Category: First Post

First Post

NEVER AGAIN

MICAH L. SIFRY
November 20, 2015
7:45 am

White supremacists see website traffic increase; air pollution v. big data; and more.

Editorial comment: While the focus of Civicist and this First Post morning round-up is on civic tech—the use of technology for public good—we believe it is also important to pay attention to larger trends as well. Civic tech cannot be neutral. It is for improving the lives of the many, not just the few. It is for expanding and improving democracy, not for narrowing or reducing it. It is for comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable. It is for creating a more just and equitable society.
It is not civic to try to close state borders to innocent and desperate refugees fleeing a genocidal dictator. It is not civic to single out people of one religion for special state surveillance and control. To be sure, racist and xenophobic attitudes in America didn’t appear out of nowhere a week ago, and many good people have been battling these trends for a very long time. But since the Paris terror attacks, American politics has taken a decidedly darker and meaner turn. The civic tech community should not be silent in the face of these developments. Bad things happen when good people fail to speak up. So, please dear readers, do not click away when we talk about these issues. Join in.
Ill tidings: Thursday night, Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump said he “would certainly implement” a database system tracking American Muslims, including signing them up at mosques and giving them a special form of identification. Asked by NBC News’ Vaughn Hillyard if there was a difference between requiring Muslims to register and requiring Jews to do so in Nazi Germany, he said, “You tell me.”
As Philip Bump reports for the Washington Post, Trump asserted that he was opposed to a federal registry for gun owners but refused to explain “why a database of gun sales would be an invasion of privacy and subject to abuse, while those risks don’t concern him with an index of Muslim Americans and migrants.”
Not to be out-Trumped, Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson compared Syrian refugees seeking to enter the United States to “rabid dogs,” Carrie Dan reports for NBC News. He added, “We have to have in place screening mechanisms that allow us to determine who the mad dogs are, quite frankly.”
Also Thursday, the U.S. House of Representatives voted 289-137 to stop allowing Syrian and Iraqi refugees into the United States until top national security officials certify that they don’t pose security risks. When CNN Politics reporter Elisa Labott tweeted that news, adding “Statue of Liberty bows head in anguish,” she was suspended for two weeks. Eight hours later, she tweeted, “Everyone, It was wrong of me to editorialize. My tweet was inappropriate and disrespectful. I sincerely apologize.”
Many public figures responded on Twitter to Labott’s apology, telling her that she was right to speak up and wrong to apologize, including Twitter investor Chris Sacca, Egyptian democracy activist Wael Ghonim, Daily Beast executive editor Noah Schachtman, Atlantic senior writer James Fallows, documentarian Alex Gibney and Reported.ly’s Andy Carvin.
The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum issued a highly unusual public statement on Syrian refugees, which read in part: “Acutely aware of the consequences to Jews who were unable to flee Nazism, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum looks with concern upon the current refugee crisis. While recognizing that security concerns must be fully addressed, we should not turn our backs on the thousands of legitimate refugees. The Museum calls on public figures and citizens to avoid condemning today’s refugees as a group. It is important to remember that many are fleeing because they have been targeted by the Assad regime and ISIS for persecution and in some cases elimination on the basis of their identity.”
On the “compassionate crowdfunding” site YouCaring, people are raising money to personally help resettle Syrian refugees.
More crypto-wars: Ex-CIA director James Woolsey says NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has “the blood” of Paris on his hands and that he should be convicted of treason and “hanged by the neck until he’s dead,” Bradford Richardson reports for The Hill.
GOP presidential candidate Rand Paul told a crowd of undergraduates at George Washington University that, “When they stand up on television and say, the tragedy in Paris means you have to give up your liberty, we need more phone surveillance—bullshit!” as David Weigel and Jose DelReal report for the Washington Post.
Julian Sanchez, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute, also tells the Post, “Frankly I think the speed with which surveillance hawks leapt ahead of the facts—blaming everything from Snowden to encryption to surveillance reforms that haven’t even taken effect yet—is likely to backfire. It’s so clearly reflexive and not grounded in any kind of concrete evidence about this specific case. Playing on people’s fears to shut down debate was a pretty effective strategy for many years after 9/11, but I think we saw in the debate over the USA Freedom Act that it’s lost a lot of its effectiveness.”
Tech bubbles: Yesterday, on his Facebook page, tech investor and founder of Code.org Hadi Partovi asked Mark Zuckerberg “if the newsfeed algorithm can help decrease America’s political divide.” He wrote:
My feed shows only pro-immigrant posts, boosted by Likes from my pro-immigrant friends. I’m certain there are anti-immigrants on Facebook, and in their network they may see a unanimous chorus in the opposite direction. Perhaps the algorithm amplifies a divide, and can it somehow make our world slightly more connected? With dialogue we can build bridges not walls, but not if we don’t even see posts from those whose viewpoints differ.
An hour later, Zuckerberg replied, arguing that Newsfeed “actually shows much *more* diverse opinions than you’d typically see on any other media,” and citing a 2012 research paper by Facebook data scientist Eytan Bakshy that argued that users in 2010 were getting “the vast majority of information..from contacts that they interact with infrequently.” It’s kind of crazy that Zuckerberg is relying on five-year-old data to argue that Newsfeed doesn’t form echo chambers—especially when you consider that Facebook has made several major changes in the Newsfeed algorithm since 2010 (adding more hard news to it, for example).
Pressed by another Silicon Valley VC, Sherwin Pishevar, to consider if there “might be creative ways for the feed/algorithm to present opposing views from friends, friends and friends and even strangers,” Zuckerberg admitted There’s always more to do and we always think about this in our work.” But then he dug in his heels, writing, “My point was only that the narrative that social media is dividing us based on our own viewpoints is incorrect. It turns out social media is much better for exposing us to diverse viewpoints than anything we’ve had to date.” If you say so, boss.
Talking with TechCrunch’s Andrew Keen, California Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom says American politics needs “systemic change,” of the kind that Silicon Valley specializes in. You’ll have to watch the video to truly appreciate Newsom’s facility with Valley buzzwords.
This is civic tech: New on Civicist: Just in time for the release of the final episode of The Hunger Games, Katie Bowers of the Harry Potter Alliance explains “how to use pop culture to increase civic engagement.”
Good Jobs First has launched Violation Tracker, a database of corporate misconduct that contains 100,000 cases involving government penalties of $5,000 or more issued by the EPA, OSHA, and 11 other government agencies. You can use it to find out which corporations are big violators of environmental, health and safety laws in the United States. Banking, antitrust and wage violations are to be added later.
Stefan Baack has updated his network map of Github’s global civic tech community, noting that it is “an inaccurate proxy” for that entire community: “Individuals or groups who are not using GitHub’s social features (such as following or starring) are underrepresented in this data. Moreover, when we talk about civic tech on a global scale we are not only talking about developers. Naturally, activist groups are not using GitHub as much so they are underrepresented as well.” Nonetheless, his visualization of the contributor network to GitHub repos is spectacular.
Coming up Thursday, December 3 here in NYC: “When Free Speech and Democracy Conflict: Campaign Finance in the Age of Citizens United,” a talk by Jonathan Soros, who is a Senior Fellow with the Roosevelt Institute. RSVP here.

First Post

CAPACITIES

MICAH L. SIFRY
November 19, 2015
7:49 am

Snapchat voters; mapping civic hackers on Github; and more.

Anonymous is claiming to have disabled more than 6,000 Twitter accounts tied to ISIS, Elizabeth Weise reports for USA Today. According to McGill University’s Gabriella Coleman, an expert on Anonymous Weise cites, the people participating “include French hackers, military geeks, Syrians who are being harmed by IS, some Tunisians and some Palestinian hackers who live overseas.”
At a cybersecurity conference in New York yesterday, FBI director James Comey and Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance reiterated their insistence that encrypted smartphones sold by Apple and other companies were hindering their ability to obtain crucial evidence in serious cases, Nicole Perlroth and David Sanger report for the New York Times.
Somewhat confounding that argument, it appears the terrorists suspected of being involved in last week’s attack in Paris used unencrypted smartphones, Dan Froomkin notes for The Intercept.
Many of the Democratic-leaning tech moguls who backed President Obama’s Priorities USA SuperPAC in 2012 are holding back from donating to it now that it’s backing Hillary Clinton’s campaign, Gabriel Debenedetti reports for Politico.
Two Clintons, one cup: Bill and Hillary Clinton have raised at least $3 billion for their political campaigns and foundation from roughly 336,000 individuals, corporations, unions and foreign governments over the course of their 41 years in public life, Matea Gold, Tom Hamburger and Anu Narayanswamy detail in an exhaustive report for the Washington Post.
A survey commissioned by Snapchat finds that two-thirds of its mostly youthful American users closely following the presidential election and are likely to vote, Shane Goldmacher reports for Politico. Snapchat is trying to convince more political campaigns to buy targeted 10-second ads and filters aimed at its users.
Facebook is starting to test new tools to assist nonprofits with fundraising, Naomi Gleit, its VP of product management, reports.
The Awl’s John Herrman has a field day dissecting some new ethnographic research from the Data & Society Institute detailing how Uber drivers are developing their own oppositional culture as they deal with the company and its algorithms of control.
Researcher Stefan Baack has built a social network map showing the relationships between civic hackers worldwide as they interact on Github.
Here’s a useful overview of the different streams of the Black Lives Matter movement, reported by John Eligon for the New York Times.
“Social media has changed the way protests take place on college campuses,” Tyrone Howard, associate dean of equity, diversity and inclusion at UCLA, tells the Los Angeles Times. “A protest goes viral in no time flat. With Instagram and Twitter, you’re in an immediate news cycle. This was not how it was 20 or 30 years ago.”

First Post

ANNOUNCEMENTS

MICAH L. SIFRY
November 18, 2015
7:52 am

A White House initiative for accelerated tech training; new Code for America partner cities; and more.

The White House announced a new $100 million TechHire initiative aimed at expanding accelerated tech training, with half the money specifically dedicated to supporting young Americans facing barriers to training and employment.
Code for America will be partnering in 2016 with the local governments of Kansas City, Missouri; Long Beach, California; New Orleans, Louisiana; New York City, New York; Salt Lake County, Utah; and Seattle, Washington; the organization announced yesterday.
The headline from Politico’s Mike Allen blares “Kochs use high tech to track left,” but the details of Kenneth Vogel’s new report on the right-wing billionaires’ intelligence gathering operation are more prosaic. “Culling geo-data embedded” in liberal organizers’ social media posts in order to track their movements sounds high-techy, but paying attention to such public information is hardly that big a deal.
Campaign finance start-up Crowdpac is launching a new platform today that will allow people to nominate themselves or others for elected positions and gather pledges of support, in order to help them gauge whether to run, Fredreka Schouten reports for USA Today. She notes that Chris Rabb, a Democratic candidate for the Pennsylvania state legislature, decided to run after someone nominated him via Crowdpac and more than a hundred of his Facebook friends pledged their support. (Rabb, an old friend of PDM, was the founder of Afro-Netizen.)
The media gossip site Gawker has announced that it will shift its focus to politics, with a strong emphasis on commentary and satire, Ravi Somaiya reports for the New York Times.
Companies are microtargeting their pitches at journalists on Facebook, Jack Marshall reports for the Wall Street Journal.
If you are a transportation data nerd, then this long and detailed post by Todd Schneider analyzing 1.1 billion individual taxi trips taken in New York City between January 2009 and June 2015, plus some 19 million recent Uber rides, should make you quiver with joy. There are all kinds of eye-opening findings in the data, my favorites being the morning drop-off times for cabs going to Goldman Sachs’ and Citigroup’s downtown headquarters and their primary points of origin (do bankers not live above 23rd St. anymore, Schneider astutely asks). Schneider has made all the data, software, and code that went into his analysis freely available.
The World Bank has released an interactive map showing where $168 billion in its development programs is spent, worldwide, Sarah Kessler reports for Mashable.
Edward West shares the news of the birth of the Collaborative Technology Alliance, which is focusing “on the creation of tools, strategies, and networks to build a new collaborative commons.”

First Post

HANDWRINGING

MICAH L. SIFRY
November 17, 2015
2:38 pm

A Twitter conversion; CIA director blames terrorism on post-Snowden handwringing; and more.

The crypto wars are back…and with a vengeance in the wake of the terror attacks in Paris. As David Sanger and Nicole Perlroth report for the New York Times, national security and law enforcement officials are renewing their criticism of tech companies that provide end-to-end encryption of their users’ communications, even though “American and French officials say there is still no definitive evidence to back up their presumption that the terrorists who massacred 129 people in Paris used new, difficult-to-crack encryption technologies to organize the plot.”
CIA director John Brennan denounced “handwringing” in the wake of Edward Snowden’s disclosures, saying it has allowed terrorists to flourish, Alex Shepherd reports for the New Republic.
Jameel Jaffer, the deputy legal director of the ACLU, responds, “As far as I know, there’s no evidence the French lacked some kind of surveillance authority that would have made a difference. When we’ve invested new powers in the government in response to events like the Paris attacks, they have often been abused.”
Also on Monday, Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio criticized two of his rivals, Ted Cruz and Rand Paul, for voting “to weaken the U.S. intelligence program” and “leav[e] America vulnerable,” Patrick O’Connor reports for The Wall Street Journal.
Rethinking the “sharing economy”: Last Friday and Saturday, more than a thousand people attended the Platform Cooperativism conference at The New School. The event, which was organized by Trebor Scholz and Nathan Schneider (and grew out of an earlier panel event at Civic Hall this past spring), was filled with passionate debate about the prospects of organizing a different approach to the ownership and governance of the emerging “on-demand” economy, as Jay Cassano reports for Shareable.
Maybe Uber isn’t that much of an economic juggernaut. That’s the argument of economist Lawrence Mishel, writing in The Atlantic, who points out that “Uber drivers represent significantly less than 0.1 percent of all full-time-equivalent employment.” He adds, “Even using [Uber senior adviser David] Plouffe’s current count of 400,000 Uber drivers, all working 10 percent fewer hours than in 2014, then Uber could account for between 0.1 to 0.14 percent of total full-time-equivalent employment at the end of 2015.”
This is civic tech: Mark Cridge, the new director of mySociety, has written an excellent statement on “Why we do what we do.” He writes:
What links all of our work is the creation of civic technology that enables greater access for citizens to the work of government and the democratic process: Lack of access to elected representatives amongst disadvantaged or underrepresented groups is a key driver of exclusion and inequality, yet governments tend only to become better at serving the needs of citizens when those citizens are capable of demanding better. Simply put, this is our cause.”
This can’t wait till the weekend: Adrian Chen’s long feature story for The New Yorker on how Megan Phelps-Roper, one of the daughters of the ultra-right Westboro Baptist Church, came to question her beliefs and ultimately leave the church thanks to friends and relationships that she developed from using Twitter is just mind-blowingly good.

First Post

INVOCATIONS

MICAH L. SIFRY
November 16, 2015
2:41 pm

Tech titans react to terrorism in Paris; how to join the civic tech movement; and more.

Tech vs. terror: BuzzFeed’s Brendan Klinkenberg reports on how several leading tech platforms, including Facebook, Google, Airbnb, Uber, and Twitter responded to the terror attacks in Paris. Facebook activated its “safety check” tool, helping 4.1 million people alert their friends and family that they were safe. Uber turned off surge pricing in Paris. Airbnb urged local hosts to make their homes available for free or low cost. Twitter users crowded around the hashtag #PorteOuverte to help Parisians find sanctuary. And Google made international calls to France free via Hangouts.
Facebook faced criticism for not having used “safety check” for other non-Western crises, and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg quickly responded that in the future, the giant social network will implement its “safety check” feature for “more human disasters,” as Alex Howard reports for the Huffington Post. While the option was activated in the wake of the terror attacks in Paris, it had not been offered to users in the wake of suicide bombings in Beirut two days earlier.
Facebook’s vice president of growth, Alex Schultz, also said the company will explore giving users options to “show support for other things that they care about through their Facebook profiles,” a reference to the company’s enabling users to add the silhouette of France’s tricolor flag to their profiles. As Howard astutely notes, “The criteria that will be used to determine which issues and events users will be able to ‘show support for,’ however, aren’t clear.” No option has been offered to users to show solidarity with the people of Lebanon or Syria, for example.
As you consider Facebook’s emerging approach to “human disasters,” keep in mind that its CEO is still hungry to crack the one global market the company has yet to penetrate: China. He says, “We care about all people equally, and we will work hard to help people suffering in as many of these situations as we can.” We shall see.
How many gigs in the gig economy? Lydia dePillis takes a behind-the-scenes look for the Washington Post on how an unusual group of tech companies, labor advocates, and think-tankers came together to call for new benefits for people working in the “gig economy.”
One interesting angle dePillis notes: not all economists agree with the Freelancer’s Union’s assessment that 53 million people are independent workers. Official numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics suggest it’s more like 15 million. Ross Eisenbrey of the Economic Policy Institute says, “It’s not true, and I think it’s in service of making people think that things are changing much faster than they are, and that therefore the legal models that we have shouldn’t be applied,” says Eisenbrey. “That’s Uber’s wish, that they escape from employment obligations, that they not have to pay minimum wage and overtime. I think that something like this could be misused.”
Debatable: For the first time in my memory, a live presidential debate included a real-time question from someone watching that was in response to something one of the candidates said. As Alexandra Petri points out for the Washington Post, the tweet came in response to Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s assertion that her millions in Wall Street connected donations were because of her hard work helping the financial sector rebuild after 9/11. “I’ve never seen a candidate invoke 9/11 to justify millions of Wall Street donations until now,” wrote Andy Grewal, at 10:07pm the night of the debate. Moments later, his question was posed directly to Clinton. (Grewal, who says he admires Bernie Sanders but thinks his tax plan is too radical, has since jokingly offered to retract his tweet “in exchange for 10% of [Hillary’s] Wall Street donations.”
Hidden deep in the Wi-Fi SSIDs and passwords for media attending the Republican and Democratic presidential debates, Upworthy’s Parker Molloy finds meaning.
This is civic tech: Omidyar Network investment partner Stacy Donohue writes for TechCrunch on three ways that techies can join the civic tech movement: by solving personal challenges (such as the ones that led some vets to start Unite US, or that led Rose Broome to start HandUp); by taking a career leap into government (like Megan Smith of Google or Alex Macgillivray of Twitter, both now at the White House); or by becoming more active citizens using problem-solving platforms like Citizinvestor or SeeClickFix.
Andrew Baron, the founder of Rocketboom and Know Your Meme, has just launched a new project called Humanwire, which aims to connect refugees to donors seeking to support them.

First Post

ENTERPRISING

MICAH L. SIFRY
November 13, 2015
2:43 pm

#BlackonCampus; why think tanks should become civic enterprises; trusting in the cloud; and more.

Today’s must-reads: New America president (and Civic Hall founding partner) Anne-Marie Slaughter and Open Technology Institute senior adviser Ben Scott say it’s time for think tanks to become “civic enterprises.” They explain:
“Civic” because it engages citizens as change makers—conscious members of a self-governing polity that expects government to be at least part of the solution to problems that individuals cannot solve on their own. And “enterprise” because of the energy and innovation involved in actually making change on the ground. Civic enterprise blends conventional policy research with local organizing, coalition building, public education, advocacy, and bottom-up projects that generate and test ideas before, during, and after engagement in the policymaking process with government.
They add: “The pendulum of American political history is swinging toward ‘democratizing technocracy,’ giving people more opportunity to participate in self-government. This is particularly powerful in an era when many citizens doubt the power and value of their vote. Civic enterprise is about knocking down the walls and partitions that have grown up between the policy class and the citizens we purport to serve.” Amen to that!
Microsoft President and Chief Legal Officer Brad Smith has posted a long manifesto on technology and privacy, with the intriguing title of “In the cloud we trust. ” In it, he urinates on some of the biggest events of the last year—the Charlie Hebdo attack, the Sony Pictures hack, as well as governments from Russia to China to the United Kingdom and the United States seeking greater access to and control of individual online communications—and wrestles with the conflicting demands of cybersecurity and personal privacy and free expression. He concludes:
Inspired by the events of the past year, our cloud business will be grounded in four commitments to governments, enterprises, consumers, and people around the world. We will keep their data secure. We will ensure people’s data is private and under their control. We will figure out the laws in each country and make sure data is managed accordingly. And we will be transparent so people know what we are doing.
Government openings: The U.S. Treasury Department is working on reinventing USASpending.gov, which tracks all federal spending, and it’s inviting the public to “participate in its development” through this beta site. (h/t @18F)
Appearing just in time for Veterans Day, here’s the new alpha version of Vets.gov. And here’s a GIF made by 18F’s Eric Mill showing how the Vets.gov site has evolved over the last 9 months.
GOP presidential candidate Rand Paul says he has “mixed feelings” about Edward Snowden, agreeing that he is a “whistleblower” but also arguing that “there probably has to be some” penalty for his revealing classified government information.
Speed of Change: The #BlackOnCampus hashtag has exploded with people “who are dissecting examples of white privilege, ‘microaggression,’ and accusations of reverse racism,” reports Katie Rogers for the New York Times. (Topsy analytics show nearly 100,000 uses of the hashtag in the last two days.)
This is civic tech: Susan Crawford reports for Backchannel on the work of Smart Chicago Collaborative’s Youth-Led Tech program and how it is “crossing the digital divide.”

First Post

IMPACTS

MICAH L. SIFRY
November 12, 2015
2:45 pm

How Americans think tech has impacted politics; how USDS and 18F are changing tech & gov’t; and more.

Yahoo is holding a conference on tech and politics today at Drake University in Des Moines, starting at 9:30am Central Time, livestreamed here. Sen. Rand Paul is the one presidential candidate on the agenda.
Concurrent with that event, Yahoo has released the results of a major poll exploring Americans’ attitudes towards the impact of tech on politics. Among its findings:
- While most Americans believe tech has made American politics more inclusive and representative of what people really think, African-American and Hispanics believe that more strongly (74 percent and 73 percent) than whites (60 percent).
- A majority of whites (57 percent) think social media has made politics more negative, compared to just 41 percent of African-Americans.
- Most Americans don’t think tech has given them more of a voice, as an individual, in politics. Just 23 percent of Hispanics, 21 percent of African-Americans, 18 percent of whites and 15 percent of Asians believe it has.
Reporting from the Fast Company Innovation Festival here at Civic Hall this week, John Paul Titlow highlights three projects coming out of the U.S. Digital Service and 18F that are dramatically changing how government uses tech.
Related: Justin Herman, the SocialGov Lead for the GSA, sits down with GovTech’s Jason Shueh to talk about how federal agencies are learning to improve their civic engagement strategies.
The Intercept’s Jordan Smith and Micah Lee report that Securus Technologies, one of the leading providers of phone services to prisons nationwide, has been recording tens millions of calls, including thousands between inmates and their lawyers. A hacker was able to obtain access to more than 70 million call records, information that was then provided to the Intercept via its Secure Drop leaking platform.
This is civic tech: We’ve been in love with Loveland Technologies co-founder Jerry Paffendorf ever since 2010 when he bought a vacant lot in Detroit and put 10,000 square inches of it up for sale for $1 apiece, and more recently when he and his team led the “Motor City Mapping” project that gave the city its first up-to-date map of every tax property. Now, as Bill Bradley reports for Next City in a long profile, Loveland is branching out beyond its home city to work on opening up land survey information across the U.S., and Paffendort is also one of eight candidates seeking to replace the retiring Wayne County Treasurer, who oversees tax foreclosure auctions.
Ever wonder how virtual organizations with staff in far-flung locations develop strong teams? Here’s how Upworthy, with 80 employees, does it, courtesy of Harvard Business Review’s Harrison Monarth.
When a video clip blows up online, context is almost always missing. So if you happen to have seen clips of protests at Yale this past week over the university’s failures to address racial discrimination there, read this essay on Medium by Aaron Lewis, a senior there.

First Post

CRUSHING IT

MICAH L. SIFRY
November 11, 2015
2:48 pm

Bush would redo internet regulation; calling for an Independent Order of Oddfellows; and more.

Tech and the presidentials: Tech policy hasn’t really surfaced yet as an issue in the presidential campaign, but during last night’s Republican debate, rising contender Marco Rubio did say this: “It took the telephone 75 years to reach 100 million users. It took Candy Crush one year to reach 100 million users. [Laughter.] So the world is changing faster than ever, and it is disruptive.” Rubio, who opposes net neutrality, wasn’t asked how he thought the next Candy Crush would grow that rapidly if we lose the open internet.
Rival Floridian Jeb Bush had this to say about that issue, kind of: “On the regulatory side I think we need to repeal every rule that Barack Obama has in terms of work in progress, every one of them. And start over. For those that are already in existence, the regulation of the internet, we have to start over, but we ought to do that.”
As a co-sponsor of last night’s debate, Facebook got mentioned ten times, either as a source of an anodyne question from a random user or as the source of some vague data about obvious issues Americans are talking about. Each time, though, Facebook got mentioned, making the evening a successful night for product placement.
“Internet startup founders represent an entirely distinct, libertarian-like ideology within the Democratic party,” writes Gregory Ferenstein in The Guardian. “Tech startup founders see the government as an investor in citizens, rather than as a protector from capitalism.”
This is civic tech: Writing for Civicist, Ruth Miller draws on her experience facilitating part of the Refugee Hackathon in Berlin to urge that more attention be paid to the impact of media attention on the vulnerable populations civic hackers may be trying to help.
Writing for Quartz, Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry riffs on Nick Grossman and Elizabeth Woyke’s new (and free to download) e-book, “Serving Workers in the Gig Economy,” and suggests that new platforms that help gig workers band together don’t go far enough. Instead, he argues for a return to a pre-New Deal solution to the insecurities of work: forming mutual aid societies “such as the Independent Order of Oddfellows or the United Order of True Reformer. Members paid dues in exchange for access to a wide range of services, based on the principle of reciprocity: today’s donor might be tomorrow’s recipient.”
Opening government: The U.S. Commerce Department now has its own Data Service, Hallie Golden reports for NextGov.
OpenDataSoft has built a list of 1600-plus open data portals around the world.

First Post

PULSES

MICAH L. SIFRY
November 10, 2015
2:50 pm

The US agency that spent 10 years & a billion dollars on one online form; Facebook on the GOP; and more.

Why can’t we be friends? President Obama just launched his own Facebook page, because, apparently, the Barack Obama Facebook page isn’t his, it just belongs to a politician with the same name and 45 million followers.
Tech and the campaign: Data from Facebook about interest in the GOP presidential candidates shows, more or less, what someone not looking at Facebook but paying attention to the conventional wisdom about the race might surmise, as Natalie Andrews, Dante Chinni and Brian McGill report for the Wall Street Journal: Donald Trump’s dominating position is weakening somewhat; Ben Carson is “a steady second”; Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio got a bump in interest after the last Republican debate; and Jeb Bush is struggling to catch on.
Paging 18F: The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has spent more than ten years and over a billion dollars trying to switch over to a digital system for managing immigration applications and records, and so far has just one online form to show for it, Jerry Markon reports for the Washington Post.
New on Civicist: Jessica McKenzie reports on the growth of GovDelivery, which just passed the 100 million users mark, with an in-depth exclusive interview with CEO Scott Burns.
The future of work: A coalition of start-ups, VCs, labor advocates and policy wonks have published a joint letter calling for new approaches to supporting contract workers—the type of people working in the “on-demand” economy—that would enable them to get benefits like worker’s compensation, retirement savings or sick leave through more portable vehicles, Cecilia Kang reports for the New York Times. The signers include Brad Burnham of Union Square Ventures; Chad Dickerson, the CEO of Etsy; Marina Gorbis and Natalie Foster of the Institute for the Future; Logan Green and John Zimmer, the co-founders of Lyft; Nick Hanauer of Second Avenue Partners; Sara Horowitz, the founder of the Freelancers Union; Michelle Miller, co-founder or Coworker.org; Tim O’Reilly, founder of O’Reilly Media; Carmen Rojas, CEO of The Workers Lab; Anne-Marie Slaughter, President of New America; and Andy Stern, the President Emeritus of the SEIU.
Today’s “whither democracy” must-read: “Pollsters rose to prominence by claiming that measuring public opinion is good for democracy. But what if it’s bad?” That’s the core question running through historian Jill Lepore’s trenchant report for the New Yorker on the rise of the polling industry. “Polls don’t take the pulse of democracy,” she writes, “they raise it.” You’ll want to read Lepore’s essay for nuggets like this one: “In 1977, the R.N.C. acquired a mainframe computer, while the D.N.C. got its own mainframe in the eighties….Democratic technological advances awaited the personal computer; the R.N.C. is to I.B.M. as the D.N.C. is to Apple.”
It’s rare to see good in-depth writing about the actual challenges of political organizing in the mainstream media, let alone two days in a row, so go read David Roberts essay in Vox on “What critics of the Keystone campaign misunderstand about climate activism.”

First Post

LIABILITIES

MICAH L. SIFRY
November 9, 2015
2:52 pm

Injury or death at your home-share? Airbnb isn’t at fault; how predatory payday lenders hide online; and more.

First, the bad news: While home-renting “home-sharing” start-up Airbnb has taken steps to protect hosts from unruly guests, it’s done little to protect guests from unsafe hosts beyond inviting them to down-rate them after a bad experience. Writing for Medium’s Matter section, Zak Stone tells the harrowing story of his father’s untimely death trying out a tree swing at an Airbnb rental (the tree was rotten to the core and fell on him), pointing out that the company “disclaims all liability” and does nothing to insure that its hosts’ properties are safe, unlike traditional B&B services. Stone makes a damning indictment, pointing out that the company has been willing to spend money on improving what their hosts do when it fits its business model. He notes that it figured out early on that ugly photos of its listing in New York City were keeping guests away, so it invested in hiring professional photographers to document properties for free. He writes:
Of course, were Airbnb to invest in safety requirements by offering home inspections or by analyzing photo content to target higher-risk properties and features (pools, saunas, trampolines, etc.) with site-specific safety recommendations, such a program could be far more costly, and might jeopardize Airbnb’s covetable neutrality as a platform. The irony is that amateur innkeepers who couldn’t be trusted with the banal task of photographing and marketing their properties are expected to excel at hospitality’s most important rule: keeping guests safe and alive. The result: Airbnb is willing to send someone to make sure your trees look beautiful in their photos, but won’t deal with whether or not those trees will fall on your head.
While predatory payday lenders have been pushed into the shadows by statewide crackdowns, Jack Smith IV of Mic.com reports on a new study from the civil rights data consulting firm Upturn that how “they hide on the other end of Google searches, waiting for terms like ‘need help paying rent’ to offer their services.” He notes that Facebook bans all payday loan ads, while Google’s approach is more porous.
A new joint report from the Center for Public Integrity and Global Integrity finds that “secrecy, corruption, and conflicts of interest pervade state governments” in America. The report scored each state across hundreds of variables related to the transparency and accountability of its government. (Full disclosure: I was a reviewer for the New York state section.)
Next, some good news: If anyone tells you that outside-the-Beltway grassroots organizing doesn’t work anymore, read this very timely piece by Ben Adler on how climate change activists from Canada’s First Nations and Nebraska’s rancher community and the 350.org digital network built the five-year campaign that on Friday, with President Obama’s announcement, stopped the Keystone XL pipeline.
Writing for the Harvard Business Review, longtime tech guru Doc Searls explains why ad blocking is on the rise and the adtech industry (read: microtargeting) is about to crash.
Little noticed victory from Election Day: 44 cities, towns and counties in Colorado passed referenda giving themselves the authority to build their own community broadband networks, Jon Brodkin reports for Ars Technica.
A new Democratic voter registration group called iVote, led by Obama campaign organizing veteran Jeremy Bird, is pushing to make voter registration automatic when people update their driver’s licenses, Michael Shear reports for the New York Times.
The New York Times rolled out its “virtual reality” journalism initiative Sunday, delivering free Google Cardboard viewers to its paper subscribers and publishing a multimedia report on child refugees around the world. The effort is very impressive, but am I the only person who wishes they called it “immersive reality”? (This ain’t Second Life, after all.)
President Obama’s digital team, led by Jason Goldman and Kori Schulman, is hard at work building a personal online identity for the president, Julie Hirschfeld Davis reports for the New York Times.
This is civic tech: Civic Hall member Joel Natividad and his company Ontodia has announced the launch of its “Civic Dashboards” product, which includes a data portal, performance management tools, analytics-as-a-service with built-in templates for tools like crime maps, economic activity tracking and open source civic-tech projects.
Accela’s Mark Headd offers some deep thoughts on the development of “government as a platform” ten years after Tim O’Reilly first popularized the concept, and argues that rather than expecting governments to plan, develop and maintain big, expensive APIs, we should focus instead on building microservices.
The new director of the Sunlight Foundation’s Sunlight Labs is Kat Duffy, who was previously at the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor where she designed and oversaw a grant portfolio that emphasized “data visualization, tool development for independent media organizations, customized application adaptation and end-user assessments, software localization, and support for internet freedom and open data advocacy initiatives,” the foundation announced Friday. Welcome Kat!

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