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CIVIC TECH NEWS & ANALYSIS

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organizing petitions

TWO NEW PLATFORMS FOR AMERICAN MUSLIMS TO ORGANIZE ONLINE

TWO NEW PLATFORMS FOR AMERICAN MUSLIMS TO ORGANIZE ONLINE

After the San Bernardino shooting earlier this month, California-based neurologist and social activist Faisal Qazi started a fundraiser for the victims’ families on LaunchGood, a crowdfunding site run by and for the Muslim community. Qazi launched the campaign before it was even known that the perpetrators of the shooting were also Muslim, but when the fact emerged, the fundraiser gave the Muslim-American community an outlet to demonstrate solidarity with the victims and their families, and to distance themselves from the violence perpetrated—an outlet increasingly necessary if American Muslims are to counter the Islamophobia proliferating in public and private discourse right now. More than 2,000 supporters raised a total of $215,515.

“This united American Muslim campaign aims to reclaim our faith from extremists by responding to evil with good,” said co-organizer Tarek El-Messidi in a campaign press release.

LaunchGood, which celebrated its two-year anniversary in October, and MPower Change, a digital organizing platform that quietly launched this fall, together are carving out space for American Muslims to communicate, collaborate, and agitate online. While other ethnic and religious groups have long had dedicated online platforms for political organizing—African Americans have Color of Change; Latinos have Presente; Asian Americans have 18 Million Rising; Christians have Faithful America—MPower Change and LaunchGood are among the first digital organizing platforms for American Muslims.

In a recent interview with Colorlines, MPower Change co-founder Linda Sarsour bemoaned the lack of platforms for civically-minded American Muslims:

We’ll have a social media campaign that will get buzz for a day or two but we lose people immediately after the frenzy. The Muslim community has been able to have a few campaigns that have trended and shift the conversation, but once they’re over we have to start from scratch…We want to create our own online base that we can consistently engage on multiple issues.

The appeal of a crowdfunding site by and for Muslims was two-fold, LaunchGood co-founder and COO Amany Killawi tells Civicist. During the five years she worked as a community organizer, primarily with inner-city youth, Killawi had crowdfunded several programs and had become aware of the “transformative” power of crowdfunding. She liked that it was decentralized and transparent, that it activated the community, and that it generated publicity for community projects and activism.

As for her co-founder Chris Blauvelt, Killawi said that he was one of the first Muslims to enter the crowdfunding space. In 2010, just over a year after Kickstarter launched, Blauvelt started a crowdfunding campaign there for Bilal’s Stand, a film about a Muslim teen he helped produce, and which was eventually screened at the Sundance Film Festival. Killawi said Blauvelt saw how crowdfunding campaigns were impacting the mainstream, pointing out that a not-insignificant number of Sundance films start out as Kickstarter projects—10 percent in 2012, the year before they started LaunchGood—and he wanted to see the global Muslim community benefit from the same groundswell of support.

“The mission of LaunchGood is to inspire everyday Muslims to just do amazing work,” Killawi explains, adding that the work does not have to be restricted to the Muslim community. She cites a LaunchGood campaign to help rebuild the primarily-black churches in Tennessee, Georgia, and the Carolinas that were targeted by arsonists earlier this year.

According to LaunchGood’s online statistics, 491 projects have been funded, with 30,745 users raising over 5 million dollars. They also boast higher success rates than other top platforms like Kickstarter and GoFundMe.

Even so, the fundraiser for San Bernardino families broke site records, Blauvelt told the Los Angeles Times, with pledges at one point topping out at $1,000 an hour. Qazi and co. raised more than $215,000 in total for the victims and their families. Qazi told the Los Angeles Times that the money would be distributed through San Bernardino County and the United Way.

“These campaigns start to counter the narrative of who Muslims really are,” Killawi said. “You’ll see on Yahoo news Trump saying ‘Ban All Muslims!’ and right next to it ‘Muslims Raise $100,000 For San Bernardino.’ There’s nothing like putting money where your mouth is.”

Killawi reports that growth is strong, especially after the slow start for the first six months after launching, and that they are looking to expand to Canada and the U.K. in the near future.

If LaunchGood has become a place for the Muslim community to respond to collective tragedy (among other causes), MPower Change is the place for harnessing collective outrage. Although co-founder Mark Crain tells Civicist that a platform like this has been a subject of conversations between Muslim activists since 2011, it wasn’t until late this September that, in partnership with MoveOn, they put out their first online campaign—a petition to ban Ben Carson from GOP debates unless he recanted several outrageous statements about Islam.

Other MPower Change petitions released since September include one asking that the AP use Daesh instead of “Islamic State”, and one asking that the New York Post stop inflammatory reporting on terrorist attacks like the one in San Bernardino. This rapid-response, roll-with-the-media-cycle activism follows in the tradition of MoveOn, where Crain works as a campaign director, and the suite of progressive online organizing platforms that MoveOn inspired and supported in the years after launching.

“This sort of model works best in moments of collective outrage,” Crain said. And, he suggests, that’s good enough for MPower, especially in these early days.

He elaborated:

Once we’ve established ourselves, and our membership has really grown, and we’ve spent some time cultivating relationships with those members, and we’ve identified the emergent leaders out of the bunch, there’s going to be an opportunity for us to invest in some long-term campaigns. But this model is probably best suited to work in rapid response moments, moments where egregious statements are made or egregious actions are taken by someone and it’s sort of in the zeitgeist, it’s being popularly covered by the media or it’s taken over social media…and people are looking for an opportunity to respond. We’re here to give them that vehicle to respond.

In order to do so, Crain said that as an organization they need to demonstrate a theory of change for why the requested action—signing a petition or similar—is actually going to make a difference.

Take the petition responding to the New York Post’s flawed reporting on San Bernardino. “Maybe they’re not going to issue a retraction,” Crain said, “but over time, our presence as an organization that’s mobilizing people to push back and say ‘this is unacceptable,’ is going to change the way in which [journalists]…cover this issue.”

When asked how MPower Change will resolve conflicting views in their membership base, Crain said, “We’re not required by any means to take on every issue that has ever plagued the Muslim community.”

“Our job,” he added, “is to identify those moments in which our membership is united around taking an action and then to give them an opportunity to express themselves.”

MPower Change is preparing to hire its first campaign manager. Although they are a new addition to the online progressive sphere, with support from organizations like MoveOn—not to mention the grassroots organizations many of MPower’s leadership come from—they are surely a player to watch, especially in the current political climate.

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First Post

PROJECTIONS

PROJECTIONS

Interpreting “schlonged”; calls for Clinton to stop “Hispandering”; and more.

  • I don’t think I’ve read a more cogent analysis of just what irks Donald Trump than this witty essay from Megan Carpentier in The Guardian, commenting on his recent declaration that Hillary Clinton had been “schlonged” in 2008 by Barack Obama: “…in 2015, the frontrunner for the Republican nomination has admitted that he’s grossed out by the thought of women urinating, he’s disgusted by breast-feeding, he thinks menstruation is a mind-altering phenomenon, and he thinks that the best rhetorical method for referring to a woman’s campaign loss is to evoke mental images of her getting bested by a penis. One would think that a man who likes to build skyline-altering, metal-and-glass phalluses and slap his name on them couldn’t pantomime his sexual insecurities any louder.”
  • Tech and the presidentials: Believe it or not, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton both agree about the role of technology in fighting terrorism—and they’re equally wrong about it. That’s Brian Fung’s point in this smart piece for the Washington Post, where he argues that they each are advocating policies that display a common ignorance about how the Internet and online communications actually work and a naive faith in cyber geniuses. “I have a lot of confidence in our tech experts,” Clinton said at Saturday’s Democratic presidential debate, regarding their ability to solve the encryption dilemma. “We should be using our brilliant people, our most brilliant minds, to figure out a way that ISIS cannot use the Internet,” Trump declared at this month’s GOP debate.
  • David Dayen argues for Salon that the real scandal in the Sanders-NGP-VAN-DNC data war is the party’s de facto creation of a monopoly on voter data services, a single-point of failure full of risk for its candidates.
  • And NationBuilder’s Will Conway piles on in Medium with a very similar argument.
  • Hillary Clinton’s latest online push for support from Hispanic voters, a social media campaign centered on “7 things Hillary Clinton has in common with your abuela,” has generated an online backlash from voters who say that don’t want to be “Hispandered” to, Juana Summers reports for Mashable.
  • Using behavioral science, the Organizing Center’s Michael Moschella’s dissects the Clinton campaign’s latest fundraising email, which makes much of the likelihood that they may be outraged by Sanders this quarter.
  • Organizing news: Our Jessica McKenzie reports on two new online platforms that are helping American Muslims organize and crowdfund for good causes, MPower Change and LaunchGood.
  • Jodi Jacobson, the editor in chief of RH Reality Check, exposes more of the realities of workplace sexual harassment in progressive organizations, an issue that got blown open by last week’s abrupt closing of FitzGibbon Media, and reports that many of the employees of the now-defunct company are in dire straits. An Indiegogo page has been set up to help them out.
  • Money watch: David Callahan’s always essential Inside Philanthropy has just rolled out its annual list of Philanthropy Awards (or IPPYs), and there are some tough and astute picks in the list. This recent piece on the general lack of transparency in much philanthropic giving is pretty mind-boggling.
  • Whither the internet: Scott Malcomson, author of the new book Splinternet, explains how rising and divergent forces in the United States, China, Russia, and the European Union are all reaching “the same conclusion—that the map of the political world should become the map of cyberspace.”
  • Your moment of zen: The Star Wars Holiday Special. A 90-minute made for TV movie featuring baby Wookies. (h/t Cathy O’Neil)
  • And with that, it’s time for some hibernation for yours truly. See you in the New Year and may it be a happy, healthy, and peaceful one for all!
Categories
Debates elections

ROUND-UP: DEBATES SCHEDULED IN TAIWAN, CIVIC ENGAGEMENT IN SPAIN AND UK

ROUND-UP: DEBATES SCHEDULED IN TAIWAN, CIVIC ENGAGEMENT IN SPAIN AND UK

Taiwan kicks off 28-day presidential campaign, plus a look at the debates leading up to Spain’s surprising election and new research on the 2015 debates in the UK.

  • Taiwan’s three presidential candidates have agreed to take part in two televised debates before the Jan. 16 election.

    One of the debates will feature questions from the media, and the other will include questions from representatives of civic groups, Alex Huang, director of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Department of News and Information, told the Taipei Times.

    Candidates will also answer questions from the public submitted via “President, may I ask a question?”, an online platform launched by Google, the newspaper Apple Daily, and Watchout, which works to engage citizens and hold politicians accountable.

    -1All three are among the nine debate sponsors. Other media sponsors include the Central News Agency (CNA), Sanlih E-Televison (SET-TV), Public Television Service, and three other major dailies—the United Daily News, the China Times, and the Liberty Times.

    As we noted last week in the Rethinking Debates newsletter (have you signed up?), Taiwan’s political parties agreed to three debates following contentious negotiations over the format and hosts. The presidential debates have since been finalized for Dec. 27 and Jan. 2. The vice-presidential candidates will meet first, on Dec. 26.

    The presidential and vice-presidential campaigns received the official greenlight to start, well, campaigning just this past Saturday.

    Besides being amazed by the 28-day campaign limit (what would we do with all the free time?), we’ll be watching to see which questions are answered when voters use the ever-so-polite “President, may I ask a question?”

    A WINNING PERFORMANCE

    Spain is confronting a new political reality after Sunday’s election broke the country’s two-party dominance and left the selection of prime minister in question.

    Seven debates were organized in the run-up to the election, with some of them embracing social media and innovative formats. A youth-focused forum in November, for example, was billed as the “first digital debate on Twitter,” with real-time questioning and commentary. Sponsored by Twitter and the European Youth Forum, representatives from six political parties took part:

    Later debates featuring opposition party leaders were broadcast on YouTube and on the website of the country’s largest daily newspaper, El Pais.

    Incumbent Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy agreed to only one debate, a sit-down with Socialist leader Pedro Sanchez. Held on Dec. 14, it was the campaign’s final debate, and it did not go well for Rajoy.

    The Podemos party, which was founded in 2014, made stunning gains in the election, but it would not have come as a huge surprise to those who were closely following the debates. Even though he was not invited to the final debate, Pablo Iglesias, the Podemos party leader and founder, won the El Pais debate, according to a poll sponsored by the newspaper.

    TELEVISED DEBATES PLAY A CIVIC ROLE

    So how much do televised debates matter? In the UK, quite a lot, according to new study.

    University of Leeds study on UK debatesUniversity of Leeds researchers concluded that the 2015 general election debates “performed a crucially important civic role,” both by reaching younger and first-time voters and by helping citizens acquire information needed to make meaningful choices. The authors are calling on party leaders to commit to debates in 2020.

    Researchers first organized a series of focus groups to ask voters and non-voters about the 2010 televised debates and what they hoped to gain from future debates. They came up with five demands or “entitlements” people said they needed from political debates to be democratic citizens:

    • They wanted to be addressed as if they were rational and independent decision-makers.
    • They wanted to be able to evaluate the claims made by debaters in order to make an informed voting decision.
    • They wanted to feel that they were in some way involved in the debate and spoken to by the debaters.
    • They wanted to be recognised by the leaders who claimed to speak for (represent) them.
    • They wanted to be able to make a difference to what happens in the political world.

    The researchers then set out to determine how voters evaluated the 2015 debates in terms of meeting their needs. They noted that more than 30 percent of viewers of the first debate—a full debate between all seven leaders of the main parties—said they became “more interested in the election campaign.”

    And of those who said after the election that their vote was influenced by a media source, almost half (48 percent) referred to the televised debates as being among the most helpful—the highest percentage for any source of election information.

    “We found that many voters feel they have a right to see the party leaders debate on television,” said Stephen Coleman, a political communication professor and leader of the research team. “Debates should become part of the fabric of major political events.”

    View the full report: “The 2015 Televised Election Debates: Democracy on Demand?”

    Sign up for the twice-monthly Rethinking Debates newsletter for the latest posts and news.

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First Post

COOLING OFF

COOLING OFF

Sanders and Clinton campaigns still squabbling over data; Podemos rises higher in Spain; and more.

  • Tech and the presidentials: Hillary Clinton’s campaign is still angry about how Bernie Sanders’ campaign is talking about the NGP-VAN data breach, especially at insinuations suggesting that they too may have accessed data inappropriately, Jennifer Epstein reports for Bloomberg Politics.
  • NGP-VAN’s chief competitors, John Phillips of Aristotle and Jim Gilliam of NationBuilder, both sound off in this New York Times story by Emma Roller on the controversy. They argue that individual campaigns should control their own data, not parties. (Note to NYTimes editors—when quoting competitors of a company, shouldn’t they be described as such?)
  • Slate’s Amanda Hess takes a deep dive into the Clinton campaign’s use of social media, asking the critical question, “Is there anything less cool than someone trying to look cool?”
  • Crypto wars: “The best minds in the world cannot rewrite the laws of mathematics,” Apple says in formal comments submitted to the British Parliament, which is considering legislation that would force the company and others to deliberately make their consumer products open to snooping. As David Sanger reports for the New York Times, the company is pushing back hard on arguments like that of FBI director James Comey: ““Some would portray this as an all-or-nothing proposition for law enforcement,” it told the Parliament. “Nothing could be further from the truth. Law enforcement today has access to more data—data which they can use to prevent terrorist attacks, solve crimes and help bring perpetrators to justice—than ever before in the history of our world.”
  • Internet publics: Spain’s Podemos party, which was founded less than two years and which has relied heavily on social networking tools like Reddit and Loomio to organize its base, is entering the country’s parliament as its third-largest party with 69 seats (20 percent of the vote), as Raphael Minder reports for the New York Times.
  • Your moment of zen: Congrats to SpaceX and its Falcon 9 Rocket, which just successfully completed the first return landing of a booster rocket. Let’s hear it for science.
 
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First Post

DRIVING THE VAN

DRIVING THE VAN

More on the Sanders-Clinton data kerfuffle; questioning big data in politics; and more.

  • System reboot: The first Democratic presidential primary data war ended quickly, with the Democratic National Party officials restoring access to the national voter file to the Bernie Sanders campaign Saturday morning, and Sanders apologizing personally to Hillary Clinton at the start of Saturday’s Democratic presidential debate. But as Bloomberg Politics’ Michael Bender, Jennifer Epstein and Andrew Harris report, “the grudging settlement of the dispute came after a day of recriminations.” That included the Sanders campaign suing the DNC in federal court, and the Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook charging that their “data was stolen.”
  • Indeed, it remains unclear whether the Sanders team actually took advantage of the temporary failure of NGP-VAN’s firewall to access actual lists of voters that the Clinton campaign had identified, or just summaries of those lists. As Pat Reynard writes for the Iowa Starting Line blog, the search logs made available by NGP-VAN show that Josh Uretsky, the fired Sanders data director, ran “multiple searches for 40 minutes of Clinton turnout and persuasion scores in key early states” which he calls “an obvious attempt to glean valuable data from your rival.” He adds, “Running lists of turnout scores can tell you how many people the Clinton campaign believes will turn out to caucus. Querying their persuasion scores can get you a rough estimate of how many supporters they think they have in a state.”
  • Here’s DNC CEO Amy Dacey’s careful recounting of the steps the committee took as the news of the data breach spread.
  • Politico’s Nancy Scola explains the history of NGP-VAN and why nearly every Democratic campaign uses it.
  • The Sanders campaign has suspended two additional staffers involved in accessing the Clinton campaign’s data, Fredrik Schouten reports for USA Today.
  • The Clinton campaign is still highly vexed over the possibility that Sanders’ team got an unfair advantage from the data breach, as Clinton pollster Joel Benenson told Glenn Thrush and Annie Karnie of Politico. “I don’t think any of us will know until this audit is completed how serious this all is,” Benenson said. “All of [the data] is extremely valuable, it is work produced by tens of thousands of volunteers. … it is part of a roadmap to how we are running and strategizing in our campaign and how we get to the totals we need to win in Iowa and New Hampshire, especially,”
  • Top Democratic campaign veterans had lots to say about the controversy, though some of them were hardly objective observers. For example, former Obama 2012 national field director Jeremy Bird of 270 Strategies tweeted “They stole millions of dollars of research. This isn’t a small thing.”
  • Jim Messina, who ran Obama’s 2012 campaign, tweeted, “Sanders camp reaction is silly. Fess up, apologize, and move on. Rule breakers aren’t victims. (Bird and Messina both worked for the Ready for Hillary Super PAC.)
  • Former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe, now advising Uber, tweeted, “Think if one company accessed and stole another’s customer data. This is no small thing. Sanders camp should be careful playing the victim.” (Plouffe endorsed Clinton in October.)
  • Taking everything down a notch, Brigade VP Adam Conner (and a longtime Personal Democracy Media friend) writes a tongue-in-cheek version of “All the President’s Data.” Best line comes from Carl Bernstein: “So what exactly got stolen again? Some kind of files? How much paper are we talking here? Boxes? Enough to fill the van?”
  • While the data war dies down, journalists and editorial writers looking for a larger lesson in what seems to be the ultimate inside baseball story might ponder this question: How do national voter files filled with fine-grained data points on the political preferences of hundreds of millions of voters, combined with sophisticated data analytics, change politics? Add in the psychographic modeling and behavioral targeting reportedly being perfected by Ted Cruz’s campaign, and what role is left for ordinary citizens?
  • Political technologist Michael Marinaccio raises a bunch of related questions about whether big data in politics is going to far, giving this as one example of what’s now possible: “I sat in a recent meeting where we were discussing potential messages to use and were planning to segment two different audiences and send them similar, but opposing messages. (Newsflash: it is insanely normal these days to send your pro-life segment a “Yes, Pro-life!” message while sending your pro-choice crowd a “Yes, Women’s health!” one.)”
  • Why you have to read the small print: If you ever bought anything from the Delaware Crossing online Americana store, you may not realize it but you were shopping from the National Republican Campaign Committee, which now has your data, as Theodoric Meyer reports for Politico.
  • This is civic tech: Data scientist Dave Goldsmith shows how to use open data to reduce cycling deaths in Los Angeles.
  • Trump watch: If the short-fingered vulgarian wins the Republican presidential nomination, GOP stalwarts would likely rally behind a more establishment candidate running as an independent, longtime political observer Jeff Greenfield writes for Politico.
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First Post

DATA WARS

DATA WARS

HRC campaign data briefly compromised; progressive’s PR co shuts down amid allegations of sexual harassment; and more.

  • Welcome to the data-driven campaign: Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign has lost its access to the Democratic party’s 50-state voter file after its staff allegedly accessed internal voter data from Hillary Clinton’s campaign that became available while NGP-VAN, the company that manages the file on behalf of the party, was applying a software patch Wednesday, Rosalind Helderman, Anne Gearan, and John Wagnerr report for the Washington Post. The DNC has blocked Sanders’ use of the voter file until it “provides an explanation as well as assurances that all Clinton data has been destroyed,” they report. Sanders’ campaign manager Jeff Weaver says the campaign didn’t download or print any data and is blaming NGP-VAN for the breach.
  • The Sanders campaign has fired one staffer involved in the incident, who “accessed some modeling data from another campaign,” its spokesman Michael Briggs said in a statement. But, as Maggie Habermas and Nick Corasaniti report for the New York Times, “…according to three people with direct knowledge of the breach, there were four user accounts associated with the Sanders campaign that ran searches while the security of Mrs. Clinton’s data was compromised.”
  • Covering the same news for BuzzFeed, Evan McMorris-Santoro and Ruby Cramer report that it was the Sanders staff that alerted NGP-VAN of the breakdown of its firewall between the campaigns. As they note, “The incident could pose a devastating setback for Sanders so close to the start of the Democratic primary: Until access is restored to the NGP-VAN, the candidate’s organizers will have to perform the basic functions of the field program—phone banks, voter contact, visibility—without an electronic system centralizing their efforts.”
  • The staffer who was fired, Josh Uretsky, told CNN’s Dan Merica that he wasn’t trying to access any proprietary Clinton data, but just trying to “understand how badly the Sanders campaign’s data was exposed.” He added, “We knew there was a security breach in the data, and we were just trying to understand it and what was happening. To the best of my knowledge, nobody took anything that would have given the (Sanders) campaign any benefit….This wasn’t the first time we identified a bad breach in the NGP-VAN system. In retrospect, I got a little panicky because our data was totally exposed, too. We had to have an assessment, and understand of how broad the exposure was and I had to document it so that I could try to calm down and think about what actually happened so that I could figure out how to protect our stuff.”
  • NGP-VAN’s president Stu Trevelyan posts a statement this morning explaining that the data breach was quite limited. “For a brief window, the voter data that is always searchable across campaigns in VoteBuilder included client scores it should not have, on a specific part of the VAN system. So for voters that a user already had access to, that user was able to search by and view (but not export or save or act on) some attributes that came from another campaign.”
  • Former Obama campaign data director Ethan Roeder tells Civicist that “It’s becoming increasingly apparent to me, the more I learn about this story, that there’s no there there,” explaining that there’s little information the Sanders campaign could have usefully gleaned from seeing some Clinton voter scores.
  • The DNC’s decision to cut off the Sanders campaign access to the national voter file is highly unlikely to last long, in my humble opinion. If it does, it will undermine the confidence of many other lower level Democratic candidates in using NGP-VAN’s vaunted system. As Ben Jacobs writes for the Guardian, “The move by the DNC raises eyebrows as many Democrats, including Sanders and fellow presidential candidate Martin O’Malley, have long accused the DNC’s chair, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, of attempting to rig the presidential process to benefit Clinton. In particular, they have raised questions about the relative paucity of debates, which have been scheduled for weekend evenings and to coincide with other events such as a major University of Iowa football game.”
  • As Simon Rosenberg of the New Democratic Network tweeted this morning, “[I] am not a Sanders supporter, but cutting off his campaign from data access after their own software errors an extreme act by DNC.”
  • Not related: Let’s stipulate that Gawker’s J.K. Trotter has an obsession with Hillary Clinton, FOIAing her government records like no other reporter. Still, this headline is quite something: “Clinton aide who avoided FOIA insists he didn’t want to avoid FOIA when he wrote ‘I want to avoid FOIA.’” At issue: longtime Clinton aide Philip Reines use of a private email account to avoid FOIA.
  • How long has this been going on?: FitzGibbon Media, a progressive public relations firm that handled PR for NARAL, MoveOn, the Center for American Progress, AFL-CIO, WikiLeaks, Chelsea Manning, and The Intercept, has shut down “amid allegations of sexual harassment and assault” by the company’s president Trevor FitzGibbon, Amanda Terkel, Ryan Grim, and Sam Stein report for the Huffington Post. Multiple female employees have come forward with accusations. Perhaps most disturbing, they report that FitzGibbon was previously disciplined, but not fired, when accused of harassment while he was working at Fenton Communications. “After the accusation and the firm’s investigation, other female employees came forward with similar harassment complaints,” they report.
  • Brave new world: The Intercept’s Jeremy Swahili and Margot Williams report on “a secret, internal U.S. government catalogue of dozens of cellphone surveillance devices used by the military and by intelligence agencies,” many of them never before described in public.
  • Turkey’s internet service is being disrupted by a huge DDOS attack that is suspected to be coming from Russia, Sheera Frenkel reports for BuzzFeed.
  • With WhatsApp service restored in Brazil, Global Voices’s Taisa Sganzeria offers more background on how the country’s Marco Civil open internet law factored into the episode.
  • Opening the way: Writing for Civicist, Accela’s Mark Headd discusses why open data is so important for understanding and regulating the behavior of “sharing economy” companies like Airbnb.
  • Your moment of zen: Until recently, it was a dry, dry season for political mashups, but suddenly they’re coming like mushrooms after a spring rain. Last week it was Darth Trump and Hello From the Dark Side; now check out this Donald Trump (“Alexander Hamilton” Parody) on YouTube, written by Tyler Davis.
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First Post

SUBJECTS OF INTEREST

SUBJECTS OF INTEREST

WhatsApp suspended in Brazil; Facewatch, a crowdsourced watchlist in the U.K.; and more.

  • The world is on fire: Five years ago today, a Tunisian vegetable seller named Mohammed Bouazizi set himself on fire after a policewoman confiscated his cart and insulted him, an event that set off the Arab Spring. That woman, Faida Hamdy, tells the Telegraph’s Radhouane Addala and Richard Spencer, “Sometimes I wish I’d never done it.” Bouazizi’s sister Samia tells them that “My brother is a lover of life and he would have rejected both the stupid politicians and death-loving extremists. My brother died for dignity, not for wealth or an ideology.”
  • The balkanization of the internet: A Brazilian court has temporarily suspended usage of the WhatsApp app across the country because of its refusal to cooperate in a criminal investigation, the BBC reports. The app has more than 100 million users in Brazil, making it the most popular app in the country.
  • Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he was “stunned that our efforts to protect people’s data would result in such an extreme decision by a single judge to punish every person in Brazil who uses WhatsApp.
  • Related: In Foreign Affairs, Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman explain how the European Court of Justice’s ending of the Safe Harbor agreement allowing American firms to circumvent tough European data privacy rules is rooted in Continental unhappiness with the NSA’s surveillance overreach. They write:

    “By transforming U.S. technology companies into tools of national intelligence, Washington has badly damaged their corporate reputations and exposed them to foreign sanctions. Their international profits—not to mention a substantial chunk of the U.S. economy—depend on the free flow of information across borders. Foreign officials, political activists, and judges who limit these flows to protect their citizens from U.S. surveillance strike at the heart of these companies’ business models. The ECJ’s Safe Harbor ruling has now forced Washington to decide whether it values its unrestricted ability to spy on Europeans more than an open Internet and the economic well-being of powerful U.S. businesses.”

  • This is civic tech: In Punjab, India, health officials started asking local workers fighting the annual dengue fever outbreak to put timestamps on their reports, and soon added geotagging of mosquito sightings and patient reports. The results have been dramatic, as Apolitical reports. (Apolitical is a new global NGO focused on how public servants worldwide are addressing the world’s greatest challenges, started by longtime Personal Democracy Media friend Lisa Witter among others.)
  • In Ghana, local elected officials are engaging with citizens taking questions by phone and the WhatsApp platform, as part of a government accountability project supported by the Media Foundation for West Africa, GhanaWeb reports. (h/t Apolitical)
  • Campaign watch: The top searched political figures of 2015, according to Google, were Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, Carly Fiorina, Ben Carson, Ted Cruz, and Deez Nuts, John Boehner, Marco Rubio, Jimmy Carter and Justin Trudeau. In that order.
  • Trump could easily mount an independent run for the presidency, should he be denied the GOP nomination, Ben Schreckinger reports for Politico.
  • Brave new world: In the U.K., the crowdsourced watchlist Facewatch, which is used by around 10,000 retail businesses to spot potentially troublesome customers, has been updated so it can interface with real-time facial recognition systems, reports Sebastian Anthony for ArsTechnica. This means the system will be able to tell a store-owner if someone on the watchlist has just entered their premises. This is a recipe for trouble. As he notes, “Facewatch lets you share ‘subjects of interest’ with other Facewatch users even if they haven’t been convicted. If you look at the shop owner in a funny way, or ask for the service charge to be removed from your bill, you might find yourself added to the ‘subject of interest’ list.
  • Opening government: City Limits’ Adam Wisneiski takes a close look at how New York City is implementing its landmark open data law, passed in 2012, and finds “little progress beyond what was built under [Mayor] Bloomberg.”
 
Categories
Debates Election 2016 Social Media

Round-Up: Three Questions That Didn’t Change the GOP Debate

Round-Up: Three Questions That Didn’t Change the GOP Debate

CNN and Facebook, hosts of last night’s Republican debate, took pre-recorded questions and engaged viewers with polls and emojis. Plus, is social media improving the debate experience?

  • There was no first-time-ever-for-a-digital-audience moment, as there was during the previous Democratic debate, but CNN and Facebook, hosts of last night’s #GOPdebate, took advantage of several interactive tools—plus emojis.

    CNN touted the “thousands” of people who stepped inside the cross-country Campaign Camper to record video questions for the candidates and the “millions” who weighed in on Facebook.

    How many questions made it into the debate? Three.

    While it was good to include different (and younger) voices, and the questions pushed the candidates for more nuance on their positions on refugees, military action against ISIS and how to deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin, the use of “regular people” mainly reinforced the debate narrative. We need a more direct form of public engagement to drive different questions and to elicit more informative answers.

    During the debate, viewers were encouraged to go to CNN’s Facebook page to vote on such questions as “What’s the greatest threat to U.S. security?” and “Did Trump do a good job defending his plan to ban Muslims from entering the U.S.?” Facebook users could also answer “How are you feeling about the debate right now?” by selecting the appropriate smiley face, ranging from angry to excited (complete with double hearts!).

    CNN-Facebook how are you feeling the debates

    Sanders Trumps Trump:  CBS and Twitter, which teamed up for last month’s Democratic debate, worked together again last night, with Twitter providing real-time insights on CBSnews.com.

    Here’s the final analysis of the debate conversation, which Donald Trump won, the largest follower growth, which Sen. Bernie Sanders won (!), and the most tweeted moment—a not-compliment from Trump to Bush. For more on the debate and the many mentions of the internet, read today’s First Post at Civicist.

    Plus: Are Twitter and Facebook improving the debate experience? “It depends,” writes Callum Borchers in the Washington Post. “That is, of course, a well-rehearsed non-answer. But you should probably be used to that, given that’s the kind of answer Bill from Reno and Susan from Carson City could very well elicit.”

    U.S. Debate Viewership Soars: Meanwhile, nearly 7 in 10 adults (69 percent) say they have watched at least some of the televised debates, according to a new Pew Research Center poll. That number is up from 43 percent in December 2007, the last time we saw contested nominations in both parties.

    Almost two-thirds of viewers (65 percent) say the debates have been helpful in learning about the candidates. That finding is consistent among all age groups, though young adults under 30 are less likely than older adults to have watched a debate (58 percent compared to 72 percent).

    Just over half (51 percent) of debate viewers have found the debates “fun to watch”—with liberal Democrats (57 percent) and conservative Republicans (59 percent) enjoying the debates the most. Yet only about a third (34 percent) say the campaign has “focused on important policy debates,” while 58 percent told Pew it has not. View the full report.

    It May Never End: Donald Trump last night said he is “totally committed to the Republican Party,” but if he changes his mind again, he could remain part of the presidential debate field. If Trump makes an independent run, he would need to draw at least 15 percent support in national polls, writes Angela Grieling Keane at Bloomberg. The same goes for Sen. Bernie Sanders, though he has been consistent about not running as an independent.

    “Fifteen percent in this crazy year we’re in, it’s not entirely inconceivable that someone may come along,” said Mike McCurry, co-chairman of the Commission on Presidential Debates. “Our job is to make sure the candidates Americans are considering for president are there on the stage.”

    Sign up for the twice-monthly Rethinking Debates newsletter for the latest posts and news.

Categories
Civic Engagement Election 2016 organizing

STAR WARS GOES TO WASHINGTON

STAR WARS GOES TO WASHINGTON

A campaign by Civic Hall fellow Andrew Slack to unite Star Wars fans against the Empire of Darth Money.

As we speak, the dream life of Star Wars and waking life of politics are merging. One of history’s most popular authors, JK Rowling tweeted she believes Trump is so evil, that even in her deepest imagination she could not come up with someone as terrifying. Darth Trump is spreading on YouTube at Ludicrous Speed. This is not to mention that Ted Cruz’s campaign is offering a chance to see the film with Cruz (and they have him with a light saber). Bernie Sanders fans are saying, “You’re my only hope,” libertarians are comparing Obama to the Emperor, and the internet is chock full of Star Wars Hillary Clinton memes that truly cross into the surreal.yodahil

The force of psychological energy for effective cultural acupuncture runs strong when Star Wars meets American politics. And here’s how we think Star Wars can help us build a real U.S. Rebel Alliance, spoken in the vernacular of the movie but written against the backdrop of our political reality:

We need to defeat the Empire of Big Money so that we may live in a Republic that is of, by, and for the Force—the Force of interconnectivity that is We The People, when all of our voices are heard.

Right now, the Empire of Big Money has struck back against We the People, silencing our voices with the force choke of Darth Vader. It is up to us, to step up as Jedi-in-training and join the U.S. Rebel Alliance, the way Luke starts his journey in A New Hope. Remember, when Obi Wan invites him to get off of the outer rim planet of Tattoine, he is resistant:

“Look, I can’t get involved. I’ve got work to do. It’s not that I like the Empire; I hate it, but there’s nothing I can do about it right now… It’s all such a long way from here.”

Similarly, 84 percent of Americans polled believe that the Empire of Big Money is a problem but probably less than 1 percent feels agency to do something about it. It is time to awaken the Force of We The People and that is what we intend to do with the U.S. Rebel Alliance.

In the United States, we are 330 million people, all of us heroes waiting in the wings, wishing to go an epic journey but nervous to take on the Empire. And while activists work on issues around gun laws, taxes, climate, religion, racial justice, and economic equality, it’s pretty clear that regardless of where we stand on these issues, should any of us want to be effective on them, we need to recognize that the Empire standing in our way is Big Money.

To paraphrase both Joseph Campbell (whose concepts profoundly influenced the writing of Star Wars) and Ben Cohen from Ben and Jerry’s: if you want to understand what empire you are living in, look to the tallest building in the city. In the 1400s in Western Europe, the tallest building was the Church. By the time of the American Revolution, the tallest building became the political palace, the nation state. By the end of the 20th century, the tallest building in the city became the multinational corporation in the financial district.

We now have an empire that is of, by, and for the corporations. The Empire of Big Money. In the words of one presidential candidate, “Congress does not govern Wall Street. Wall Street governs Congress.”

But it doesn’t have to be this way. As the saying goes, it is far, far better to light even the smallest candle than to curse the darkness. This past November, both Maine and Seattle won ballot initiatives setting up small-donor public financing systems. We the People spoke up against the Empire; candles were lit. Regardless of the Empire’s Dark Side, we can spread the light of those candles across our Republic. And that is what we are doing with the U.S. Rebel Alliance.

We are asking people to sign the Jedi Pledge to end the Empire of Big Money, to share this video starring Mark Ruffalo, Heather McGhee (head of Demos), Darren Criss (star of Glee), Baratunde Thurston (The Daily Show), and more. This Sunday from 7pm ET to 10pm ET, we’re holding a live webcast to geek out about the new film, and we’ll be holding a meme contest on fighting Darth Money.

By signing the Pledge, that’s all just the warm up. As we roll out on Twitter as @usrebelalliance, as well as on Facebook, Tumblr, and YouTube, you’ll hear about actions to get President Obama and the candidates to sign the Jedi pledge and use that to create accountability. We want to help make the very needed issue of Big Money center stage in the U.S. primary. Imagine getting the debate moderators to ask the candidates, “A lot of Americans are comparing Star Wars to the Empire of Big Money. If the Death Star is as they suggest, made by Darth Money and Super Pacs, how do you respond?”

In defiance of the notion that “serious topics” must only be addressed “seriously,” we are aiming to turn this winter into a Star Wars U.S. Rebel Alliance party to create change. We plan to use storytelling through social media, guerilla theater actions, and even U.S. Rebel Alliance hotlines in a where we are the heroes in a real world choose your own adventure.

But You are Our Only Hope! We want your ideas on strategy regarding the larger campaign, social media, guerilla theater, pragmatic asks, and more. We want to work with you on how to get people who have never been engaged in civic life to be working alongside veteran activists.

It is time for the franchise that brought us Obi Wan Kenobi to invite 330 million American heroes waiting in the wings to go on an adventure that balances the Force of We the People. It is an adventure to bring down the Empire of Money in politics while lifting up the heroic agency that flows deep in each of us. It is time to make good on our childhood dreams of becoming the heroes’ in films like Star Wars.

May we use the common thread of Star Wars to Awaken the Force that is We the People. May our light emerge from the Dark Side and the Empire. And #MayTheForceBeWithUS.

Categories
First Post

A FORCE AWAKENS

A FORCE AWAKENS

The U.S. Rebel Alliance is here; RepubliCATS; Sanders gained more Twitter followers than most Republican candidates last night; and more.

  • Hacking Star Wars: We’re interrupting this morning’s programming for an urgent message: The U.S. Rebel Alliance is real. And as Civic Hall’s civic imagination fellow Andrew Slack explains in this new post for Civicist, “as we speak, the dream life of Star Wars and the waking life of politics is merging.” And here’s a new video starring Mark Ruffalo, Darren Criss, Heather McGhee (of Demos), Baratunde Thurston (of the Daily Show), and a host of YouTube stars, explaining more.
  • While we’re on the topic of culture hacking, here’s Cats’ creator Andrew Lloyd Webber with his version of “RepubliCATS.”
  • And here’s actor Mandy Patinkin, taking issue with how GOP presidential candidate Ted Cruz is embracing his role in “The Princess Bride.”
  • Tech and the presidentials: The internet was mentioned a whopping 18 times during last night’s GOP presidential debate, but if you were paying attention and know anything about tech, you were probably cringing most of the time.
  • With millions of people watching last night’s GOP presidential debate, Twitter reports that the candidates who gained the most followers during the debate’s first hour were, in order: Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, Ben Carson, Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz. You read that right: Bernie Sanders, a Democrat who wasn’t in the debate, gained more followers than every other Republican candidate save Trump. (If you watched the debate live online at CBS News’ site, you saw these insights in real-time, by the way.)
  • Since you won’t find out most of these things from watching debates, the New York Times Interactive department has built a nifty tool for finding out where the presidential candidates stand on a host of top national issues.
  • Net neutrality opponent Marco Rubio has now added his name to a letter attacking the FCC for trying to help municipalities set up their own publicly-run internet services, Brian Fung of the Washington Post reports.
  • If you doubt the impact of Citizens United on this presidential election cycle, check out this one stat: Super PACs and other independent groups have run 35,743 TV ads on broadcast and cable TV, compared to just 291 by traditional advocacy groups, Matea Gold reports for the Washington Post.
  • Brave new world: Google and Facebook could face huge fines amounting to billions of dollars if they fail to comply with tough new European Union privacy rules, Elizabeth Weise reports for USA Today.
  • Security researchers found a huge hole in Target’s gift-registry app, one that allowed anyone to access reams of personal information, Dan Goodin reports for ArsTechnica.
  • FBI Director James Comey testified yesterday on Capitol Hall, calling on tech companies to change their “business models” and stop providing their customers with encryption by default, Dan Froomkin and Jenna McLaughlin report for The Intercept. Told by Senator Mike Lee that encrypted apps would still exist, Comey acknowledged that “the sophisticated user could still find a way.”
  • Related: Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is calling for Silicon Valley to do more to counter ISIS’ influence online, David Sanger and Amy Chock report for the New York Times.
  • Trump watch: Boston Globe columnist Michael Cohen hears cries of “Sieg Heil” directed at Black Lives Matter protesters at Donald Trump’s Monday rally in Las Vegas. Literally.
  • Kamua Bell explains the #WhitesAgainstTrump movement, which has started trending on Twitter.
  • What sharing economy? Quartz’s Alison Griswold reports on the continuing controversy over Airbnb’s business practices, centering her account on the company’s hyper-controlled approach to data transparency in New York City (they are offering limited viewing hours to internal spreadsheets at a “data room” they occasionally set up here at Civic Hall). The best line in the piece goes to NYC council member Helen Rosenthal, an Airbnb critic. She tells Griswold, “When I met with Chris Lehane (Airbnb’s recently appointed head of policy and a former Bill Clinton aide), he said flat out that he did not agree with our laws. I did not realize that a $25 billion company can just decide which laws they do and do not agree with.”
  • Richie Ross, a veteran labor organizer who worked under Cesar Chavez, is championing legislation in California that would enable gig workers to self-organize and negotiate with the companies whose apps they are working through, George Skelton reports for the Los Angeles Times. He notes, astutely, that Ross’ legislation is unlikely to pass, since business wants to keep these workers exploitable as independent contractors and labor unions want them redefined as traditional employees subject to current labor laws.
  • Related: Seattle’s city council has voted to let Uber and Lyft drivers unionize, Marielle Mondon reports for Next City.
  • Open society: Sam Borden and James Montague report for the New York Times on the rising impact of Football Leaks, a whistleblowing website modeled on WikiLeaks that is driving attention to soccer scandals worldwide.
  • A new report from Philamplify, an initiative of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, calls on the Knight Foundation to “Look Beyond #ShinyBrightObjects” and “Do More to Promote Equity.”
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