Civicist

CIVIC TECH NEWS & ANALYSIS

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First Post

CIVIC BUNTWANI

CIVIC BUNTWANI

Things are worse than Orwell imagined; how Ghanaians use social media; and more.

  • This is civic tech: The Smart Chicago Collaborative has posted the full 29-day, 174-hour curriculum for its recently concluded Youth-Led Tech mentoring program. The six week program graduated 141 teens from five poor Chicago neighborhoods. The curriculum is available for free download and re-use.

  • Ethan Zuckerman describes for readers of the Daily Graphic, Ghana’s leading daily newspaper, how Ghanaians using social media are changing how their country is seen by the rest of the world.

  • Bookmark this one: Jane Wiseman, the head of the Institute for Excellence in Government, has written a long and well-thought-out essay for Harvard’s Data-Smart City Solutions on “Customer-Driven Government.” (h/t Heidi Sieck) As she writes:

    Government Yelp pages are more common for agencies that directly serve the public on a one-to-one basis, such as departments of motor vehicles, post offices, libraries, courthouses, fire and police departments. Less common are Yelp pages for agencies without a public face, such as those that repair potholes, maintain public parks, regulate the timing of streetlights, or repair graffiti in public places. This is likely because these agencies typically don’t think of themselves as customer-facing and are less likely to create a venue for online feedback. Wouldn’t it be great if government sought out input on the quality of those services, and sought our input on how to improve them?

  • Washington DC’s Impact Hub and its managing director Beth Flores get profiled by DCInno’s Eric Hal Schwartz.

  • Code for DC’s Leah Bannon is moving to San Francisco, where she will keep working for 18F, reports Lalita Clozel for TechnicallyDC. Bannon, who has been a leader of the women-in-tech movement in DC, says, “The Black Lives Matter movement…got under my skin. I’d like to do a lot more with some underprivileged groups. I’m not really sure how yet.”

  • Today and tomorrow is Buntwani 2015, “a global gathering of actors from the civil society, technology, donor, research, government and policy sectors focusing on the intersection of governance and innovation” taking place in Johannesburg, South Africa. This year’s conference is focusing on innovation for good governance. Follow along via #buntwani. (Buntwani is Swahili for an open air space where communities meet.)

  • Tech and the presidentials: Lawrence Lessig’s exploratory presidential campaign says he is now more than halfway to his Labor Day fundraising goal of $1 million, which if he hits will cause him to formally throw his hat in the Democratic ring.

  • Future, Imperfect: The United Nation’s new special rapporteur on privacy, Joseph Cannataci, didn’t mince words when talking to The Guardian’s Adam Alexander. He says things are “worse” than anything George Orwell foresaw, “Because if you look at CCTV alone, at least Winston [Winston Smith in Orwell’s novel 1984] was able to go out in the countryside and go under a tree and expect there wouldn’t be any screen, as it was called. Whereas today there are many parts of the English countryside where there are more cameras than George Orwell could ever have imagined. So the situation in some cases is far worse already.”

  • Before you judge all AshleyMadison.com users for “cheating,” read this post by Glenn Greenwald, who shares an email from a married woman who is now awaiting her outing.

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First Post

DEVILS AND CABALS

DEVILS AND CABALS

Monopolizing presidential debates in the digital info age; Twitter kills international Politwoops; and more.

  • Access Denials: When did it become OK for a single cable channel to monopolize access to a presidential debate, Susan Crawford asks on Medium’s Backchannel? Yet that is exactly what the Fox News Channel did with the first GOP debate earlier this month, with the result that if you didn’t have a cable subscription, you couldn’t watch. As Crawford correctly notes, “There is no speech more central to civic life than a political debate. And yet we have allowed access to that speech by way of the common medium of our era—high-speed internet access—to be controlled by a cabal of private actors.”

  • This past weekend, Twitter informed the Open State Foundation that it was shutting down its Politwoops sites in 30 countries and its related Diplotwoops service, which monitored deleted tweets by diplomats and embassies. This follows on Twitter’s equally shameful decision to shut down the Sunlight Foundation’s Politwoops account tracking US politicians’ deleted tweets earlier this year. Explaining its decision, Twitter told the Open State Foundation that it believed all its users deserved the ability to safely and privately delete tweets. Arjan El Fassed, the director of the foundation commented: “What elected politicians publicly say is a matter of public record. Even when tweets are deleted, it’s part of parliamentary history. These tweets were once posted and later deleted. What politicians say in public should be available to anyone. This is not about typos but it is a unique insight on how messages from elected politicians can change without notice.”

  • In Wired, Klint Finley reports on how pro-government Twitter bots are disrupting online activism by Mexico’s protest movements, “drowning out real conversations with noise.”

  • USA Today’s Brad Heath reports on how police in Baltimore regularly use phone trackers (aka stingrays, or cell-site simulators) in everyday cases. He writes, “Records show that the city’s police used stingrays to catch everyone from killers to petty thieves, that the authorities regularly hid or obscured that surveillance once suspects got to court and that many of those they arrested were never prosecuted.” State law requires that defense lawyers be told about electronic surveillance, while the FBI has asked police agencies to keep their use confidential.

  • Food for Thought: The Fall 2014 issue of the World Policy Journal is titled “Connectivity,” and this article by Egyptian political activist Mahmoud Salem, known on Twitter as @sandmonkey, captures well the upside and downside of connection technologies in revolutionary situations. On the one hand, he notes, a Twitter account called “Tahrir Supplies”—created by two girls forbidden by their parents from attending the street protests—collected $700K in medical supplies in one day. On the other hand, he writes:

    A revolution organized by social media is by definition a revolution made up of disparate individuals who share similar but general goals. When it came to details, however, the devil lay there smiling. Ideological disagreements reared their ugly heads. Political divisions cracked the collective. Shrillness and extremism quickly replaced rational discourse among even the most renowned activists, who had been allies for years.

  • ICYMI: Elena Fagotto and Archon Fung offer an excellent and careful parsing in the Boston Review of the benefits and weaknesses of information transparency.

  • This is civic tech: Our Erin Simpson reports on Blue Ridge Labs’ summer fellowship program, which had its roll-out last Thursday night at Civic Hall, showcasing five new civic tech products aimed at helping low income communities.

  • It’s not too early to sign up for the “Platform Cooperativism” conference coming up November 13-14 at the New School, convened by our friends Trebor Scholz and Nathan Schneider and in partnership with Civic Hall and many other related groups. It’s being conceived as a “coming-out party for the cooperative internet, built of platforms owned and governed by the people who rely on them.”

  • MySociety is looking to hire a U.S. Civic Technologies Researcher.

  • Media tactics: Operating from the principle that “anything can be interesting if it’s packaged the right way,” former Gawkerite Neetzan Zimmerman, now the head of social for The Hill, has boosted the inside-the-Beltway publication’s Facebook presence nearly twenty-fold in the last month, Lucia Moses reports for Digiday.

  • Here’s a great new guide for data visualizers on when to use maps—and when not to.

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First Post

MARGINAL RETURNS

MARGINAL RETURNS

Hillary Clinton unleashes 2016’s first “attack text”; Martin O’Malley tries to show off his tech nerd chops; civic hackers making the European Commission more transparent.

  • Tech and the presidentials: Huffington Post senior political reporter Amanda Terkel catches Hillary Clinton’s campaign doing something new: texting supporters so they could hear what GOP presidential candidate had to say “about Latinos when he thinks no one is listening” (that is, referring to U.S. born children of undocumented immigrants as “anchor babies”). As she reports, “People who texted back the words ‘HEAR’ then received an automated call with audio of Bush’s remarks in both English and Spanish.”

  • Dark horse Democratic presidential candidate Martin O’Malley made an impression during his 36-hour visit to woo techies in the Bay Area, the San Francisco Chronicle’s Joe Garofoli reports. But, he notes, “While O’Malley may be fluent in techspeak, it has not translated into financial support from the sector.”

  • Writing for Politico Magazine, the former editor of Psychology Today, Robert Epstein posits a somewhat hyperbolic scenario wherein Google uses its search algorithm to shift voter sentiments toward Hillary Clinton. While it’s highly unlikely that Google could keep secret any effort to bias search results to favor a political candidate, Epstein still has a point. Voters can definitely be influenced by what they see in top search results. (Just ask President Rick Santorum.)

  • Instagram is now taking political ads, reports Natalie Andrews for the Wall Street Journal.

  • Government Openings: Alex Howard, the Huffington Post’s senior editor for technology and society, reports on the ongoing work of the White House’s police data initiative.

  • The White House has a new Tumblr: LetterstoPresidentObama.tumblr.com, where some of the letters Americans send to the President will be posted.

  • Scott Schwaitzberg of Tusk Ventures argues on Medium that the same technology behind digital currencies may make it possible to rethink government regulation. He writes, “Creating a fundamentally more transparent, almost unimpeachable system for health inspections, building inspections, environmental safety and other areas that currently face significant regulatory scrutiny is not a compromise to avoid an unpopular political fight, it’s an imperative for any regulator committed to maximizing public safety.”

  • Beltway Bandits: The AP’s Jack Gillum and Ted Bridis have discovered that hundreds of US government employees, including people at the White House, Congress and in law enforcement, used the Internet connections in their federal offices to access and pay for the cheating website AshleyMadison.com. None were named because they are not elected officials or accused of a crime.

  • Future of Work: Reflecting on this week’s news about Amazon’s punishing work culture, Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskowitz points out that “the research is clear: beyond ~40-50 hours per week, the marginal returns from additional work decrease rapidly and quickly become negative” and “the current culture of intensity in the tech industry…is both destroying the personal lives of … employees and getting nothing in return.”

  • With $2.2 million in funding from the Knight Foundation, ProPublica is launching a “crowd-powered news network,” building on its already successful efforts to crowd-source investigative journalism built by engaging communities in story-telling, engagement editor Amanda Zamora blogs.

  • This is civic tech: Over the years, hacktivists and open data advocates have created a number of free online tools for understanding the workings of the European Union, and Laurens Cerulus reviews a batch of them including EU Integrity Watch, VoteWatch, MEPRanking, Parltrack, LobbyPlag, and LobbyFacts.

  • San Antonio has chosen Accela’s Civic Platform for a $14 million wave of civic tech improvements, Bailey McCann reports for CivSource.

Categories
elections First Post

FIRST POST: SELF-ORGANIZING

FIRST POST: SELF-ORGANIZING

How Bernie Sanders supporters are using Reddit, Facebook and clipboards to self-organize; Jeb Bush’s opposition to encryption; Amsterdam’s Internet of Things network.

    • Tech and the presidentials: Must-read: How Bernie Sanders supporters around the country are organizing themselves, frequently in advance of the campaign or with limited help from it, using Reddit, Facebook and clipboards, as reported by Ben Schreckinger for Politico.

    • One key Sanders supporter is Aidin King, a 23-year-old winery employee who administers the Bernie Sanders for President subreddit, which has 90,000 subscribers. (Notably, the Sanders campaign has made no moves to take over the Reddit page–those of you with long memories will recall how the Obama campaign’s online organizing team took over a supporter’s grassroots MySpace page back in 2007. One of the people responsible for that decision, Chris Hughes, is now the owner of The New Republic. The other one, Scott Goodstein, is working for the Sanders campaign.)

    • Related: On Facebook, Zack Exley shares that he joined the Bernie Sanders campaign six weeks ago, where he says he’s “doing the massively-scaled movement organizing work that I’ve been dreaming about, and only scratching the surface of, for two decades.” Exley was director of online communications and organizing on John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign, and also co-founded and was the president of the New Organizing Institute.

    • Interviewed for a Time magazine cover story, GOP frontrunner Donald Trump (who is also self-organizing his campaign) says he would get rid of the artificial separation between Super PACs and candidates, arguing “Now you’re not supposed to talk, you’re not supposed to – they go out and play golf, they get together, but they don’t talk. Who believes that? So I want transparency. I don’t mind the money coming in. Let it be transparent. Let them talk, but let there be total transparency.”

    • Paging Larry Lessig: Trump also says this about Members of Congress and campaign finance:

      All they do it fundraise. They don’t really govern. They just fundraise. Their whole life is raising money. And I say what percentage of the time you’re raising money as opposed to legislating? …I mean they’re constantly – it’s that time of year, you come in. I mean that’s all they do is raise money….It’s the rare politician that can do what’s right in the face of massive contributions.

    • And in a comment that is sure to interest companies like Apple, which have billions in profits parked overseas to avoid paying U.S. taxes, Trump says, “We should let them back in. Everybody. Even if you paid nothing it would be a good deal. Because they’ll take that money then and use it for other things.”

    • GOP presidential candidate Jeb Bush says he’s against encryption, reports Jenna McLaughlin for The Intercept. This is kind of like saying you are against math. The actual quote, from a South Carolina event sponsored by Americans for Peace, Prosperity and Security, was ““If you create encryption, it makes it harder for the American government to do its job — while protecting civil liberties — to make sure that evildoers aren’t in our midst.”

    • The New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin makes a really good point about the latest twist in the Hillary Clinton email server brouhaha: the post-facto discovery that some of her emails might have contained classified information is largely meaningless, because government bureaucrats routinely classify far too much information and often do so for reasons have little to do with actual national security. And, as he notes, “Criminal violations for mishandling classified information all have intent requirements; in other words, in order to be guilty of a crime, there must be evidence that Clinton knew that the information was classified and intentionally disclosed it to an unauthorized person. There is no evidence she did anything like that. This is not now a criminal matter, and there is no realistic possibility it will turn into one.”

    • Future, Imperfect: Cosmopolitan’s Jill Filipovic reports on how Twitchy, a conservative online platform founding by rightwing blogger Michelle Malkin that monitors Twitter, has become an “organized harassment tool.” The site, which Malkin sold to Salem Media, gets 2 million unique visitors a month. She notes that “Twitchy’s terms of use disallow content that is ‘fraudulent, unlawful, threatening, abusive, harassing, libelous, defamatory, obscene, vulgar, offensive, pornographic, profane, sexually explicit or indecent,’ but those terms don’t seem to be enforced.”

    • The Awl’s media writer John Herrman says the AshleyMadison.com data dump “is in some ways the first large scale real hack, in the popular, your-secrets-are-now-public sense of the word. It is plausible—likely?—that you will know someone in or affected by this dump.”

    • This is civic tech: A bottom-up network of Amsterdam residents have built an open “Internet of Things” wireless network, Martin Bryant reports for The Next Web. “Unlike other ‘smart city projects’,” he notes, “this one is entirely crowdsourced by citizens and was put together in just six weeks.” Ten $1000 LoRaWAN gateway devices were all it took to cover the entire city.

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Categories
elections First Post

FIRST POST: TRUMP CARDS

FIRST POST: TRUMP CARDS

Why to take Donald Trump seriously; Lawrence Lessig’s open source campaign; and warnings about the Internet’s future.

  • Tech and the Presidentials: Just as the Obama campaign collected the mobile phone numbers of tens of thousands of supporters attending his mass rallies, candidates like Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton are looking to the text message channel as the best way to communicate with their core supporters, Nick Corasaniti reports for The New York Times.

  • Politico’s Annie Karni reports on concerns among Clinton allies that her response to the ongoing questions about her private email server is too legalistic.

  • Wondering why Donald Trump is doing so well in Republican primary polling? Political scientist Lee Drutman argues in Vox that its because he’s in tune with a sizable chunk of the public: populists who want to reduce immigration AND protect Social Security, who may be as many as 40% of the overall electorate. What holds these two positions together is a “turning inward” mood led by Americans fearful that their middle class standard of living is disappearing. (Republican business elites who favor cutting Social Security while taking a more liberal view of immigration are deeply out of touch with their party’s base, he adds.)

  • If you subtract Trump’s demagoguery on immigration from the picture, he’s somewhat more moderate than most of the other Republican contenders, Josh Barro argues for The Upshot. He cites Trump’s statements and positions on taxes (he hasn’t signed Grover Norquist’s pledge to never raise them) abortion (he favors allowing it in cases of rape or incest), and trade (he’s not a free trader) as example.

  • My view: If Trump starts talking up his call to eliminate the inheritance tax in exchange for a one-time mega-tax on the mega-rich (14.25% on individuals and trusts worth $10 million or more), which he made in his 2000 book, The America We Deserve [h/t to Daily News columnist Errol Louis for the long memory], and keeps talking about how all the other top GOP candidates are too beholden to their billionaire Super PAC backers to call for anything similar, he could take the Republican base away from the party establishment entirely and win the GOP nomination. And if he fails at that goal, the Commission on Presidential Debates will be hard pressed to exclude him from the general election debates if he runs as an independent, since he’s highly likely to be above 15% in the polls if he keeps campaigning.

  • All of the software that Lawrence Lessig’s 2016 presidential campaign makes will be released “under the GPL 3.0 open-source licence [sic]”, and all creative materials will be released “under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 4.0 licence [sic]”, his exploratory committee announced. We have no idea why his organisation is honouring Her Majesty’s English.

  • Ross Choma reminds us in Mother Jones that most online political advertising is essentially unregulated compared to TV or print ads, where the names of the organization paying for them have to be disclosed.

  • Future, Imperfect: Jennifer Granick, the director of civil liberties at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society, gave a powerful keynote at the Black Hat 2015 conference earlier this month. She’s posted a modified version of her talk on Medium, entitled “The end of the Internet dream.” She warns: “For better or for worse, we’ve prioritized things like security, online civility, user interface, and intellectual property interests above freedom and openness. The Internet is less open and more centralized. It’s more regulated. And increasingly it’s less global, and more divided. These trends: centralization, regulation, and globalization are accelerating. And they will define the future of our communications network, unless something dramatic changes.” (h/t David Isenberg)

  • Hackers who stole user information from the adult cheating site AshleyMadison.com have now posted the data on the dark web, Kim Zetter reports for Wired.com.

  • This is civic tech: Congrats to Civic Hall member company Citymart, which has been hired by New York City to help make its procurement processes more flexible and open to smaller vendors and new technologies, as Miranda Neubauer reports for Capital New York.

  • The FCC has fined Smart City $750,000 for blocking people attending conventions from using their personal mobile WiFi hotspots and forcing them to pay for Smart City’s Wi-Fi, Sarah Lawson reports for Fast Company.

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Civic Tech elections First Post

FIRST POST: SUBVERSIONS

FIRST POST: SUBVERSIONS

Is it really a “social media election”? How #BlackLiveMatters is engaging Hillary Clinton; and the White House Presidential Innovation Fellows program grows up.

  • Tech and the Presidentials: “Welcome to the social media election,” writes David McCabe for The Hill. Really? Does anyone have any evidence that shows that the presidential campaigns putting a lot of effort into their candidate’s social media postings are doing better than their less-savvy peers? McCabe’s examples include both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, who are doing better than expected in the polls, and Hillary Clinton, Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, and Scott Walker, who are all doing as predicted or worse, despite their social media prowess.

  • Here’s the video of Hillary Clinton’s August 11 meeting with five #BlackLivesMatter activists in New Hampshire last week, posted by GOOD Magazine’s Gabriel Reilich. The activists press Clinton on her support for the massive increase in “tough on crime” measures in the 1990s, championed by her husband while he was President. Interestingly, Clinton appears to admit that she is a “sinner” in the context of the rise of mass incarceration of black people. As MSNBC’s Ari Melber tweeted, “Candor & tension in Clinton-‪#BlackLivesMatter‬ mtg shows why citizen Qs for pols are powerful.”

  • Spending on online political ads is projected to top the $1 billion mark in the 2016 cycle, Jon Lafayette of Broadcasting & Cable reports. That would be a first, but at the same time most political dollars, $8.5 billion, will go to broadcast TV ads.

  • Opening Government: A new executive order from President Obama has made the White House Presidential Innovation Fellows Program, which pulls technologists from the private sector into government for one-year stints, a permanent federal government program, as this post on Medium explains.

  • The winner of the Federal Trade Commission’s “Robocalls: Humanity Strikes Back” civic hacking competition is a mobile app appropriately called RoboKiller, which uses audio-fingerprint technology to identify and block likely robocalls. As they explain on their Kickstarter page, “Before a user’s phone rings, we trick robocallers to start playing their recorded messages so that we can start our analysis. Live callers hear traditional ringing during this process. If RAE [their “rob analytics engine”] determines that a call is from a robot, it never rings through; we send it straight to the user’s SpamBox in the RoboKiller app. Humans, on the other hand, ring through to the user as soon as their legitimacy is confirmed.” (h/t Consumerist)

  • This is civic tech: Google engineer Carl Elkin used his 20% time to build Project Sunroof, which uses Google Earth mapping to help people figure out their home’s solar energy potential. It’s available in the San Francisco, Fresno and Boston areas now. As Elkin explains, the tool “first figures out how much sunlight hits your rooftop throughout the year, taking into account factors like roof orientation, shade from trees and nearby buildings, and local weather patterns. You can also enter your typical electric bill amount to customize the results. The tool then combines all this information to estimate the amount you could potentially save with solar panels, and it can help connect you with local solar providers.”

  • New on Civicist: Contributing editor Mark Headd notes the increasingly cozy relationship between civic hackers and government, and argues that “a little subversion is still necessary.”

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Civic Tech elections First Post future of work

FIRST POST: FEEDBACK

FIRST POST: FEEDBACK

Is Amazon’s grueling workplace the future? Can Lawrence Lessig fire up the Internet? How tech can help Asian language speakers navigate the voting process.

  • The Future of Work? In case you missed it, Amazon is a pretty hyper-competitive place to work, according to Jodi Kantor and David Streitfeld’s long investigative piece for Sunday’s New York Times. Perhaps the creepiest revelation in their story is the “Anytime Feedback Tool,” an internal communications widget that “allows employees to send praise or criticism about colleagues to management” which “many workers” call “a river of intrigue and scheming.”

  • Amazon employee Nick Ciubotariu offers his rebuttal on LinkedIn. I found his faith in the company kind of charming. As he writes, “We’ve got our hands full with reinventing the world.”

  • And company CEO Jeff Bezos says, in an email to his employees first reported by John Cook of GeekWire, “I strongly believe that anyone working in a company that really is like the one described in the NYT would be crazy to stay. I know I would leave such a company.”

  • Tech and the Presidentials: BuzzFeed’s Rosie Gray reports on how Republican front-runner Donald Trump is renting conservative email lists to fundraise for his campaign. She notes that Trump has said he doesn’t need to fundraise, but it’s just as likely that the billionnaire’s rental of lists from PJ Media, Newsmax and the Daily Caller may also be a way for him to buy favor with their owner’s.

  • Brigade is hosting a forum this Thursday in San Francisco with Democratic presidential candidate Martin O’Malley and several civic tech leaders, focusing on “how public and private sector stakeholders can adapt digital tools to improve the impact of government, elevate marginalized communities, and tackle our country’s most pressing shared challenges.”

  • Jimmy Wales, the cofounder of Wikipedia, explains on Medium why he is chairing Lawrence Lessig’s exploratory presidential campaign committee.

  • In my humble opinion, Lessig’s plan for getting elected president and serving only long enough to pass fundamental pro-democracy reform through Congress (a laudable goal) reminds me a lot of the South Park gnomes episode–Step 1: Collect underpants. Step 2: ???? Step 3: PROFIT.

  • This is civic tech: Code for Africa has just received a grant of $4.7 million for the next three years from the Gates Foundation to extend its work supporting data journalism, focusing on three hub nations: Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa, the organization’s chief strategist Justin Arenstein writes on Medium.

  • Asian-American e-activist group 18 Million Rising is raising money on Indiegogo for VoterVOX, an app that will connect multilingual Asian Americans with voters needing language assistance to navigate the voting process. According to a 2012 exit poll from the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, nearly 1 in 4 Asian Americans prefer to vote with help from an interpreter or translated materials.

 
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First Post

VOLUNTEERS

VOLUNTEERS

A holistic techno-activism coding program in Ferguson; when Internet filters block too much; and more.

  • FiveThirtyEight’s Jody Avirgan interviews Donovan X. Ramsey, a journalist and a fellow at the progressive think tank Demos, and Samuel Sinyangwe, an activist and data scientist, for a podcast about the volunteer-led effort to gather data and statistics about police violence.

  • I wrote about a free coding workshop for black and brown youth in Ferguson, Missouri, that teaches tech, activism, and building community. Participants receive support and nourishment (mentorship, new skills, healthy meals) during the program, and in return they build a website for local businesses. At graduation, they receive a small stipend and a personal laptop, so they can put their new skills to use.

  • Internet filters in schools have gone too far according to the American Library Association, Cory Doctorow notes in Boing Boing.

  • Apple just released the second annual diversity report, with new statistics on recent hires, Max Nisen reports for Quartz.

  • A Harvard student got his internship at Facebook rescinded after he created an app that pointed out a major privacy hole, Allison Pohle reports for Boston.com.

  • A piece by Chris Latterell for The Next Web asks what Facebook’s responsibility to Internet.org users is.

  • To say Uber is not wheelchair friendly would be putting it mildly, according to this Wired article by Issie Lapowsky.

  • If you thought it couldn’t get worse than Hillary Clinton’s campaign asking for feedback in emojis, you were wrong. 
 
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First Post

COUNT/QUANT

COUNT/QUANT

Three emojis or less; how social change is shaping the internet; and more.

  • Hamza Shaban reports for BuzzFeed on Countable, an app that translates proposed legislation into plain English and then helps you email your representatives so that citizens can wield more political agency. Shaban points out that Countable boasts 100,000 registered users, whereas invite-only Brigade only has 13,000 at the moment.

  • The Observer has an interview up with Ben Wellington, the blogger behind I Quant NY. Among other things, he tells Hunter Harris which city agencies aren’t doing a good job at releasing open data, and why it’s important to make your work reproducible.

  • Hillary Clinton asked supporters to articulate how student loan debt makes them feel in three emojis or less, and Issie Lapowsky reports for Wired that it didn’t go well.

  • Report: The Center for Media Justice has released a new report, written in partnership with ColorofChange.org and Data & Society, titled The Digital Culture Shift: From Scale to Power. How the Internet Shapes Social Change, and How Social Change is Shaping the Internet. Keep an eye out for thoughts from Civic Hall’s Micah Sifry.

  • David Auerbach writes about the imperfect anti-harassment use of blocklists on Twitter for Slate.

  • The article prompts an interesting back and forth (you have to click around a bit to see all of the responses) between Alex Howard, Anil Dash, and Zeynep Tufekci on Twitter.

  • Laura Hudson writes for Wired about the comic that explores the reality and impact of online harassment.
 
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First Post

SOCRATES

SOCRATES

USAID’s first drone; the Socrates of the NSA; and more.

  • The Department of Homeland Security has monitored the social media accounts of prominent civil rights activist DeRay Mckesson, Jason Leopold reports for Vice.

  • Speaking of surveillance, The Intercept has an excellent piece by Peter Maass about the “Socrates of the National Security Agency,” their in-house ethicist.

  • The notices contained in New York City’s City Record newspaper—including schedules for public hearings, land-sales and contract awards—will now be available online in a searchable and downloadable format. “Cracking open unstructured data is always an adventure. Cracking open NYC’s most valuable newspaper has been historic. Never before has the public had this level of access to the City Record team and its underlying data,” said Noel Hidalgo, executive director and co-founder of BetaNYC (and Civic Hall member), who helped develop the tool.

  • Google’s new umbrella organization, Alphabet, does not include the statement “Don’t be evil,” Brian Merchant reports for Motherboard.

  • Patrick Meier wrote a blog post about the USAID’s first project that deployed a drone, which they used to map artisanal diamond mining sites in Western Guinea.

  • The privacy policy for Microsoft’s interactive bot-with-feelings we mentioned recently? Kashmir Hill points out in Fusion that it includes the phrase “Please do not worry.” Well, okay then.

  • This. (a Civic Hall member) announced $600,000 in seed funding yesterday and has starting building version 2.0. Congrats!

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