy platform. He attended PDF15 as a Knight Foundation Fellow.

Categories
#PDF

THE CIVIC PHOTOGRAPHER

THE CIVIC PHOTOGRAPHER

The more people photographing truth to power, the better.

  • On the first morning of Personal Democracy Forum, Micah Sifry shared a more than 100-year-old image by Jacob Riis from a series titled How the Other Half Lives. Riis, who was equal parts photographer and social reformer, created the series to call attention to the deplorable living conditions in the tenement housing system. Sifry’s interlude was followed by talks by Eric Liu, on reckoning with power and positionality, as well as Jess Kutch and Palak Shah on re-envisioning labor movements for the 21st century. All the while, Riis’ image remained in my mind’s eye, and got me thinking about all those who should be considered today’s Jacob Riis.

    Is it the Chinese activists sharing images on Weibo that contradict official history?

    Or Joao Silva, whose long journalistic career has included chronicling the end of apartheid, the War on Terror, and human rights abuses in the Balkans, to name just a few of his subjects.

    Riis surely would have approved of the efforts of the International Bar Association, which has just unveiled an Android app to help human rights activists document and store images until they are shown in court. The idea behind the application is to time-stamp and affix GPS-determined location to each uploaded image, verify the image, and protect “the safety of those brave enough to record them.”

    Maybe Riis’ latest inheritor is the 15-year-old bystander who filmed this weekend’s police violence against black teens in McKinney, Texas. Brandon Brooks’ video of a police officer holding down a bikini-clad teen and waving his rifle at two of her male peers has been shared around the world in a matter of days.

    Of course, it doesn’t really matter who fills Riis’ shoes. The more people photographing truth to power, the better.

    Another PDF speaker, Harold Feld, reminded us that the net is an undeniable public utility. Moments before that, Dante Berry pointed out that over 100 million Americans lacked reliable internet service. Merely having internet access or a camera isn’t enough. Today, just as it did in Riis’ era, what matters most is what we do after the images are captured. Will we share, question, organize and culture-hack around them, or will we let the agenda and power be set by someone else?

    Zoe Middleton is an aspiring academic (read: grad student) in New York. When she’s not thinking about media studies and sociology, you can find her searching the city for quality pastor tacos. You can find more of her ideas here. Zoe attended PDF15 as a Knight Foundation Fellow.

     
Categories
#PDF Civic Tech Design

WHY WE NEED A “GROWTH MINDSET” CIVIC TECH CULTURE

WHY WE NEED A “GROWTH MINDSET” CIVIC TECH CULTURE

This year, many of the speakers at Personal Democracy Forum challenged us to rethink the cultural design of our systems, not simply the technical.

(Andreas Pizsa, CC BY 2.0)

  • This year, many of the speakers at Personal Democracy Forum challenged us to rethink the cultural design of our systems, not simply the technical. Deanna Zandt asked us to “Imagine All The Feelz” and consider how we might create space for personal truths, even the painful ones, in our social media discourse. And in “Public Engagement is Broken: Are You Part of the Problem?” Catherine Bracy suggested that, instead of building a new social network, we redesign the public meeting from a space for contentious bickering to a space for productive dialogue.

    The truth is, the culture of a system determines its success. We need systems that are comfortable with the notion that they are not perfect. We need systems that acknowledge that we are always learning, that we improve over time. We need systems built on a culture of ongoing improvement, not fixed outcomes. We see this learning culture across many disciplines, from agile development in tech to continuous improvement in education. The core logic at the heart of all of these successful systems is that of the “growth mindset,” a philosophical stance first identified by Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck. 

    A “fixed mindset” assumes our qualities of character and intelligence are set at one inherent level, and there is little to be done to change them. Some of us are smart, some of us are dumb, and we play the hand we’re dealt. A growth mindset assumes that our intelligence and abilities are dynamic, and that we can improve our skill levels through practice. Our capacity is directly related to our effort. Carol Dweck finds that fixed mindset students are mainly motivated “to look smart all the time and never look dumb.” Growth mindset students are more likely to continue working hard despite setbacks, and look at challenges as opportunities for growth.

    What will happen if we adopt the growth mindset as the culture of our civic engagement systems? We can reframe our failures as opportunities to learn. We can contextualize data as a means to an end. We can embed accountability as a stepping stone to progress. We can meet people where they’re currently at and create opportunities for deeper participation over time. Our systems will incentivize participation, because participation will create improvement.

    Tristan Harris broke down what happens when we use a fixed outcomes approach to designing our systems in his PDF talk, called “Constantly Distracted? Design for Time Well Spent.” Using a fixed volume metric like time spent has lead to product features like the Facebook Timeline, which encourages passive content consumption. The Facebook Timeline has had a profound impact on how we spend our time on the internet, reducing active participation by omission. What if we measure mindful engagement, as Tristan advocates? What if, as he suggests, we use positive impact on human well-being as a measure of our success instead of time spent? Using our metrics to track what we value gives us a concrete pathway to deliver on growth mindset-based design.

    Last year I founded a social systems design lab called Thicket. From its inception, we’ve focused on creating a space for people to think and work together to solve our most entrenched systemic problems. Throughout the process of designing our community-powered research and design platform launching this summer, our team has been motivated by this question: How might we instill the growth mindset in our product design? We think we’ve done pretty well, but in the spirit of continuous improvement, we can do even better.

    Coming to PDF this year as a Civic Hall Fellow has been an invigorating reminder that there is a strong, motivated, energized community of thinkers, designers and technologists who believe that our systems can truly be better, and are putting in the effort to make them so. If we can channel that spirit of dynamic improvement into all of our systems, I believe we will have successfully created the conditions for greater civic engagement. 

    Deepthi Welaratna (@deepthiw) is founder of Thicket, a design lab and consultancy creating products and experiences that harness the power of global communities to move us forward, faster. Deepthi has spent the last 14 years influencing complex systems through public policy campaigns, creative leadership programs, and movement building around a range of social and economic issues. Deepthi attended PDF as a Civic Hall fellow this year.

     
Categories
Internet of Things Op-Ed Smart Cities

FIX THE DMCA TO MAKE THE INTERNET OF THINGS STOP WORKING AGAINST US

FIX THE DMCA TO MAKE THE INTERNET OF THINGS STOP WORKING AGAINST US

The real question we ought to be asking is, how can we fix the DMCA to make the internet of things work for us instead of against us?

Congress has made a lot of mistakes governing the internet over the years. But the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), enacted in 1998, stands above the pack as one of the worst. The age of digital rights management (DRM) it made possible was bad enough in the realm of music and video media. But as manufacturers prepare to extend this regime to a world of connected things, we’re on the cusp of a colossal mistake.

This is, at least according to Cory Doctorow. Speaking at Personal Democracy Forum 2015 on Thursday, he criticized the extension of the “ink jet business model” to the internet of things. Do we really want to have to pay a subscription fee to the manufacturer of every connected device in our home to keep it from shutting down? Especially in a future where life as we know it might not be possible when connected systems fail to keep our homes, cars, and offices cooled, connected, safe, and clean.

Doctorow’s position draws much of its strength from the ethos of the maker movement—that such schemes result in products that are fundamentally “broken out of the box,” and only the valiant, repeated (and usually successful) efforts of hackers to jailbreak them can restore the balance of power between manufacturer and consumer.

Doctorow is fighting an important campaign. Even since I saw the DRM chair, a concept design created by some Swiss students in 2013 that would self-destruct after eight uses, I’ve worried about the coupling of smart infrastructure and these kinds of metering and access control systems.

But I think that things get murkier when the discussion turns to security. Doctorow launched into a scathing critique of the awful provisions of the DMCA that inhibit research on vulnerabilities in DRM schemes—it isn’t just a crime to distribute cracks to rights management encryption, it’s also a crime to distribute any information about potential vulnerabilities. These restrictions have created enormous obstacles to serious and valid academic research.

Now let’s map this over to the internet of things. Now I may be wrong, but it’s one thing for Disney and Sony to stop free culture hacktivists from cracking DVDs; it’s a whole other game if Siemens and GE are stopping engineering professors from exposing holes in the firewall on my power plant. Seeing this in the cards, earlier this year, Doctorow and the Electronic Frontier Foundation launched the Apollo 1201 project (after Section 1201 of the DMCA), which aims to “eradicate DRM everywhere.”

The problem though, is that the consequences of security flaws on the internet of things are much, much higher than anything we faced in the age of Napster. But there aren’t any truly viable schemes for securing the internet of things on the table yet. With a proliferating array of devices, tucked away in every corner of our pockets, our homes, and our cities, with firmware becoming obsolete at various rates, and being probed constantly by an unseen mass of miscreants around the world—even as they sense our most private activities and pull the levers on our most critical infrastructures—this is not something to be taken lightly. If DRM is a part of the toolkit that allows internet of things businesses to bring their products to market in a profitable and responsible manner, despite all of these challenges, we shouldn’t immediately throw out the baby with the bathwater because it didn’t work out the last time around.

No one likes the way DRM currently treats users when they try to
scrutinize and fix its security vulnerabilities—to essentially
consider you as much as an enemy as it would an actual intruder.

But my hunch is that the battle over when fighting DRM does and doesn’t make sense in the internet of things is going to be a lot more complicated than the picture Doctorow paints.

But simply extending the DMCA, crafted in the 1990s by media industry insiders, to the realm of connected objects makes no sense at all. The real question we ought to be asking is, how can we fix the DMCA to make the internet of things work for us instead of against us?

Categories
#PDF laber

5 TAKEAWAYS FROM ‘LABS FOR SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC EMPOWERMENT’ BREAKOUT

5 TAKEAWAYS FROM ‘LABS FOR SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC EMPOWERMENT’ BREAKOUT

  • With panelists Palak Shah (Fair Care Labs), Jess Kutch (Coworker.org), Hannah Calhoon (Blue Ridge Labs @ Robin Hood), and moderator Ibrahim Abdul Matin (Green Deen: What Islam Teaches About Protecting the Planet), day one of PDF15 saw an enormous sharing of learnings around using technology and new forms of worker engagement to bring about economic justice. Here are five quick takeaways from Thursday’s breakout session on labs for social and economic empowerment.

    1. “Labs” are essential

    For civic tech hackers to produce social solutions ready to enter the free market, we’re going to need “labs”—spaces where new ventures aiming for positive social change can not only test new ideas, but pass on the knowledge of their failures.

    2. We need a new form of organizing

    The decline in collective bargaining has opened space for a new form of worker organizing. This is a space where technology has the potential to create enormous value, as we’ve already seen with tools like Coworker.org, DemocracyOS, and more.

    3. Technology is not replacing unions

    Rather than replace unions, new technologies can complement existing labor organizations and even ease workers into the idea of organizing. A great example of this is a group of bike share workers that voted to unionize after running a successful campaign for better working conditions on Coworker.org. In other cases, unions have used Coworker.org as a tool for their organizing.

    4. Profitability: the biggest hurdle for civic tech?

    As all of today’s panelists attested to, preparing civic tech teams to create market-based solutions that can survive without government funding or philanthropy is quite the challenge. The panel left us with an important question to ponder: How will civic tech applications of the future drive enough revenue to sustain their activities?

    5. Moderator Ibrahim Abdul-Matin is a “cruel but benevolent dictator”

    Our group couldn’t have covered as much ground or had half as many laughs without your guidance and willingness to cut us off. Thanks, Ibrahim!

    Lauren Mobertz is a New York-based freelance writer who specializes in digital labor and youth employment and is attending PDF as a Mozilla fellow. When she’s not writing about the career moves of gutsy millennials, Lauren is usually running in strange places or trying to dance Brazilian zouk. She’s also just quit her day job to work on her passion project, which you can follow this summer at generationlimbo.com.

Categories
#PDF Digital Divide

HAROLD FELD ON THE NET AS A PUBLIC UTILITY

HAROLD FELD ON THE NET AS A PUBLIC UTILITY

For the last 125 years we have used the term “public utility” to describe a service so fundamental to our participation in society and our economic well being that we cannot leave them to the benevolence of corporations, the indifference of the market, or the kindness of kings.

  • Personal Democracy Forum is next week, and we’re reaching out to some of the speakers for a quick preview of their respective talks and panels. What follows are a few words from Harold Feld, Senior Vice President of Public Knowledge. Feld will be speaking on the net as a public utility.

    So, for people who aren’t familiar with your work, how does it relate to civic tech?

    I focus on the intersection of law and policy in telecommunications and tech at the U.S. federal level. We work to ensure the availability of ubiquitous, affordable, and meaningful broadband access. By “meaningful,” I mean without either government or corporate intermediaries able to prohibit or unduly influence how others use broadband and other new technologies.

    For example, we have been very involved in the net neutrality debate and pushed for reclassification of broadband as a Title II telecommunications service as early as January 2010. We are active in the effort to limit “patent trolls” and work to reform copyright law so that it cannot be used to strangle free speech.

    You’ll be speaking at the conference on the subject of the net as a public utility. What still needs to be addressed in the wake of the net neutrality win? What isn’t getting enough attention?

    We need to recognize the importance of what we have won, and how easily we can still lose it. To say that something is a “public utility” in the United States does not have anything to do with whether it is a monopoly or a regulated rate. For the last 125 years we have used the term “public utility” to describe a service so fundamental to our participation in society and our economic well being that we cannot leave them to the benevolence of corporations, the indifference of the market, or the kindness of kings. We must safeguard the right of all people to access under a rule of law. We do this with electricity, with transportation, with water, and with a very small number of other critical services.

    The fundamental right to communicate is one of these services. We have that principle embedded in our Constitution, and it has been the cornerstone of telephone regulation for more than 100 years. As a result, 96 percent of the country have access to some kind of voice telephony service. We need to recognize that broadband falls in this same category: a service so essential that government has a responsibility to ensure that all people have affordable access.

    Put another way, it is common to think that we care about classifying broadband as a Title II “telecommunications service” because that was the only way to ensure net neutrality. But it is really the other way around. We care about net neutrality so passionately because we recognize broadband has become essential in our lives. With that realization, we now have a responsibility to ensure that everyone has legally protected rights to enjoy the benefits of this fundamental service.

    The theme of the conference this year is the future of civic tech. As briefly as you like: Where do you think civic tech is going, what do we have to look forward to, and what pitfalls should people working in this sector be aware of?

    I think the future of civic tech lies in moving from scarcity to abundance. Corporate profit depends on scarcity, but to unlock the civic potential of technology requires ubiquity. I think our greatest pitfall is trying to measure success with the wrong numbers. It’s not about creating the next hot startup. It’s not about generating videos with millions of hits. Hundreds of thousands—even millions—of people able to talk in their own voices to each other is more critically important then the creation of a new entertainment colossus. When we see how people use these technologies to organize for social change, to learn new things, to open new worlds, and to express themselves freely to the world in their own voices, then we have truly accomplished something more important than “the next Google” or “next Netflix.”

Categories
Campaign Finance Civic Hall Transparency

A NEW TOOL FOR FINDING CAMPAIGN FINANCE SCOOPS

A NEW TOOL FOR FINDING CAMPAIGN FINANCE SCOOPS

“There are thousands of potential front page of reddit stories hidden in 25 years of campaign finance data,” and Solomon Kahn wants to help unearth them.

  • In the hours he’s not working at Paperless Post or spending time with his wife and baby, Solomon Kahn is a crusader for campaign finance transparency. Earlier today, Kahn stopped by Civic Hall for a brown bag lunch to share the a visualization tool he built using OpenSecrets data that lets users dive into politicians’ campaign finance records, all the way down to individual-level donors, if necessary. Kahn is currently raising money on Kickstarter to help pay for hosting and to support outreach and training for journalists who can best make use of the tool.

    Using his own local congressperson, Rep. Joseph Crowley (D-NY), as an example, Kahn demonstrated how the visualization made it easy to see that Crowley went from getting 27 percent of his campaign funds from labor groups and 14 percent from finance/insurance/real estate in 2000, to getting 6 percent of funds from labor and 38 percent from finance/insurance/real estate in 2014. Digging a bit deeper, Kahn found that one of Crowley’s largest contributors is the Blackstone Group, and that in 2007, 14 people affiliated with Blackstone, who had never contributed to Crowley before, all gave $2,300 on the exact same day.

    Kahn says that users will be able to submit “scoops” like this which, once vetted for accuracy, will be displayed at the top of a politician’s page so that journalists and other interested folks will see notable facts like the above right off the bat. (An audience member asks if he’s thought about annotation, to which Kahn replies: “That’s complicated,” and reiterates the limits of his time and money.)

    Helping journalists make the most of the tool is one of Kahn’s priorities. “For a reporter in Sunnyside [Queens, New York] at the Tribune to get a story like this would just be impossible without this kind of tool,” Kahn tells those gathered at Civic Hall.

    “There are thousands of potential front page of reddit stories hidden in 25 years of campaign finance data,” Kahn writes to potential Kickstarter backers. He wants to make sure those stories see the light of day.

    Speaking of reddit, Kahn says he’ll be promoting the tool in a reddit I Am A—, Ask Me Anything session soon, so keep your eyes peeled for that.

    For more information, see Kahn’s Kickstarter video here:

     

Categories
#PDF Algorithms Civic Tech

CATHY O’NEIL ON WEAPONS OF MATH DESTRUCTION

CATHY O’NEIL ON WEAPONS OF MATH DESTRUCTION

Weapons of math destruction are characterized by their opacity, their power, their widespread use, their poor definitions of success, and their engendering of pernicious feedback loops.

  • Personal Democracy Forum is next week, and we’re reaching out to some of the speakers for a quick preview of their respective talks and panels. What follows are a few words from Cathy O’Neil, who writes at the blog mathbabe.org and is working on a book about the dark side of big data. O’Neil will deliver a talk on “Weapons of Math Destruction.”

    You’ll be speaking at the conference on the subject of weapons of math destruction. Give us a preview: what the heck are weapons of math destruction?!

    They are mathematical algorithms that are being deployed to make important life decisions for certain people at certain moments. They are characterized by their opacity, their power, their widespread use, their poor definitions of success, and their engendering of pernicious feedback loops. I will give a bunch of examples of WMD’s from education (the Value-Added Model for Teachers), the criminal justice system (evidence-based sentencing models), and politics (micro-targeting).

    The theme of the conference this year is the future of civic tech. As briefly as you like: Where do you think civic tech is going, what do we have to look forward to, and what pitfalls should people working in this sector be aware of?

    I’d say that my example with micro-targeting in politics is more or less an intersection of WMD’s with civic tech. I am, in other words, a civic tech skeptic.

    I’m focusing on the pitfalls. Civic tech has a lot of positive vibes but successful data work, which is usually done in the quest of power, money, or both, should teach us a few lessons. If we want data or technology to work for the public good, we have to make it so in a deliberate and thoughtful fashion. It’s not good enough for us to “open up the data” and wait for the tide that lifts all boats. 

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