Category: First Post

First Post

BEACONS

MICAH L. SIFRY
September 8, 2015
6:53 am

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

This is civic tech: One way that the Civil Society and Technology Project at the Central European University in Budapest is helping refugees navigate their difficult journeys: they’re setting up volunteers as “walking Wi-Fi beacons,” reports Aviva Rutkin for the New Scientist. She writes, “For about $100, you can pick up a ready to use Wi-Fi hotspot and prepaid SIM cards, pop it all into someone’s backpack, and send them out into the crowd. The networks last for about six hours before needing to be recharged, and can support around a dozen users at a time.”
A “We the People” petition on the White House website calling for a big increase in the number of Syrian refugees resettled here is now halfway to the 100,000 signatures needed to prompt an official response.
Our Jessica McKenzie reports for Civicist on how the city of Austin, Texas, is using online engagement tools to poll city residents about an initiative to delete the box on job applications that asks applicants about prior convictions. Featured: HeartGov, a text-based tool developed by Civic Hall member Asher Novek.
Tech and the presidentials: Harvard Law professor Lawrence Lessig, a leader of the free culture movement and author of several seminal books on the internet, has announced that he is running for the Democratic nomination for President, having garnered a million dollars in backing Kickstarter-style online. He’s running as a “referendum” candidate seeking to only pass substantial campaign finance and election reform legislation.
Lessig’s friend Ethan Zuckerman, the director of MIT’s Center for Civic Media, blogs about his reasons for supporting his run, arguing that he can “win by losing, so long as his referendum attracts sufficient attention.”
Taking a somewhat less optimistic (and more realistic?) view of Lessig’s chances, his friend David Weinberger, another Harvard scholar and author of seminal internet books, blogs that he worries that rather than demonstrating widespread support for democracy reforms, Lessig’s bid will “make [campaign] finance reform look more marginal than it actually is.” He calls this the “lose-by-losing outcome.”
At least two emails received by Hillary Clinton on her private server while she was Secretary of State contained highly classified information, Michael Schmidt reports for the New York Times.
Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina recently told a New Hampshire audience that if elected, she would ask Americans to respond to questions during her weekly radio address, The Economist reports. “For instance, she explained, she might ask whether the federal government should have the right to sack employees who fail to do their jobs, or whether it is important for Americans to know where their federal tax dollars go. Press 1 for Yes, and 2 for No.”
Brave new world: Apple and Microsoft are butting heads with government authorities more and more over demands for private and/or encrypted customer data, report Matt Apuzzo, David Sanger, and Michael Schmidt for the New York Times.

First Post

LEGION

MICAH L. SIFRY
September 4, 2015
6:55 am

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

There is a petition to the U.K. government asking them to accept more asylum seekers and increase support for refugee migrants that has more than 350,000 signatures. The U.K. parliament considers debating all petitions that get more than 100,000 signatures, and responds to all petitions with more than 10,000 signatures.
Andy Carvin writes at Reported.ly that this is not the moment to debate the place of graphic imagery in news and social media; this is the moment to respond to a crisis and ongoing catastrophe.
Bernie Sanders has a “legion” of volunteer coders supporting him, Nick Corasaniti reports for the New York Times, building apps that would cost thousands if they had been commissioned by a paid developer. Most are young—under 35—but they are otherwise a diverse crowd, and Corasaniti writes that nearly everyone interviewed was new to this level of political engagement. Although many volunteers get involved through the subreddit Coders for Sanders, the bulk of the collaborative work is taking place on Slack.
The Obama administration has released a new set of online climate data resources as part of an online Climate Resilience Toolkit meant to boost climate resistance in the Arctic.
The Justice Department has announced increased regulation of StingRays in federal investigation, Nicholas Fandos reports for the New York Times.
John Paul Farmer, the Director of Microsoft’s Technology & Civic Innovation group and co-founder of the Presidential Innovation Fellows program, writes in the Harvard Business Review that the U.S. now needs a Congressional Innovation Fellows program: “In the 21st century, policy doesn’t work unless the technology works. That simple truth is why we need a federal government—including both the executive and legislative branches—that understands technology and innovation and infuses best practices from Silicon Valley into the very fabric of government.”
Yesterday a new campaign finance tracking tool developed by Maplight went live on California’s secretary of state website, reports Patrick McGreevy for the Los Angeles Times. Californians (or anyone else) can search by geography, dollar amounts and time periods, back to 2001.
Passing for human: TIL that a bot has made it to the front page of Reddit three times, which Hamza Shaban writes at BuzzFeed has implications for future newsrooms. This editor would like to point out that a human still had to write the headlines.
President Obama left a Facebook comment on a Humans of New York photo from Iran, which Vox’s Max Fisher writes is significant: “Maybe I’m reading too much into one Facebook comment on a heartwarming photo about fatherhood, but the fact that the president chose the unusual step of leaving this comment, and that he chose to leave it on a photo of a father and son in Iran of all places, seems meaningful.”
Remember when schools used to block Facebook? Maybe some still do. But perhaps not for much longer—Joseph Bernstein and Molly Hensley-Clancy report for BuzzFeed that Summit Schools, a charter school network, has let Facebook rebuild its learning software, a tool that Facebook plans on eventually providing public schools for free.

First Post

HITCHHIKING

MICAH L. SIFRY
September 3, 2015
8:02 am

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

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

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

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

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

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

In a somewhat whimsical post for The Conversation, Ethan Zuckerman asks “Could the sharing economy bring back hitchhiking?” Zuckerman observes that much of the language used to persuade users to trust companies like Lyft and Airbnb could be used to defend hitchhiking as a normal and healthy practice.
Zuckerman, for one, says he regularly picks up hitchhikers and appreciates getting to know his community in this way, adding that “social serendipity is too important an activity to be left to the advertising slogans of sharing-economy start-ups in the hope that they will make it happen as a side benefit.”

Facebook has submitted a patent application for a tool that would allow loan providers access to one’s social network information for the purposes of deciding whether or not to grant the application, Susie Cagle reports for Pacific Standard.
From the application: “In a fourth embodiment of the invention, the service provider is a lender. When an individual applies for a loan, the lender examines the credit ratings of members of the individual’s social network who are connected to the individual through authorized nodes. If the average credit rating of these members is at least a minimum credit score, the lender continues to process the loan application. Otherwise, the loan application is rejected.”
From Cagle: “In short: You could be denied a loan simply because your friends have defaulted on theirs. It’s the kind of digital redlining that critics of “big data” collection have been warning of for years. It could make Facebook a lot of money, and it could make the Web even less safe for poor people. And it could be just the beginning.”

First Post

OPEN GATES

MICAH L. SIFRY
September 2, 2015
8:05 am

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

Give me your tired, your poor…: Nearly five percent of Iceland’s population of 320,000 have joined a Facebook page calling on their government to take in more refugees, responding to an official cap of just 50, Christine Hauser reports for the New York Times. The page, Syria is Calling, has an absolutely lyrical call to action: “Refugees are our future spouses, best friends, our next soul mate, the drummer in our children’s band, our next colleague, Miss Iceland 2022, the carpenter who finally fixes our bathroom, the chef in the cafeteria, the fireman, the hacker and the television host. People who we’ll never be able to say to: ‘Your life is worth less than mine.’ ….Open the gates.”
Inspired by Iceland’s example: “Americans Supporting Syrian Refugees: Open Homes, Open Hearts” just launched on Facebook. The United States is currently only allowing 8,000 in.
Refugees Welcome, a Berlin-based group that connects German citizens with refugees in need of a place to stay, says it has been “overwhelmed by offers of support,” Jessica Elgot reports for The Guardian. It has helped people from Afghanistan, Burkina Faso, Mali, Nigeria, Pakistan, Somalia and Syria.
Future, Imperfect: Uber drivers in California may join a class-action lawsuit against the company if they want to be treated as workers, not independent contractors, Judge Edward Chen ruled yesterday, Sarah Jeong reports for Motherboard.
Google’s self-driving cars, which are programmed to obey the law precisely, are apparently too safe for actual driving conditions, where other drivers are more aggressive or simply can’t make eye contact with its missing driver, Matt Richtel and Conor Dougherty report for the New York Times.
Depending on your zip code, the Princeton Review SAT preparation course charges anywhere from $6,600 to $8,400 when you sign up online, and “Asians are almost twice as likely to be offered a higher price than non-Asians,” ProPublica’s Julia Angwin, Surya Mattu and Jeff Larson report. This kind of price differential is legal as long as there is no intent to racially discriminate.
This is civic tech: For GovTech, the always readable Jason Shueh takes a close look at the rise of startups swarming into the “smart city” movement, zeroing in on Shaun Abrahamson’s Urban.us venture fund and its focus on investment areas like mobility and logistics, the built environment, utilities and service delivery.
What happens when journalists let the public decide which stories to do? “Stories made from public curiosity perform significantly better than typical news stories,” writes Jennifer Brandel on Medium.
Josh Miller, the founder of Branch, has left Facebook to join the White House digital team as its director of product. Explaining the move, he writes: “Wouldn’t it be great if your government had a conversation with you instead of just talking at you? The Obama Administration has already responded to 255 online petitions that had collectively gathered more than 11 million signatures. Imagine if talking to the government was as easy as talking to your friends on social networks? White House officials have started to regularly host Q&As on Twitter. These initiatives represent amazing progress, and there’s so much more good work to be done. I’m excited to apply what I’ve learned in the technology industry to the ideals of our democracy. As a mentor of mine likes to say, ‘It’s gonna be great!’”
Your moment of Zen: The only thing missing from this Huffington Post mashup of Donald Trump saying “China” is him breaking into song. What a shift from 2008, when the buzzword du jour was “Change.” Paging Hugh Atkin!

First Post

STRETCHES

MICAH L. SIFRY
September 1, 2015
8:08 am

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

Blasts from the past: The State Department has posted a whole batch of Hillary Clinton’s emails (4,368 in all) in searchable format, though the Wall Street Journal’s tool works a bit better. Some fascinating finds to those of us with an interest in Clinton’s policies on Internet freedom:
- Clinton’s December 29, 2009 response to her staff’s first draft of her 2010 internet freedom speech: “This looks fine and makes me sound like a techie (which is good, albeit a stretch.)”
- A January 25, 2010 email from Anne-Marie Slaughter, Clinton’s top policy advisor in 2010, sharing the news that a Chinese blogger said Clinton’s speech on internet freedom “was like a song to his heart.” Clinton replies, “That is so gratifying!”
- Clinton counsel Cheryl Mills forwarding her a September 24, 2010 email from Alec Ross, a top deputy who was working on the Internet freedom agenda, describing the “1st known case of a successful social media campaign in Syria.” (Ross also reflects on his and Jared Cohen’s high-profile trip there in June 2010, writing “When Jared and I went to Syria, it was because we knew Syrian society was growing increasingly young…and digital and that this was going to create disruptions in society that we could potential [sic] harness for our purposes.)”
- Clinton responds to a Roger Cohen New York Times op-ed praising the good works of the U.S. Foreign Service, which had its internal communications exposed by Wikileaks in the fall of 2010, with two words: “Not bad.”
- A November 24, 2010 email from New York Times reporter Scott Shane to State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley reading, “In view of wires, etc, and not for attribution please, we don’t think WL [Wikileaks] is going to dump 250k cables on the web anytime soon. We think they will for now follow guidance of other publications and the initial numbers will be small. But multiple people seem to have the whole collection, so who knows.” Crowley forwards the email up the chain, with the comment, “Potentially great news.”
You can download all the Clinton emails from here.
This is civic tech: Meedan, the global journalism/translation company, has unveiled Bridge, a new mobile tool for translating social media posts in close to real-time, and Joseph Lichterman of Nieman Lab reports on its early findings around the recent Suez Canal opening. Looking ahead, Meedan founder Ed Bice says, “We are thinking about how we bring micropayments, virtual currencies, incentive models into an ecosystem where someone can request a translation, a journalist who is breaking a news story and needs an immediate translation can query the network with a request for translation.” Here are some examples of Bridge translations coming out of the #YouStink protests currently underway in Lebanon.
Christopher Moraff reports for NextCity on pilot program in Chicago called “RespectStat” that “rates civilian encounters with the police based on indicators such as an officer’s level of respect, helpfulness and competence,” providing the city’s police department with current information on varying levels of community attitudes towards the police.
U.S. Open Data’s Waldo Jaquith is joining the Sunlight Foundation as a part-time senior technology adviser. Congrats!
President Obama posts to the White House Instagram account as he arrives in Anchorage.
Future, Imperfect: A Seattle city councilman is proposing legislation to allow Uber drivers to collectively bargain with the company, Lydia DePillis reports for the Washington Post. As independent contractors, the drivers aren’t allowed to unionize under federal law, but Councilmember Mike O’Brien wants to let them vote on a non-profit organization that would serve as their “exclusive driver representative” and negotiate on their behalf.

First Post

INWARD-FACING

MICAH L. SIFRY
August 31, 2015
8:11 am

Why Twitter is not your town square; what the Army Corps of Engineers had to do with Katrina; and more.

Food for thought: On the tenth anniversary of Katrina, veteran reporter Michael Grunwald offers this Twitter-storm-rant on the ongoing scandal that is the Army Corps of Engineers. In theory, what the Corps does is old-fashioned civic tech, in the core sense of using technology for the common good, but as Grunwald points out, not only did 1,800 people die in New Orleans because the Corps flood protection failed, Congress never took steps to reform it after Katrina and the agency remains a prime hub for pork-barrel waste.
Our global town square: Data scientist Kalev Leetaru took a hard look at three years worth of Twitter messages from 2012 to 2014, and finds that “if Twitter is indeed a global town square, it’s one that most of the town hasn’t entered yet—and one where the townsfolk who have entered seem to be doing more listening than talking these days….rather than growing outwardly and spreading to new regions, Twitter is largely growing inwardly and intensifying its coverage of locations where it was already popular, including the United States, Indonesia, and Japan.”
Twitter has published explicit targets for improving the diversity of its workforce in 2016, Stuart Dredge reports for The Guardian.
EFF’s Parker Higgins points out that a big reason Russia backed down on censoring Wikipedia last week over the publication of an article about hashish (which apparently violated the country’s restrictions on content related to drugs) was because the site uses HTTPS encryption. As a result, Russian authorities could not avoid blocking the entire site when they sought to suppress that one page. Higgins argues that that level of “conspicuous overblocking” was too much censorship for Russian authorities to risk.
Google could face a fine of as much as $1.4 billion if Indian authorities decide it has been rigged search results in its favor there, Abhimanyu Ghoshal reports for The Next Web.
What political nerds don’t get about techies: Since David Roberts’ long piece in Vox about how smart “tech nerds” don’t get American politics seems to have struck a nerve, let me add a few cents about why I’m not enamored of his essay. The core problem is that Roberts makes a blanket statement about “tech nerds” that he never actually backs up. Tim Urban, the author of the Wait But Why blog, is his sole target, and that for writing a long post about climate change that gets the science right and the politics wrong. From there, Roberts leaps, gazelle-like, to the claim that “distaste for government and politics” is “extremely common in the nerd community” and that most tech nerds just think Washington is dysfunctional and both parties are equally to blame. Well, if “tech nerds” all thought that, then why are so many tech nerds plugged into the Obama administration (and campaign before it)? And why are Democratic campaigns so well stocked with tech nerds while the Republicans struggle to recruit top talent to their side?
(Oh, and as to Roberts’ claim that “there are no independents” in American politics, the fact is that when Americans have three viable choices on the ballot (rather than the duopoly), they often vote for the independent—just ask Senators Angus King, Bernie Sanders, Lincoln Chafee or Governors Bill Walker, Lowell Weicker and Jesse Ventura. If Democratic and Republican party identities were so strong, how did these guys all get elected?)

First Post

LIST-BUILDING

MICAH L. SIFRY
August 28, 2015
8:22 am

Gift cards for the homeless; who has control of the largest political email list in the world; and more.

This is civic tech: Handup has launched a gift-card program for the San Francisco homeless community, reports Kim Mai Cutler for TechCrunch. According to Rose Broome, Handup’s founder, in addition to providing donors with more ways to give, they also help connect homeless people to the city’s social service workers. “We don’t have a unified database of the homeless population in many cities, so every time they show up at a new non-profit or government center, social workers have to do a full intake all over again,” she said. “…Some of our really big goals involve not only distributing private money, but also making distributing government benefits more efficient as well.”
And this is NOT civic tech: Tana Ganeva reports for Alternet on a private Facebook group for residents of the Murray Hill and Kips Bay of Manhattan’s wealthy east side called “Third and 33rd (and Beyond!)” where many users post pictures and comments disparaging the neighborhood’s homeless.
If you missed last night’s demos from the Microsoft Civic team at Civic Hall, check out Yangbo Du’s Storify.
Chris Birk, the lead developer for the OpenGov Foundation, attended a meeting of Chicago’s City Council, and came away astounded by the “Mount Everest of paper” generated by just one session. He asks, quite understandably, “In the age of iPhones and Google Docs, is this the best system for running a major city, or any government for that matter? If legislation and laws—the most important information in every democracy—are born digital, shouldn’t they stay digital throughout their lifecycle?”
The Sunlight Foundation is looking to hire its next Labs Director.
Tech and the presidentials: “The largest political email list in the world” is now in the hands of the Democratic Party, Evan McMorris-Santoro reports for BuzzFeed. That is, control of the Obama for America list has now been handed to the DNC. As he notes, “More than just a huge file of emails, the Obama 2012 list includes information about which specific type of appeals a supporter responded to, how much they donated and when, how they prefer to be contacted, and other granular data that helped make Obama’s digital grassroots outreach the best over two separate campaign cycles. DNC control means that eventually the party’s presidential nominee will get access to the email list Obama built.”
Hillary Clinton’s decision to use a private email server while Secretary of State, and her handling of the issue since it has arisen, “has allowed a cloud to settle over her candidacy,” according to interviews with “more than 75 Democracy governors, lawmakers, candidates and party members” done by Patrick Healy, Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman for the New York Times. For example, here’s Clinton supporter Edward Rendell, the former governor of Pennsylvania: “They’ve handled the email issue poorly, maybe atrociously, certainly horribly. The campaign has been incredibly tone-deaf, not seeing this as a more serious issue. She should have turned over the email server at the start, because they should have known they’d be forced to give it up. But at this point, there’s nothing they can do to kill the issue—they’re left just playing defense.”
According to a new survey by Adobe, 42 percent of Americans check their email while in the bathroom. Apparently a lot of us would like to have a private email server, too. (More seriously, the fact just about everyone uses email must be part of why Clinton’s email issue has resonated; it’s easy for people to understand.)
Sasha Issenberg, author of the Victory Lab, argues for Bloomberg Politics that, contrary to conventional wisdom, Donald Trump doesn’t need a big field operation. He writes, “If supporters are eager to give their free time to the multibillionaire candidate, he would be wise to keep them away from phone banks or doorstep canvasses where they try to influence other voters on his behalf. Instead, he would probably find their labor most valuable building the crowds at events that sustain Trump’s abnormally intense media coverage. The political world can believe that Trump’s ‘much more traditional campaign’ is just around the corner; he just needs to continue to do exactly what he’s been doing.”
Future, Imperfect: Technosociologist Zeynep Tufekci argues in her New York Times column that it’s time for the media to “dampen the copycat effect” and stop giving killers like the gunman who planned his live televised murder of two TV journalists the notoriety they clearly are seeking.
David Roberts of Vox offers a long and meandering take on what “tech nerds” like Elon Musk need to learn about politics. The TL/DR version: if you want to address climate change, don’t treat the two parties as equally guilty for the current lack of action on the problem.
On Monday, Facebook was used by one billion people, the first time ever that it hit that milestone, claims CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Internet provider CenturyLink is slated to receive more than $3 billion over the next six years from the Federal Communications Commission’s Connect America Fund for rural broadband expansion, David McCabe reports for The Hill.
The Daily Show, which is getting ready to relaunch with new host Trevor Noah, has hired digital polymath Baratunde Thurston to oversee all of its digital content, Dave Itzkoff reports for the New York Times. Thurston, who is a member of Civic Hall and longtime friend of PDM, was previously the director of digital for The Onion, author of How to Be Black, and founder of Cultivated Wit. Congratatunde!

First Post

UNBOXING THE NEWS

MICAH L. SIFRY
August 27, 2015
8:25 am

How the greatest troll of them all stole the media spotlight; a defense of voting booth selfies; and more.

This is civic tech: Our Jessica McKenzie has a fresh report on the rollout of the New York City Public Library’s hotspot lending program, through which needy New Yorkers are checking out free Sprint Netgear Zinger mobile hotspots. Residents are eagerly signing up for the service, but as she notes, it’s not at all clear how the one-year pilot will be sustained.
Pennsylvania becomes the 23rd state to offer online voter registration today, the AP’s Peter Jackson reports.
For Slate, Ava Lubell explains why she is in favor of people taking selfies while they vote, which is illegal in many states because it could enable vote-buying.
“Let’s get democracy Cinderella to the redesign ball,” writes Dave McKenna on Medium. He’s highlighting the work of the #NotWestminster group, which is tackling the fun challenge of remaining local democracy in the digital age.
Trevor Timm reports for the Columbia Journalism Review about the successes digital news organizations are having suing the government under the Freedom of Information Act, and Buzzfeed’s plans to release a “sunshine report” about their FOIA requests.
The co-founder of the social impact firm Reboot, Panthea Lee, writes in the Stanford Social Innovation Review that we should rethink user-centered design in development contexts. She notes, “User-centered design was born out of the private sector, and many in my field are starting to wonder if the methodology just isn’t right for the complex global challenges staring us down.”
Citizen Lab’s John Scott Tailton and Katie Kleemola expose an “elaborate phishing campaign against targets in Iran’s diaspora” that attempts to get around the safety provided by Gmail’s two-factor authentication. The campaign appears to be linked to previous Iranian government attackers.
Tech and the presidentials: FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver reports on how Donald Trump, who he jokingly refers to as “perhaps the world’s greatest troll,” has managed to keep earning the lion’s share of media attention, according to his tracking of Google News and Google Search data.
This snippet of handheld video, showing a Trump supporter confronting Univision’s Jorge Ramos after he was thrown out of a Donald Trump press conference, is pretty shocking.
The New York Times’ data-politics whiz Nate Cohn performed an analysis of Bernie Sanders’ support base, using data from Sanders’ campaign website about its local volunteers, and found—no surprise—that they are concentrated in liberal areas around the country. So far, so good—we’d love to see more data journalism based on the clues you can glean from careful study of what campaigns make available online through their websites and other tactics. But then Cohn takes a leap from hard data to mushy opinion, writing that the belief among Sanders supporters that they can expand this base is a lot like “trickle-down economics,” and twisting himself in pretzels to make a too-clever-by-half economics joke about Sanders’ current coalition, which he says is “even more unequal than the wealth in the United States.” Given that Sanders’ campaign is arguably the least dependent on wealthy donors of any of the major candidates running, this is a strikingly obnoxious judgment.
Future, Imperfect: The horrific shooting of a Virginia TV reporter and cameraman on live TV yesterday reignited the debate about video autopsy and graphic footage on social media, Jason Abbruzzese reports for Mashable.
“There’s a good chance that about 12,000 of the profiles out of millions belonged to actual, real women who were active users of Ashley Madison,” writes Annalee Newitz for Gizmodo, meaning that the 31 million men who were paying users of the cheating site were mostly communicating with fake accounts or each other. She adds: “It’s like a science fictional future where every woman on Earth is dead, and some Dilbert-like engineer has replaced them with badly-designed robots.
Haven’t heard of the popular phenomenon known as “unboxing videos” where YouTube celebrities open up new toy boxes online and then comment on their contents? (As my kids are now grown, this was news to me.) Well, Disney is all over this YouTube trend and will be using it for a big online push for attention to its upcoming Star Wars movie, Shan Li reports for the Los Angeles Times. Apparently, these are the chachkes you have been looking for!

First Post

UPLINKS

MICAH L. SIFRY
August 26, 2015
8:58 am

Bootlegged gov’t datasets; a Trump-Lessig third-party ticket; and more.

Government Openings: In Medium, Presidential Innovation Fellow Denice Ross looks at the value of open data in New Orleans, starting with the creation and sharing, post-Katrina, of “bootlegged copies” of government datasets like building permits, through the rise of the open data movement in 2009-10, up to some present-day releases that are truly impressive.
GovTech’s Jason Shueh reports on the first prototype projects resulting from Google’s Government Innovation Lab’s partnership with California’s Kern County. He writes, “The first prototype is what officials call a Virtual Resource Library (VRL), an online hub that once finished, will act as a crowdsourced resource for county services and collaboration. The second prototype is an enterprise app designed to pluck data from departments for countywide analytics.”
Why did Twitter stop letting transparency groups monitor politicians’ deleted tweets? In the Huffington Post, Alex Howard suggests that the real reason for the change is that “the executives who once called Twitter the ‘free-speech wing of the free-speech party’ don’t work [there] anymore.”
Narbeth Borough (outside of Philadelphia) is looking to hire a full-time Director of Civic Technology. “The ideal candidate will be well versed in the principles of open data, open government and Government 2.0.”
Tech and the presidentials: Spanish news media in the US isn’t taking Donald Trump lightly, reports Ashley Parker for the New York Times: “About 58 percent of all mentions of Mr. Trump in mainstream news media—broadcast, cable, radio and online outlets—in the past month have focused on immigration, while on Spanish-language news programs, the proportion is almost 80 percent, according to an analysis by Two.42.Solutions, a nonpartisan media analytics company. The Spanish-language news media has also been more critical in its coverage of Mr. Trump’s positions on the issue, with nearly all of it negative in tone.
Crazy talk? Harvard Law professor and erstwhile single-issue presidential candidate tells Politico Magazine’s Ben Wofford that he would run with Donald Trump as a third-party ticket. “I’ll make a promise,” Lessig declared. “If Trump said he was going to do one thing and fix this corrupted system, then go back to his life as an entertainment figure, I absolutely would link up with Donald Trump.” Lessig also says Trump’s statements about not being beholden to big money explain his appeal (as opposed to his attacks on immigrants and women). Your reading may vary. (See Evan Osnos’ New Yorker story on Trump’s appeal to racists, for one alternative view.)
Lessig also would make Joe Biden his Vice President and hand the White House over to him once his Citizen Equality Act became law, Emily Greenhouse reports for Bloomberg.
Speaking of money in politics, Bernie Sanders appears to be drawing more support from small donors for his campaign than Barack Obama did in 2008, 75% of it through ActBlue, Eric Lichtblau reports for the New York Times. Unlike nearly all the other candidates, Sanders has also rejected efforts by supporters to set up a Super PAC on his behalf.
TEDXX: GenderAvenger.com founder Gina Glantz makes a sharp point in this Washington Post oped: conferences and media platforms centered on women don’t do much for women. For example, she writes, “Despite great women appearing at TEDWomen, one can only find 33 out of 102 participants who appeared at this year’s main event. Maybe there should also be a TEDMen and the best of both should be featured at a TEDEverybody.”
Future, Imperfect: As Uber starts offering services in San Francisco that look a lot like bus routes, The Awl’s Matt Buchanan speculates on where this may all be headed: a future of privatized mass transit that succeeds while “siphoning…the political will to fix existing—or build new—public transit infrastructure in major cities.”
Meanwhile, refugees making their way from the Middle East into Europe are heavily reliant on their smartphones, reports Matthew Brunwasser for the New York Times. He writes, “In this modern migration, smartphone maps, global positioning apps, social media and WhatsApp have become essential tools. Migrants depend on them to post real-time updates about routes, arrests, border guard movements and transport, as well as places to stay and prices, all the while keeping in touch with family and friends….Syrians are helped along their journeys by Arabic-language Facebook groups like “Smuggling Into the E.U.,” with 23,953 members, and “How to Emigrate to Europe,” with 39,304.”

First Post

SERVICE

MICAH L. SIFRY
August 25, 2015
5:52 pm

Tech companies’ non-response to the refugee crisis; Internet.org becomes Free Basics by Facebook; and more.

Caitlin Dewey has a must-read piece in the Washington Post on the failure of major tech companies to offer their platforms or skills in the face of Europe’s humanitarian crisis, comparing their inaction to the swiftness with which they have deployed their tools (and, it might be added, PR teams) to respond to natural disasters like earthquakes. She reports that to date:
“…no private firms have partnered with ICRC [International Committee of the Red Cross] to develop tools or technologies to help European refugees, and no one seems interested in doing much more than flinging money at charity. Neither Facebook nor Google has launched their safety check-up features in Europe, for instance, though both did after Nepal’s earthquake earlier this year….Microsoft-owned Skype, which has periodically made calls free after major storms and other natural disasters, hasn’t extended the same courtesy to the hundreds of thousands of people now stranded in such places as Hungary and Croatia.”
Instead, Dewey writes, it is volunteer civic techies like Berlin’s Fluchtlinge Wilkommen (Welcome Refugees) that have started to step into the gap, but they are overwhelmed by demand and having trouble raising money at the same time. (Go here if you want to donate to them.)
Pope Francis made reference to technology in his address to Congress yesterday, the Huffington Post’s Alex Howard notes. It was not to his @pontifex Twitter feed, however, but to to his hope that we “put technology at the service of another type of progress, one which is healthier, more human, more social, more integral.”
Speaking of “more integral” uses of technology, Lucy Bernholz, Rob Reich, Emma Saunders-Hastings, and Emma Leeds Armstrong have developed “a basic framework for ethical, safe, and effective use of digital data by civil society organizations.” It has three key principles that make a lot of sense: “Default to person-centered consent. Prioritize privacy and minimum viable data collection. Plan from the beginning to open (share) your work.”
Deep inside this very detailed story by Patrick Wintour and Nicholas Watt for The Guardian on how backbencher Jeremy Corbyn won his unlikely bid to be the new leader of the UK’s Labour party is this fascinating tidbit:
The digital team’s secret weapon was a soft-spoken young tech expert named Ben Soffa. As the TSSA’s head of digital operations—who happens to be Cat Smith’s partner—Soffa was seconded to the Corbyn campaign by his union to try to give it an edge over the other campaigns, which were thought to have been vastly better prepared. Soffa created an app—using the American political organising software NationBuilder—that allowed volunteers to make calls to potential supporters from their own homes. The app provided information about an individual’s Labour membership, which constituency they lived in and its electoral history. Volunteers would follow a series of questions, with the answers fed back to Soffa’s team through the app. The data coming back to Soffa showed a clear pattern by the end of June: Corbyn was garnering surprising levels of support from across the party, especially from the so-called “three pounders”—people who had signed up to vote as “registered supporters”. The figures were so good that the Corbyn camp assumed they must be incorrect. “The numbers are amazing, but it must just be that we’re finding all of Jeremy’s core supporters,” Soffa told Smith towards the end of June. Another coup by the Corbyn camp was the prescient decision to embed the £3 registration process directly into the campaign’s website—ensuring that thousands of people who visited the website were easily able to sign up. “It was just an obvious, natural thing to do,” Soffa recalled—but the other campaigns did not think to do it, an oversight they all now regret.
In the face of a broad backlash across the developing world, Facebook has quietly decided to rename its controversial “Internet.org” program “Free Basics by Facebook,” Newley Purnell reports for the Wall Street Journal.
The city of Boston is going to use private data from social traffic app Waze to figure out if its “Don’t Block the Box” program actually reduces traffic jams and speeds up travel, Curt Woodward reports for BetaBoston.
Define American, one of the organizations Jake Brewer helped found and build, released this moving clip of him and Jose Antonio Vargas at the first meeting brainstorming the group’s very name.
Jake’s partners at Fission Strategy posted this tribute, filled with personal statements from many of his close colleagues there.

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