The #EmptySeat; Google Trends in Iowa trend to Bernie; ranking desirability on Tinder; and more.
Tech and the presidentials: On Twitter, the #EmptySeat hashtag was a powerful counterpoint during President Obama’s State of the Union speech last night, with hundreds of people sharing the names and pictures of family members they’ve lost to gun violence.
Google Trends reports that during the speech, the #2 question most being asked about President Obama was “Who is sitting behind Obama?”
Speaking of Google Trends, search interest in Bernie Sanders has overtaken interest in Hillary Clinton dramatically in Iowa as polls show the Democratic race tightening there.
MoveOn.org Political Action has endorsed Bernie Sanders for president, with what its executive director Ilya Sheyman says was a “record-setting 78.6 percent of 340,665 votes cast” by its membership. Hillary Clinton got 14.6 percent of the vote, and 5.9 percent favored no endorsement. The group says it has more than 43,000 members in Iowa and more than 30,000 in New Hampshire.
Brave new world: Taking a page from Gary Shteyngart’s satirical novel Super Sad True Love Story, the dating app Tinder has an internal scoring system ranking how desirable each user is, Austin Carr reports for Fast Company.
A New York state assemblyman, Matthew Titone, has proposed what appears to be the nation’s first ban on the sale of smartphones using encryption, Tim Cushing reports for TechDirt.
Sharing and organizing: A new report from RSA on the sharing economy says it sees good news ahead. As Brhmie Balaram writes, “we are seeing the development of sharing platforms that are co-operative and decentralised in nature, and able to forgo intermediaries completely with the help of ‘blockchain’ technology. While these platforms are in their infancy, they hold promise for workers who will be able to truly free themselves from under the thumb of a middleman and fully retain their earnings.”
Greenpeace’s MobLab has just released The Mobilisation Cookbook, a guide to organizing “people-powered” campaigns.
Life in the golden age: Reflecting on the announcement by Mark Zuckerberg that he is donating 99 percent of his Facebook shares to, what, an LLC? charity? trying to influence public policy, philanthropy wonk Lucy Bernholz says it’s high time we clarified the differences between charity, politics and investing.
“What do you do with your billions when you become dynastically wealthy in your 20s?” That’s the question behind Felix Salmon’s bracing and sympathetic dissection of Chris Hughes’ failure at The New Republic, written for rival site Fusion.
Fitbits go to university; a history of gov’ts hacking human rights orgs; and more.
Yesterday’s civic-tech must-read had one problem: the wrong link! Here it is, to Emily Shaw’s excellent take on how to understand and define the mission of civic tech.
Their article has a dry-as-bones title, but “Open Data and Civic Apps: First-Generation Failures, Second Generation Improvements” by Melissa Lee, Esteve Almirall, and Jonathan Wareham is an excellent and clear-eyed look at apps contests built on open government data and how civic hacktivists are evolving smarter strategies for making civic tech that matters. (h/t Wendy M. Grossman)
Fabian Girardin of the Near Future Laboratory unveils Humans, a new app that helps users turn the tables on their social media addictions. Count me in.
Brave new world: Oral Roberts University is requiring incoming student to buy and wear a Fitbit tracker, with its data fed into their online grade books, and school administrators are already crowing about the opportunity to link fitness to academic achievement, Samantha Allen reports for The Daily Beast.
Nearly 200 security experts, companies and organizations spanning 42 companies have signed onto an open letter organized by Access Now declaring that “encryption isn’t a security problem, it’s a security solution.”
Tech and the presidentials: The White House is joining Snapchat, TechCrunch’s Sarah Perez reports.
But what about Meerkat? Isn’t this the “Meerkat election“? As former-White-House communications director Dan Pfeiffer told us last spring: “By the time voters start showing up at VFW halls and high schools to caucus next year, it will be clear that yet another new technology is in the process of revolutionizing our politics.”
The No Republic: Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes is putting The New Republic up for sale, barely a year after a staff upheaval left the venerable opinion magazine in turmoil, and Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo has some choice words for “Chainsaw Chris.”
And where does Hughes post his memo to his New Republic staff? On Medium.
Saying Kaddish: On the third anniversary of his brother Aaron’s suicide, Noah Swartz writes that he’s “finally ready…to stop hiding how I feel and be seen for who I am.” He shares with great courage the burdens of losing an older brother, of surviving, of being expected to join with Aaron’s being turned “into a figurehead for American injustice” when he knows that his brother was a far more complicated and less saint-like figure, of not being allowed to forget him, and of being regularly called Aaron(!) by friends and fellow travelers.
Will the blockchain be the end of Uber, Airbnb, and Spotify?; White House responds to Change.org petition; and more.
Today’s civic tech must-read: mySociety researcher Emily Shaw gives her take on the defining-civic-tech debate. Here’s the key graf, IMO:
[I]n the field we are building a clear definition of civic tech. It has to do with the way we believe we improve democratic self-management. We want to improve everyone’s ability to transmit information about their preferences into government. We want to improve everyone’s ability to get the information they want out of government. And we want to see what happens as information is processed in the middle. Civic technology seeks to improve government input/output, while opening the process to full view.
Don’t miss Scott Rosenberg’s latest report on Medium’s Backchannel on the potential of blockchain technology to end centralized services like Uber, Spotify, and Airbnb.
The Stanford Social Innovation Review’s Corey Binns did a field report on Color of Change for its Winter 2016 issue that nicely encapsulates the online group’s growth and impact.
The White House “We the People” team has responded to a petition from Change.org, marking the first time that the administration has responded officially to a petition from an outside organization. The petition, which had nearly 400,000 signers, is calling on the president to pardon Steven Avery in the Teresa Halbach murder case, which is the focus of the “Making a Murderer” documentary.
The White House will be making video of President Obama’s final State of the Union speech available to Amazon users starting this Wednesday, Brian Stelter reports for CNN.
And as White House Jason Goldman explains, on Wednesday more than 500 administration officials including the First Lady and Vice President will be doing a daylong question and answer session via social media, on what the administration calls “#BigBlockOfCheeseDay.”
Connections: Bhavik Lathia of the Indian online activist group Jhatkaa explains why Facebook’s push for “Free Basics” in India (the rebranded version of its Internet.org) is anything but a public service.
If Governor Andrew Cuomo has his way, every New York City subway station will have free Wi-Fi by the end of 2016, along with USB charging stations and mobile payments for subway fares, Andrew Hawkins reports for The Verge.
Related: Maya Wiley, counsel to NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio, reports for The Nation on the city’s ongoing efforts to increase access to affordable broadband.
Are Technica’s Cyrus Farivar profiles Shari Steele, the new director of the Tor Project.
Media downs and ups: Upworthy announced the lay-off of 14 of its 97 employees on Friday, cutting people from its intel, product development and editorial departments, in order to focus resources on its growing original video department, Kelsey Sutton reports for Capital New York. “Upworthy’s original video views grew to 167 million in December, more than 33 times what the site was seeing 11 months prior, at the launch of Upworthy’s video operation,” Sutton reports. “In the first week of January alone, Upworthy video views hit 67 million.”
Meanwhile, the Huffington Post is ending HuffPost Live in order to focus more on shareable, video content and long-form documentaries, Alex Weprin, Joe Pompeo and Peter Sterne report for Capital New York.
Boston’s Metropolitan Area Planning Council is looking to hire a civic technology fellow.
Brave New Films is looking to hire a social media strategist.
Starman: RIP David Bowie, who was as much of a technological pioneer as he was a social one. Here he is in the New York Times in 2002, anticipating the future:
The absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music will take place within 10 years, and nothing is going to be able to stop it. I see absolutely no point in pretending that it’s not going to happen. I’m fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years, and authorship and intellectual property is in for such a bashing. Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity. So it’s like, just take advantage of these last few years because none of this is ever going to happen again. You’d better be prepared for doing a lot of touring because that’s really the only unique situation that’s going to be left. It’s terribly exciting. But on the other hand it doesn’t matter if you think it’s exciting or not; it’s what’s going to happen.
In Quartz, Joon Ian Wong recalls Bowie’s history as a tech entrepreneur in the dot-com boom days, when he launched an Internet Service Provider called BowieNet.
Tonight in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, NYC, and San Francisco, people will be gathering to celebrate the life of Aaron Swartz and the publication of the new book of his writings, The Boy Who Could Change the World.
Rebranding icitizen; how to reduce wait times at polling places; and more.
This is civic tech: Our Jessica McKenzie has an in-depth story on how citizen science startup iSeeChange came to partner with NASA on an innovative new project to combine high-tech, satellite and other sensor info with low-tech, bottom-up reporting by ordinary people on the rising signs of climate change.
Bill Bushey of Open Twin Cities offers their definition of civic tech: “a set of processes involving deep engagement with diverse stakeholders for creating effective tools in support of public services.” That’s good, but in my humble opinion that’s more of a “how” than a “what.” To us here at Civicist the definition is pretty simple: civic tech is technology used for public good.
Adam Becker, the co-founder of the Department of Better Technology, a small govtech firm that grew out of the White House Presidential Innovation Fellows program, explains to Marquis Cabrera of the Huffington Post why DOBT’s main product Screendoor is so useful to government agencies.
Nashville’s icitizen has relaunched its mobile app with a complete rebranding, the company announced yesterday. Its CEO Russell Reeder blogs, “We are on a mission at icitizen to transform the way people communicate on civic issues, connect our communities, and promote meaningful change!”
Natalie Adona explains on the Democracy Fund blog how queueing theory and new technology can help election administrators reduce long waiting times at polling stations—or at least give them the factual ammunition they need to make the case for increased funding for poll workers. (The Voting Technology Project’s Election Management Toolkit is a great resource, by the way.)
Chicago’s innovative data-driven approach to helping food-safety inspectors target likely violators works, but despite running on open source code it’s only been picked up by one other city. CityLab’s Julian Spector drills down to explain why.
Here’s a nice review by Sid Espinoso of all the things Microsoft’s civic tech team has been involved in of the last year in the Bay Area.
InfoLib, the Liberia Freedom of Information Request Platform, has just launched, powered by Alaveteli software made by mySociety, and tied into a regular radio program run by iLab Liberia that will help it bridge the lack of Internet access there.
Maryann Kongovi is Code for America’s new COO, coming over from Google where she ran its Independent Full Service Agency business unit. Welcome to the world of civic tech!
New York State’s chief digital officer Rachel Haot is now the managing director of 1776, the global incubator and venture fund that focuses on startups aimed at disrupting public sector industries like education, health and energy, Jessica Hullinger reports for Fast Company.
In other news: NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden made an appearance at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, not as a speaker but just as a presenter at the Suitable Technologies booth, Danny Hadron reports for The Guardian. The company makes the Beam, a rolling screen on wheels useful for remote commuting. ““What if you could commute to work without having to sit in traffic?” Snowden asked. “The US government basically cancelled my passport, but I’m sitting here in Las Vegas with you guys at CES.”
ProPublica has launched a version of its website running as a “hidden service” on the Tor network, which means that someone can visit the site with complete anonymity, as Andy Greenberg reports for Wired.
The Atlantic’s Molly Ball explains how the Working Families Party, which is on the verge of going national, is trying to become the Tea Party of the left.
MoveOn’s presidential primary is now open. Voting closes on Sunday night.
Straddling both citizen journalism and citizen science, iSeeChange is pairing crowdsourced, on-the-ground observations with data from NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 mission in the hope of telling a new story about our changing world.
Radio producer Julia Drapkin was tired of climate reporting. Not of the subject itself, but of the routine, which she found lacking: First, a scientist must pose a question, conduct research, and eventually publish. Only then can a reporter write a story, maybe interview the scientist, and maybe—if she has time, which she rarely does—find “a local anecdote to make the story familiar.”
“That wasn’t working anymore. It never really did,” Drapkin told Civicist.
Drapkin wanted to turn that model on its head, to put the local anecdote at the heart of climate reporting. The project she proposed and eventually secured funding for in 2012 became iSeeChange: a citizen-science-slash-journalism project that relaunched last year with a new website, optimized for mobile, and expanded coverage nationwide. The project also received an institutional stamp of approval in the form of a new partnership with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in addition to partnerships with the Berkeley Atmospheric CO2 Observation Network (BEACO2N) and Yale Climate Connections, and with numerous radio stations around the country.
EXPERTS IN THEIR OWN BACKYARD
In 2012, Drapkin’s proposal was selected by the Association for Independence in Radio (AIR) to be part of the inaugural year of the Localore initiative, a program to support innovation in locally-produced public media. As a condition of the year-long grant, Drapkin moved from New Orleans to western Colorado to lead the iSeeChange pilot at community radio station KVNF-FM in Paonia.
She started simply, by going on air and asking the audience what they were seeing change that season.
In many ways, that first year was a proof of concept, all before they even got a website up and running.
“People are experts in their own backyard,” Drapkin said. “We underestimate people’s ability to flag things that are really significant. And if we provide a platform on which people can do that, that’s really important.”
The first iSeeChange website, The Almanac, launched in February 2013. Posts could be viewed by week, by season, or by year, and the website’s whimsical header photo evoked the old-time feel of the weather-forecasting periodical, the Farmers’ Almanac.
While developing the iSeeChange model, Drapkin also discovered a longstanding tradition of note-keeping in the small Colorado community that dated back to the Dust Bowl, at least.
“They read like tweets from the 1920s and 30s,” Drapkin said of the daily diary entries of farmers like William Beezley. “And you could see that these were climate records…notes from the last major, man-made environmental crisis, the Dust Bowl, [and] you could see the parallels between that time and 2012 happening in near-real-time. It was mind-blowing.”
Drapkin believes that iSeeChange is as important a resource for future generations as it is for ours, and that it is a weather-forecasting tool as well as a historical record.
“We need to write everything down so that this generation can have a record to pass onto the next, so that we have a baseline to be able to really gauge change,” she said.
Not just record-highs and record-lows, she adds, but “how we are impacted…because you can’t record that from a weather station.”
A month after the website launched Drapkin’s Localore funding ran out.
ISEECHANGE IN LIMBO
Without funding, Drapkin had to move back to New Orleans and iSeeChange fell into a lull. KVNF kept the project going in that little corner of Colorado, but the project had otherwise stalled.
“People kept using it [the website], but nobody was answering them,” Drapkin explained. “I couldn’t scale myself without any additional resources.”
In spite of her success in Paonia and even a feature on This American Life, Drapkin had trouble finding new funding. “It was like crickets,” she said.
In the course of hustling for grants or other opportunities for iSeeChange, Drapkin was invited to speak at both NASA headquarters and the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), and something clicked.
“I said, we at iSeeChange, in this community, we’re near-sensing,” Drapkin told Civicist. “You guys [at NASA JPL] are remote-sensing. How do we connect the dots?”
In October 2013, iSeeChange and NASA held a workshop on tackling the challenges and opportunities of citizen science, and how to better connect the scientific community with the general public. The workshop led to a partnership with NASA JPL and a new mission: to integrate satellite data on atmospheric carbon dioxide levels into a new iSeeChange platform.
In late 2014, Drapkin finally secured new funding from AIR to scale the iSeeChange model nationwide and began gearing up for the relaunch.
OBSERVATION AND DATA, SIDE BY SIDE
Several months earlier, in July 2014, NASA had launched its first satellite dedicated to measuring levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2). (The original Orbiting Carbon Observatory crashed into the ocean near Antartica minutes after launching in February 2009, when the payload fairing failed to separate, preventing the satellite from making orbit.)
Data supplied by OCO-2 will help identify and characterize sources and sinks (absorption sites) of atmospheric carbon dioxide, and to quantify carbon dioxide variability over the seasons. And now, through the partnership between NASA JPL and iSeeChange, OCO-2 data will add context to crowdsourced climate observations, and vice versa. Geotagged posts on the new iSeeChange website include temperature and other statistics, including humidity, wind speed, and visibility, as well as the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide in the area.
For example, when Eliot Walter posted a photo of a mosquito taken on December 30 in Lexington, Kentucky, the iSeeChange website filled in a 7:14:24 pm reading from forecast.io, and a carbon dioxide reading of 403.70 ppm, which had been recorded 93 miles away on November 10. (Atmospheric carbon dioxide only surpassed 400 ppm in 2013, a first since scientists began keeping track in 1958.)
Because of the nature of a satellite, NASA does not have a constant, complete picture of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Instead, they get “skinny swaths of data,” the science data applications lead for OCO-2, Karen Yuen, explained to Civicist.
OCO-2 makes 14.5 orbits of the earth a day but the spectrometer used to take measurements must be focused very tightly on a small area, which limits coverage—that’s why the closest carbon dioxide reading for an iSeeChange post could be almost 100 miles away. On top of that, measurements can’t be taken through cloud cover. “Every day we make about a million measurements but only keep 100,000 of them because of the clouds,” Yuen said.
NASA estimates that they get a “complete” picture of global carbon every 16 days, Yuen tells Civicist.
When you zoom out on one of the carbon dioxide maps on iSeeChange, you see what Yuen means by skinny swaths of data.
But with computer modeling, NASA can do impressive things with that data, including produce short videos like “A Year in the Life of Earth’s CO2.”
MAKING THE INVISIBLE, VISIBLE
“When we started we didn’t know exactly what we were going to be able to do with the data, we had just this basic idea of syncing the data with posts,” Drapkin told Civicist.
“The trick is that CO2 is an invisible gas,” Karen Yuen explained. “Short of providing micro-sensors to people, how else can we get people to want to participate in a citizen science project with us where they cannot see the gas? Well, what we can ask people to do is report out what they can see and feel from the ground. By noting changes from the ground such as early bloom, increased dust, temperature, taking a picture of something unusual, the citizen scientist is helping to create their own regional database every time anyone uploads information.”
“If you take the iSeeChange data about how weather and climate change are impacting your daily life and juxtapose it with carbon, we are telling a story about climate change in a very new and different way,” Drapkin said.
Yuen said that citizen science is an ongoing pitch of hers at NASA. Generally speaking, she said, those in management are often fans of the idea but worry about backing a project that seems out of their control. Scientists are an equally hard sell, she said, fretting over whether the information will be up to their standards.
“What I told them was that’s not the point,” Yuen said. “Something is better than nothing…when people point out areas where they say ‘we noticed something different, you guys should look at that,’ that’s like a needle in a haystack. That’s really important.”
The new iSeeChange website has a feature for precisely that: a button that allows users to flag posts as “weird” and worthy of additional scrutiny and investigation.
Even without the needle-in-the-haystack observations, or the climate change narrative that could emerge from the juxtaposition of data and observation, the partnership will get this particular data set in front of more eyes, which is one of NASA’s organizational goals: to “reveal the unknown for the benefit of humankind.”
LOOKING FOR LEGITIMACY
Citizen science is far from new. In the mid-18th century, for example, a Norwegian bishop called upon a network of clergymen to keep him in observations of and specimens from the natural world. However, the decreasing cost of tools and sensors, not to mention the proliferation of mini-computers that many of us carry around all day, every day, has allowed citizen science to flourish to an unprecedented extent.
In 2007, the public helped classify the shapes of one million galaxies in only three weeks as part of a project called Galaxy Zoo. Before Galaxy Zoo launched, astronomers had estimated that it would take experts three to five years to complete the task.
Lucy Fortson, one of the co-founders of the Citizen Science Alliance (CSA), which oversees Galaxy Zoo and the other projects that populate the citizen-science platform Zooniverse, believes that citizen-science projects should have the capacity to produce peer-reviewed science. Galaxy Zoo was among the earliest citizen-science projects to do so. Since then, CSA projects have resulted in nearly 50 articles that have appeared in peer-reviewed journals.
But Galaxy Zoo is data analysis, not data collection. Every classification is agreed upon by consensus, involving at least 20 individuals.
The challenge with projects like iSeeChange, Fortson explained, is substantiating observations with additional data.“The difficulty is if you have someone who could be an expert,” she said, “who could say ‘We’ve never have a second crop of raspberries.’”
But that just doesn’t carry the same weight as 20 people saying, “I had a second crop of raspberries, too.”
However, Fortson is also familiar with the power of the crowd to find anomalies in a large data set. When CSA created an online forum where citizen scientists could discuss their work with project scientists and with each other, volunteers began making discoveries of their own.
“Unlike a machine, a human can say, ‘Ooh, that looks really weird’ and post about it on the forum,” Fortson said. That’s how a group of volunteers discovered what has been dubbed the “Green Pea” galaxies, for their small size and bright green color.
Her words recall those of both Karen Yuen and Julia Drapkin, explaining the reasoning behind iSeeChange.
A NEW CITIZEN SCIENCE
ISeeChange does not fit in the clearly defined box of citizen science that Galaxy Zoo belongs to, but its not the first to break down barriers between disciplines, either.
Jeffrey Warren, one of the co-founders of the Public Lab, a nonprofit dedicated to democratizing science in the pursuit of environmental justice, draws a distinction between citizen science and community science. He sees the first as being primarily concerned with getting people to submit data or to perform a simple task, like identifying a type of galaxy or a species of animal.
He defines community science, on the other hand, as the engagement of the public at all levels of the scientific process.
“We typically don’t call ourselves a citizen science organization,” Public Lab executive director Shannon Dosemagen told techPresident in 2014. “We don’t want to be…posing research questions and then telling people to give us data…We work way outside of what the normal scope of that is.”
The same could be said of Drapkin’s iSeeChange: an entirely people-powered platform, without an explicit research question other than, “Hey guys, what’s new? What’s different?”
One thing that’s more challenging with this broader, squishier kind of citizen science is that it is harder to prove “success.” Lucy Fortson can point to nearly 50 peer-reviewed articles and say “That’s what we’ve accomplished,” but with Public Lab projects or iSeeChange, those metrics are less defined.
Warren told Civicist that early on—Public Lab was created in 2011—they measured success by participation and engagement.
“Now we’re more mature, people are more interested in outcomes—measurable impacts on the world,” Warren said. “[For example], data being used in legal proceedings, [and] regulatory outcomes.” But even if they have some concrete successes, there are reverberating impacts that are nearly impossible to measure, like changes in perception, “corporations…the EPA, or politicians [becoming] more aware of people’s ability to organize and collect data.”
ISeeChange declined to share contributor numbers, but even if they had, the absolute reach of the project would be similarly hard to quantify, because it would include radio listeners and random social media users. (Some stations, in the early years, didn’t require listeners to post on The Almanac website and instead had them submit observations on Twitter or Facebook using the hashtag #iSeeChange, which Drapkin said they at one point shared with a weight-loss program.)
Drapkin can point to the numerous radio stories that iSeeChange has inspired, but the impact of those stories is hard to measure. Karen Yuen would like people to be inspired by the project to make changes in their daily lives, to drive less or not to not rely so heavily on their air conditioner. Yuen told Civicist that NASA will at some point publish a report on the project, detailing what worked, what didn’t work, and best practices for future collaborations of a similar nature.
The advantage of the dual citizen-science, citizen-journalism qualities of iSeeChange is the built-in broadcast component guaranteed to spread the word far and wide.
Now to see who heeds their call, and what they can all accomplish.
Why civic hacking is almost dead in Madison, Wisconsin; why the Open Gov’t Partnership isn’t working out as planned; and more.
Today’s civic tech must-read: Like many other cities, Madison, Wisconsin, decided to open up public data back in 2012, responding to the rising demand from local civic hackers. But as Laurel White reports for the Capital Times, “Almost exactly three years later, while other cities have built thriving partnerships between civic hackers and municipal government, Madison’s civic hacking and open data communities are almost dead.” As he reports, resistance from stubborn city bureaucrats about releasing useful datasets—”the city forester’s office had security concerns about the release” of data about ash trees!? (talk about covering your ash)—as well as a top-down attitudes from government officials who viewed the hackers as free labor, appears to be the cause. (h/t Derek Eder)
The U.K.’s Government Digital Service is setting up an exchange program with their counterparts in the U.S. federal government, Sophie Curtis reports for The Telegraph. (Oh, there’s also some vaporous musings in her story as well from UK Cabinet Office minister Matthew Hancock about the potential of the blockchain to revolutionize government.)
Urban community problem-solving platform SeeClickFix is the “most influential and innovative company to launch in New Haven since the days of the cotton gin, the frisbee, the apizza, the hamburger, the clock, and the oyster,” writes veteran local journalist Paul Bass for the New Haven Independent. Now I know what an apizza is!
Government opening: Set aside your cynicism and take a look at this post by Joseph Feti from the Open Government Partnership, exploring many of the reasons why the highfaluting promises made by OGP countries to be more transparent and accountable don’t get implemented. My favorite reasons:
“Start date happens after the action plan ends…Believe it or not, some commitments have a start date in 2017 for a 2013-2015 action plan.”
“No one is holding anyone else responsible. IRM [Independent Reporting Mechanism] researchers are regularly surprised at how few governments have internal tracking systems (like spreadsheets) to check in with commitment leads.
“Vested interests: the Commitment would disadvantage someone high in the administration (or legislature) who would suffer loss due to commitment being completed.”
Don’t miss our Christine Cupaioulo’s round-up of political debate news from around the world: did you know that Taiwan’s presidential debates included questions from the public that were voted on by the public using a Google platform? Sign up here to get her Rethinking Debates biweekly newsletter delivered straight to your email.
From agriculture to law-making, here’s the Sunlight Foundation’s Julia Keseru with a handy guide to the benefits of government transparency around the globe.
Sharing economy: Uber is paying a $20,000 fine and promising to adopt stringent privacy practices in a settlement with the New York Attorney General’s office over an investigation of its use of a “God View” tool to track riders, Johana Bhuiyan reports for BuzzFeed.
Chris Messina, the popularizer of the #hashtag (and old friend of Personal Democracy Media), explains why he’s decided to go work for Uber helping evangelize for its developer platform: “As I see and understand it, Uber exists at the beginning of the inevitable shift from an internet experienced on screens to an internet that is present in and connects the everyday things that are all around us….The question is not if, but when—and importantly, how—we will interact and engage with this emerging era of the internet.”
Andrew Golis, the founder of This.cm (and Civic Hall member), has found an ingeniously simple way to explain “why social media is broken.” (And how This is helping fix it, he might have added.)
Tech and the presidentials: Meet “Field the Bern,” a new open-source canvassing app developed by Feel the Bern and Coders for Sanders. As Issie Lapowsky reports for Wired, “On the app, supporters get access to information on how to canvass, including sample scripts and information on Sanders’ platforms. Volunteers can see where other canvassers have been, but they’re free to knock on any door they choose. As they move from home to home, they can enter an address and input information on people’s names, party affiliations, and how interested or disinterested they are in voting for Sanders. That information gets sent straight to the Sanders campaign. Volunteers get five points for every door they knock on and 10 points for every piece of information they update, so they can see how they rank against other volunteers.”
Alyson Krueger explains for Fast Company how Hillary Clinton’s campaign operation put together its diverse staff, where “each department boasts steals from impressive firms including IBM, General Assembly, Etsy, Yelp, Google, Gawker, Facebook, Kiva, and DreamWorks.”
Political GIFs, helpfully defined by Harper Reed, former Obama campaign CTO, as “miniature movies,” are having their heyday, Nick Bilton writes for the New York Times.
Plus: U.S. presidential debates popular in China, study on second screens and political engagement, and could televised debates in the UK become a thing?
Between Christmas and Jan. 2, Taiwan held its first and only vice-presidential debate and two presidential debates in advance of the Jan. 16 election.
Watchout spokesman Lin Zu-yi told Taiwan’s press last month that Watchout would select questions by lottery, drawing only from those questions that received at least 1,000 online signatures. We’ll have more on President, May I Ask a Question—developed by Google, the newspaper Apple Daily, and Watchout—in a future article.
Plus: Remember Mitt Romney’s comment regarding “binders full of women” during a 2012 presidential debate and the memes that followed? KMT presidential candidate Eric Chu’s comment during the first debate about being encouraged to run by an unnamed elder woman sparked a similar flurry of responses, including the Facebook parody page Tamsui Grandma. Another site, Taiwan Fugue, is offering stickers for those worried about being held responsible for Chu’s campaign.
The Tamsui Grandma parody page on Facebook has more than 37,000 likes.
Catherine Chou, a PhD candidate at Stanford University, has a fascinating analysis of the responses, looking at how language interweaves with humor.
“That Chu would use Taiwanese when telling a humanizing story about an elderly lady is predictable; what is less so is that netizens and new political parties—overwhelmingly composed of the young—would respond in the same language,” writes Chou.
IN OTHER DEBATE NEWS …
How to Avoid Campaign Fatigue: Not every country is as speedy as Taiwan when it comes to presidential campaigns, but the United States is more like a marathon—or two. Brian Dickerson of the Detroit Free Press looks at how other countries manage to keep their campaigns shorter by putting limits on time, spending and/or by offering public financing.
Is the U.S. system, which gives more time to candidates to make their case through primaries and debates, more democratic, or simply more adept at supporting all the third-party donors, businesses, journalists, and consultants who benefit from long campaigns?
U.S. Debates Popular in China: The Guojiang Subtitle Group in China, a group of about 70 volunteers who produce subtitles for American TV shows, are translating the U.S. presidential debates. The videos, which are uploaded to a Weibo account and onto Chinese video-sharing sites, have become quite a hit in China, reports Owe Guo in The New York Times. The group was started by Zhou Qianyu, a Beijing high school student, in 2014.
Chinese translation of Republican debate hosted by CNN and Facebook.
“Watching the U.S. presidential debates is like watching a football match,” said Yin Hao, one of the translators. “You see a lot of moves and tactics by the candidates, but eventually it all comes down to who scores.”
From Parliament to Television: Labour Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn has called for a live, televised annual “state of the nation” debate among party leaders. Scottish National Party leader Nicola Sturgeon and Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron told The Independent they would take part if Prime Minister David Cameron is willing.
That seems unlikely. “Downing Street has said it will ‘look at the formal details of any proposal’, which is throat-clearing in advance of saying no,” writes political columnist Rafael Behr, who takes a broader look at debate participation and the shortcomings of prime minister’s questions.
The call for an annual debate comes on the heels of a report by University of Leeds researchers showing that the 2015 general election debates increased viewers’ engagement.
Second Screen Study: A study published in the Journal of Communication found that people who use social media to discuss televised debates are more likely to become engaged in politics as a result. The study, “Dual Screening the Political: Media Events, Social Media, and Citizen Engagement,” focuses on Twitter use during the 2014 European Parliament elections in the United Kingdom.
“Twitter users who more actively participated in the discussion about the debates on social media using hashtags like #NickvNigel, #CleggFarage and #europedebate came away more energized and engaged with politics,” the authors of the study wrote in the Washington Post.
Get Those Second (and Third) Screens Ready:YouTube and NBC News are teaming up for the final Democratic presidential debate before the Iowa Caucus. The NBC News-YouTube Democratic Candidates Debate, hosted by the Congressional Black Caucus Institute, will take place Sunday, Jan. 17, in Charleston, S.C., with the action streamed live on the NBC News YouTube channel. The announcement notes that the debate will feature questions from the YouTube community, but we haven’t seen information yet on what that might involve. Check Civicist for post-debate coverage.
Before Democrats take the stage, FOX Business Network will host a Republican presidential primary debate on Thursday, Jan. 14, also in South Carolina. Happy New Year, and happy debate watching!
MoveOn.org to poll members on endorsement; a new Reddit-like civic engagement app; and more.
Long-form: Twitter is considering offering its users a 10,000 character limit, up from 140, Kurt Wagner reports for Re/Code. More details from Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, here.
On Slate, Will Oremus’ hot take is that this means Twitter is trying to “build a wall” to encompass stories that its users may post. “That’s because Twitter is struggling to compete with rivals like Snapchat, Instagram, and Tumblr, all of which are designed to keep users in rather than continually sending them out to the broader Web to view content,” he writes.
Tech and the presidentials: Donald Trump may appear to be winging his campaign, only beginning to pour millions into traditional TV ads this week. But as Kenneth Vogel and Darren Samuelsohn report for Politico, for several months he actually has been working with “an experienced data team to build sophisticated models to transform fervor into votes.” True to form, Politico is hyping this story by calling it “Trump’s data juggernaut” but so far the operation looks more like a data rickshaw.
MoveOn.org Political Action is launching a formal vote of its membership to see if should endorse a presidential candidate, starting tomorrow, its executive director Ilya Sherman announced. The group, which has an online membership of about 8 million, endorsed Barack Obama in 2008.
This is civic tech: Capitol Bells launched a new “Reddit-like civic engagement” mobile app yesterday, and its founder Ted Henderson celebrated with an AMA on Reddit along with Alex Ebert, the lead singer of the band Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, who also happens to be a civic hacker (say what?!).
Judging from the user comments, folks were a lot more interested in Ebert than Henderson, which is a shame because Capitol Bells’ new app is pretty intriguing. On top of giving users instantaneous updates about pending House or Senate votes, and allowing them to compare their preferences to their representatives (a trope of nearly every such app), CB also has a “Lobby” where users can anonymously post and poll each other on political gossip. (Think of that as Brigade without the real-name policy.) That said, Ebert’s new site, The New IRS, is also worth checking out. It gives users the opportunity to allocate government tax collections how they would like them to be spent and then compare that to the actual breakdown of government spending. He describes it as “a virtuality. an experience of a more powerful democracy, a talking piece, and a data collection point.”
Here’s Ebert’s vision (per his AMA): “Political engagement must become facile, swift, and the results must feel and be immediately tangible – just like life. tech facilitates worldwide instantaneousness – a virtual town hall the world over – meaning real participatory democracy is, now, possible.” Dude!
Here’s Ebert’s song for Bernie Sanders, “The Bern.” Should he stick to his day job?
With the unprecedented release of detailed incident-level crime data by New York City’s police department, civic hackers are starting to build some great visualizations. Here’s CivicDashboard’s interactive map showing crime by type, neighborhood, volume, and month. And here’s IQuantNY’s detailed dissection of the data.
You can now dive deep into the New York Public Library’s special collections of archival photographs, maps and other public domain files, as Jennifer Schuessler reports for the New York Times. Nearly 200,000 high-quality files are available for download, courtesy of NYPL Labs, along with APIs for using them more easily. Here’s a photo from the library’s collection of the entrance to Civic Hall’s 156 Fifth Ave address, from 1911. Kudos to the library for taking such an open approach!
mySociety’s second TICTeC 2016, its research conference on the impacts of civic tech, is taking place in Barcelona April 27-28, and the call for papers is now open.
A report on the booming govtech market; the internet is one of the causes of Trumpism; and more.
Today’s civic tech must-read: The founder of the Govtech Fund, Ron Bouganim, has penned an excellent update on the state of “govtech,” which he defines as “the ‘operating system’ for government—the infrastructure and tools government agencies use everyday to do their jobs.” He says the field is booming, thanks to a number of trends including “government adoption of the cloud, budget constraints, a massive government personnel retirement cycle and an open data movement have coalesced to create an openness on the part of government agencies to embrace new technologies and a dramatically shortened sales cycle.” And he helpfully distinguishes govtech from civic tech, the “operating system” of the citizen, in which he includes “community organizing, petitions, advocacy, connecting with elected officials, politics and campaigns, the citizen journalist, and much more.”
Speaking of community organizing, a group of longtime feminist online organizers, including Civic Hall members Deanna Zandt of Lux Digital and Jeanne Brooks of Datakind, along with Tracy Van Slyke of Culture Lab and Sabrina Hersi Issa of Be Bold Media (longtime Personal Democracy Media friends all, I should add), have launched ShineSquad to organize a systemic response to the problem of sexual harassment and assault in social change organizations, as Juana Summers reports for Mashable. Their effort is a direct response to the collapse of FitzGibbon Media but is rooted in a much longer and largely hidden history of abuse and neglect of the issue.
The Sunlight Foundation’s president, Christopher Gates, is stepping down, the organization’s co-founder Michael Klein announced yesterday. Stepping in as interim executive director is longtime Sunlight policy director John Wonderlich. We wish the best of luck to them both!
Trump watch: Donald Trump’s new TV ad, the first of his presidential campaign, which you should not ignore because it is going to play constantly in Iowa and New Hampshire for the next few weeks, blatantly conflates being Muslim with being a terrorist, and shows ominous pictures of dark-skinned people while promising to build a border fence that “Mexico will pay for.” Despite the ad’s explicit racism, many political commentators have generally confined themselves to asking whether it will be “effective.” As if they were in the 1930s covering the German parliamentary elections like they were a normal event: Wolf Blitzer: “How do you think the new radio ad the Nazis have been running—the one where they blame the Jews for the economic collapse and Germany’s weakness in the world—is going to play as we head into the final weeks of the election, panel? Cokie Roberts: “Well, honestly Wolf, the tone is a bit strong but it’s clearly working for Adolf. German voters seem attracted to his ‘tell-it-like-it-is’ style.” Mark Halperin: “It’s just another amazing piece of work by Goebbels. He’s really got his finger on the pulse of the German electorate.” Etc. etc.
Or, they’ve tried to “fact-check” it, as Politifact’s C. Eugene Emery Jr. and Louis Jacobson point out, its image of people swarming a border is actually from footage of migrants trying to cross from Morocco to Spain, and marked the ad “pants on fire.” Asked about that supposed error, his campaign manager Corey Lewandowski told NBC News, “No sh—it’s not the Mexican border but that’s what our country is going to look like. This was 1,000 percent on purpose.”
Among the “Eight Causes of Trumpism,” longtime political commentator Norman Ornstein writes in the Atlantic, one must count the internet. He blames it for “a dramatic deterioration of civil discourse and social standards” (i.e. comment pages and chat rooms where “nothing is too course or off limits anymore”), the ease with which conspiracy theorists can now engage in collective action (i.e. Here Comes Every Birther!), and the rise of echo chambers where we can “all actively seek out the information sources [we] want—and actively avoid those that provide dissonant information.”
Brave new world: Liberty Mutual has just launched a new partnership with Subaru, offering drivers discounts for installing and abiding by a car app that tells them when they are accelerating or braking too fast, and Brian Fung of the Washington Post uses that news to offer a warning about how these new usage-tracking technologies may also endanger drivers’ privacy, lead to new kinds of legal liabilities and potentially higher rates for non-compliance.
Security researchers believe a power failure that hit regional power authorities in Ukraine last week was caused by malicious code designed to sabotage industrial control systems, Dan Goodin reports for ArsTechnica. This may be the first time a cyber-attack on energy targets actually caused a blackout.
The new Huffington Post; the rebirth of Politwoops; inside Facebook’s News Feed (kinda); and more.
News feeders: Politico’s Nancy Scola offers a smart look at why so many political players are turning to Medium to post their thoughts, rather than running the gauntlet of old media’s op-ed editors. (I have to add: isn’t Medium just the Huffington Post with a much better publishing platform and less of an overtly liberal slant?)
On Medium (naturally), Andrew Hayward of MIT Media Lab’s Electome project offers some first findings from the project’s comparison of political news coverage to Twitter conversation (in English) related to the presidential election. Given that Electome has access to the full Twitter “hose,” there’s good reason to expect some fresh insights here from exploring what Twitter users talk about compared to what the media focuses on, but count me dissatisfied so far. Heyward gives us some pretty charts that imply that Electome’s data scientists have figured out how to measure such things as Donald Trump’s percentage share of media coverage—when in fact they are only looking at 12 news publications, not the entire universe of news media. Nor does he explain how his team counts the coverage a candidate gets when they are one of several mentioned in a story, or how they weight headlines vs text. But hey, it’s “big data,” so enjoy!
CrowdTangle tracks engagement on Facebook, and here lists the top ten progressive Facebook pages in terms of the total engagement they drove in 2015. It’s worth noting that none of these ten pages had even one-tenth the total interactions that Crowdtangle’s list of the top ten overall most influential pages on the social networking site. No, we haven’t heard of any of them.
Will Oremus of Slate got an inside look at how Facebook keeps tweaking its News Feed algorithm, and the result is a long piece that impressively manages to avoid asking any hard questions about its workings.
Government works: Here’s a lovely ode to the value of public infrastructure, disguised as a paean to the U.S. Post Office, by Zeynep Tufekci writing for the New York Times.
It remains a mystery how a database containing the voter records of 191 million Americans briefly surfaced online. Here’s the full report from Chris Vickery, who originally found the database, working with DataBreaches.net and Steve Ragan of Salted Hash. Their assumption is that the data came from NationBuilder, given that some of the fields in the database used NationBuilder’s data format. But Jim Gilliam, NationBuilder’s founder, issued a statement denying that the database belonged to it.
This is civic tech: Self-described “govgeek” Abhi Nemani offers some pungent thoughts on what he’d like to change about how we talk about and do civic tech in 2016.
Here’s how cities like Los Angeles are using open government data to save lives, reports Alex Howard for the Huffington Post.
Twitter has come to an agreement with the Open State Foundation and the Sunlight Foundation allowing them to restart their “Politwoops” services tracking deleted tweets by politicians in dozens of countries worldwide, the company’s VP for global public policy Colin Crowell announced.
The online townhall startup Agora will be live-streaming next week’s New Hampshire primary student convention, at which several presidential candidates are expected to speak, Olivia Vanni of BostonInno reports
Brave new world: Internet connection speeds in the United States have risen in the last three years, according to a new report from the FCC, but they are still below those of two dozen other countries, David Shepardson reports for Reuters.
Uber is having trouble expanding in Germany, the New York Times’ Mark Scott reports, as both drivers and customers have been repelled by its no-holds-barred tactics. General Motors is partnering with Lyft to develop a fleet of on-demand driverless cars to be hailed exclusively through the Lyft platform, Johana Bhuiyan reports for BuzzFeed.
For example, when Eliot Walter posted a photo of a mosquito taken on December 30 in Lexington, Kentucky, the iSeeChange website filled in a 7:14:24 pm reading from forecast.io, and a carbon dioxide reading of 403.70 ppm, which had been recorded 93 miles away on November 10. (Atmospheric carbon dioxide 
