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CIVIC TECH NEWS & ANALYSIS

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ARRAY OF THINGS

ARRAY OF THINGS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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DIRECT SERVICE

DIRECT SERVICE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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JAKE BREWER, 1981-2015

JAKE BREWER, 1981-2015

The civic tech community mourns Jake Brewer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Here is my remembrance of our friend Jake.

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FINDINGS

FINDINGS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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SIGNS OF HOPE

SIGNS OF HOPE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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SCHOOLED

SCHOOLED

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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AUTOMATIC

AUTOMATIC

Tweet to donate; the Clinton campaign embraces nostalgia; we killed the sharing economy; and more.

  • California is on the verge of becoming the second state (after Oregon) to automatically register residents to vote, Andrew Prokop reports for Vox.


  • Writing for Politico, Andrew Zaleski uses Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers’ (R-Wash.) comments at Personal Democracy Forum 2015 as a jumping off point to discuss just how bad the state of tech in the Legislative Branch can be—”deplorable,” according to one chief of staff who did time in Silicon Valley. The co-founder of the Congressional Data Coalition, Daniel Schuman, compared what was happening in Congress to a lobotomy, especially when huge steps have been taken to advance technology in the Executive Branch. And Zaleski sites a Sunlight Foundation finding that says only 15 percent of congressional websites are ready for HTTPS.


  • It turns out Americans don’t want to share power drills, writes Sarah Kessler for Fast Company. The power drill was briefly the universally cited mascot of the sharing economy (“everyone owns one but nobody uses it more than 15 minutes”), but the platform(s) that would allow you to share small household items never took off, or folded completely. Kessler dives into why that is, finding that there really wasn’t much demand for sharing services (one co-founder of a sharing platform could not get THREE users—of the thousands who registered—to complete a transaction).



    Reading now (you know what they say about hindsight) it seems obviously incongruous to talk about charging people for participating in the sharing economy. It just sounds like renting (and Kessler does point out that the most successful “sharing” companies are those that track most closely with traditional companies like hotels, car rental services, or taxis). From personal experience, I think that a post on Facebook would likely turn up a power drill available to borrow—no middle man required.


  • An impending “tragedy of the commons”?: Thomas Lowenhaupt, the director of the nonprofit Connecting.nyc Inc., writes for City Limits that New York City has disbanded the .NYC Community Advisory Board (on which he served) leaving the development of the city’s online civic commons “rudderless.” Lowenhaupt calls for continued investment in the space and outlines why online common spaces are so important to a rich civic culture.

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

  • Writing in his blog Democracy Spot, Tiago Peixoto ponders what it is about initiatives like SeeClickFix: to what extent is it the naming and shaming that gets government to respond to citizens, and how can we make them perform even better?

  • A win for fair use: Ben Sisario reports for the New York Times on the ‘Dancing Baby’ copyright case.

  • Annie Karni reports for Politico on the vintage photographs being posted on all of Clinton’s social media channels, in an effort to make her more “relatable.”

  • Brave new world: Twitter has announced a partnership with Square to allow anyone in the U.S. to donate to a presidential candidate via tweet.

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SCORING

SCORING

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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ASSESSMENTS

ASSESSMENTS

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

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

     

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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LEVELERS

LEVELERS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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