Civicist

CIVIC TECH NEWS & ANALYSIS

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MIND SHARES

MIND SHARES

The most militarized universities in America; Prop F loses in SF & Airbnb rejoices; and more.

  • Warning shot: Proposition F, the controversial San Francisco ballot measure that would have curbed short-term home rentals, lost with 45 percent of the vote Tuesday, as did a proposed 18-month moratorium on new market-rate development in the Mission neighborhood, Emily Badger reports for the Washington Post. But as she notes, the issue of housing affordability in San Francisco isn’t about to go away.

  • Airbnb’s Chris Lehane, who spearheaded the company’s massive lobbying effort against Prop F, lauded the vote on the company’s policy blog as “A victory for the middle class.” The longtime Democratic political operative’s language notably refers repeatedly to “middle class families’ right to share their home” and the “home sharing community,” though as best as I can tell very few hosts on Airbnb actually share their homes with anyone, according to the word’s old-fashioned dictionary definition. George Orwell would be proud of Lehane.

  • As Conor Dougherty and Mike Isaac report for the New York Times, companies like Airbnb and Uber are fighting local regulators “by turning their users into a vast political operation that can be mobilized at any sign of a threat.” With that in mind, they describe Lehane’s Prop F victory press conference in San Francisco “as a warning shot to other cities thinking about proposing new regulations.”

  • Indeed, it’s hard not to read Lehane’s blog post without thinking of Airbnb as a political campaign—one that is steeped in the data-driven field organizing techniques honed by the Obama campaigns. He writes: “This election was a victory for the middle class and it was made possible by the 138,000 members of the Airbnb community who had individual conversations with over 105,000 voters, knocked on 285,000 doors, including 55,000 today, and worked to generate support from more than 2,000 small, family-owned businesses in the city. This effort shows that home sharing is both a community and a movement.”

  • While we’re on the topic of Orwellian language (aka “Spinglish“), David Plouffe, President Obama’s former campaign manager and now the chief adviser and board member of Uber, recently shared this post on Uber’s “Under the Hood” policy blog, titled “Racing to rideshare.” It too makes no mention of anyone charging anyone else for anything and brags repeatedly about Uber as a “ridesharing” service.

  • Campaign tech: Matt Lira, the former deputy executive director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee (and a friend of PDM), says the reason why Republicans are getting beat by Democrats in the small-donor fundraising game isn’t something technological, like the lack of “unifying one-click donation platform” like ActBlue: “This is a cultural challenge. The largest Republican campaigns and organizations simply are not synced up on this issue; greater cooperation in this area would have an outsized influence on the problem.”

  • User rights: Responding to Monday’s release of the Ranking Digital Rights report, Yahoo’s Business and Human Rights Program has blogged that it is “actively studying the results of the Index and will be discussing the findings with our teams. We are also looking forward to the important conversations that RDR’s Index will spark about company disclosures and policies affecting users’ free expression and privacy.”

  • It’s not an explicit response to the report, but yesterday Twitter announced a new policy hub where the company plans to centralize information about the company’s political efforts as well as policy issues affecting its users. We heart that.

  • Culture wars:The long-running reality TV show Mythbusters just announced that next year’s season will be its last, and on the New York Times oped page, James Meigs, the former editor of Popular Mechanics, pens a lovely piece praising it for having “taught a whole generation how science works and why it matters.”

  • Deep, deep lobbying: If you wonder where so much bad thinking about cyber-security policy comes from, set aside time to read William Arkin and Alexa O’Brien’s detailed report for Vice News on “The Most Militarized Universities in America.” The rankings are based on a dataset of more than 90,000 individuals who have worked in the intelligence community since 9/11, which is just six percent of all the people in the US with a Top Secret clearance, and they document a vast expansion in national security academic funding. They write:

    The gloomy result is that the academy (and by extension the philanthropic world) has failed to establish a post-9/11 academic program to cultivate the next generation of scholars who can offer a genuinely civilian counter-narrative to the national security state similar to the civilian arms control community created during the Cold War. Even at the most elite schools that rank in the top 100, the many centers and research institutes focusing on warfare and terrorism are predominantly adjuncts of the national security state

  • Eric Raymond, the author of the influential open-source bible “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” has turned to the bizarre world of “manospheric derangement,” Jesse Singal writes for New York magazine. How so? By elevating a totally unsourced allegation that women-in-tech feminists have been trying to entrap men using “honey pots” and then accusing them of attempted assault, and that their chief target is the founder of Linux, Linus Torvalds. Singal’s eloquent take-down is worth reading not just for its depressing content but also for its style: “The peristaltic movement of the misogynist web finally nudged the story to its inevitable destination…” Now that is writing, my friends.

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ROUNDS

ROUNDS

Where New Yorkers can weigh in on the congestion issue; the TPP and the #IoT; and more.

  • U.S. Chief Technology Officer Megan Smith tells Alex Howard of the Huffington Post that she thinks civic tech is the next big thing: “I was there at the beginning of the smart phone, the beginning of open source. I think this is like that. It’s the start of something much bigger.”

  • New on Civicist from our Jessica McKenzie: How researchers at Cornell University have built a “smart participation” tool to improve public comment processes, which is now being used to invite the New York City public to weigh in on congestion and the ongoing dispute between City Hall and transportation network companies like Uber.

  • “Many people are driving on the Uber platform to get the pay raise they have not received in their other jobs,” writes David Plouffe, the company’s senior adviser. In other words, Uber does what unions used to do.

  • Becky Hogge looked at six case studies of open government data usage in the U.K. for the Omidyar Network, and found that “Private actors have taken government data, and they have transformed it in ways that are useful and valuable to citizens and consumers. Far more time and money has been invested in government data than it is possible to imagine the government ever having done by itself. The impact of this investment, though not always quantifiable, is in most cases tangible and scalable, if not already ‘at scale.’”

  • In San Francisco, grants are called “philanthropic rounds.” That’s what health-care crowdfunding nonprofit Watsi is celebrating, as donors including Ron Conway, Tencent, and Paul Graham have just given $3.5 million to fund its operations for the next two years, as Josh Constine reports for Techcrunch.

  • Cory Doctorow reports for BoingBoing on how the just-released text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade treaty seeks to prevent governments from requiring that “internet of things” products like cars and other regulated devices make their software open for inspection.

  • It’s not too late to register for the annual Nonprofit Software Development Summit, hosted by Aspiration November 18-20 in Oakland.

  • Aimee Lee Ball reports for the New York Times on the rising trend of “all-gender bathrooms,” including our own here at Civic Hall. And, yes, there’s an app for that: Refuge Restrooms, which shows the location of all-gender bathrooms nationwide.

 
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HEART BEATS

HEART BEATS

Civic Hall launches Rethinking Debates; Google.org donates millions to racial justice movement; and more.

  • Debates 2.0: Welcome aboard Christine Cupaiuolo, our new Civic Engagement Fellow, who will be leading our Rethinking Debates project. She’ll be reporting on how political debates around the world are using innovative formats and social media, focusing on examples that help make these crucial public events more informative, engaging, and responsive to the concerns of voters. Here’s her first post.

  • This is civic tech: Writing for Medium’s Backchannel, Susan Crawford reports on a pioneering open data project in Louisville, Kentucky, where the city’s commitment to make all municipal public information “open by default” combined with a local business focused on serving the blind and the local Civic Data Alliance produced a drastically improved version of Open Street Map that can now support many new third-party apps and services.

  • Columbus, Ohio, is the home of the world’s first “B-celerator,” reports Susan Post for Metropreneur, where David All and Christine Deye of Civic Hacks are focusing on helping new businesses through the process of becoming certified as B-corporations. (Yes, that’s the same David All who was once Rep. Jack Kingston’s communications director and the vanguard of a pod of young Republicans who pressed their party to embrace technology before it was cool.)

  • There’s a lot of nascent civic tech in this new round of Knight Prototype Fund grantees, each of whom is getting $35,000 in support, design training, and peer networking opportunities. The winners include Billcam (which aims to add transparency to the legislative process), CityGram (which makes it easier for local governments to connect with citizens), the U.S. Vote Foundation’s local election dates and deadlines API, IdeaMapr (which helps communities understand and join in on local government decision making), and @Stake by Emerson College’s Engagement Lab.

  • Bryan Breckenridge and Anne Maloney of Box.org have authored a useful whitepaper on why it’s important to “fund tech for nonprofits.” They note that currently, most nonprofits spend no more than 10 percent of their budgets on tech, and many large NGOs allocate only 1 percent – 2.5 percent of their annual income to tech. They add:

    For many organizations that do fund tech, they’ve limited it to the “sexiest” areas of program-side investment while ignoring an organization’s need to shore up its foundational data and content collection, management, analytics, and sharing layer… the “plumbing”: ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), CRM (Constituent Relationship Management), ECM (Enterprise Content Management), Identity Management, communications systems, productivity and collaboration tools, grant management, etc. and the headcount and know-how to run them well. Underinvestment and lacking capacity in plumbing are two of the main reasons organizations struggle to scale overall and rise and crash in a highly turbulent project-to-project life cycle.

  • Speaking of which, Google.org is giving $2.35 million to community organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area that are on the forefront of the racial justice movement, Jessica Guynn reports for USA Today. The funding includes two grants of $500,000 to the Ella Baker Center in Oakland, one to support Patrisse Cullors of Black Lives Matter, and another to support a worker training program.

  • Our troubled times: A new study from Common Sense Media finds new evidence of the digital divide’s impact on young people. As Natasha Singer of the New York Times writes, “Only one-fourth of teenagers in households with less than $35,000 in annual income said they had their own laptops compared with 62 percent in households with annual incomes of $100,000 or more, according to the report.” Try typing a homework essay on your smartphone, for one reason why this matters.

  • Micah Lakin Avni, whose father Richard Lakin was stabbed to death by Palestinian attackers in Jerusalem three weeks ago, calls on Facebook and other social network platforms to do a more pro-active job of removing “blatant incitement” from their sites before waiting for complaints to arise.

  • If you are wondering why Twitter’s decision to replace the “favorite” star with a “like” heart has created such tumult in the Twittersphere, read this august piece by technosociologist Zeynep Tufekci about the problems with Facebook’s “like” button. As she writes, “Not everything in life is ‘like’-able. We cannot like refugee kids wading among dead bodies. And we cannot directly tell Facebook’s algorithm that we still care about this, or find it important.”

  • Tech and campaigns: Civic engagement start-up Brigade tested an interactive ballot guide for voters in the Bay Area and Manchester, New Hampshire, yesterday, and as Dawn Chmielewski reports for Re/Code, the company’s engineers are hoping to learn if that made its users more likely to pledge support for candidates or recruit friends as a result.

  • ActBlue, the Democratic online fundraising hub, gets a glowing profile in the New York Times from Eric Lichtblau and Nick Corasaniti.

  • Chris Gates of the Sunlight Foundation offers a useful list of questions for the 2016 presidential candidates, all pertaining to measuring their commitment to “a more open and data-driven government.”

  • Today in snake oil sales: Apparently polling and data science isn’t enough for some political consultants; now they’re selling “neuropolitics,” reports Kevin Randall for the New York Times. As he reports, “According to campaign records, the campaigns of presidents and prime ministers on at least three continents have hired science consultants to scan voters’ brains, bodies, and faces, all with the aim of heightening their emotional resonance with the electorate.”

  • Take note: Our friends up the block at the Data & Society Institute are looking for their next group of fellows, for the 2016-17 cycle. Apply here—the deadline is December 1.

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SURFACING

SURFACING

Anonymous outs alleged KKK members; Silicon Valley’s philanthropy; and more.

  • Votebnb: The sharing economy is on the ballot tomorrow in San Francisco, where Proposition F, which would limit short-term home rentals, is pitting Airbnb against the San Francisco tenants union, Conor Dougherty reports for the New York Times. He notes that several other ballot propositions “are either directly or indirectly related to the technology industry and housing costs. In addition to ‘the Airbnb thing,’ there are two affordable-housing measures and a proposal to help old-line businesses make rent in neighborhoods that are filling up with boutiques and organic restaurants.”

  • Related: Nancy Watzman of the Internet Archive reports that, as that San Francisco vote nears, ads opposing Prop F are running at a rate of 100-1 compared to ads supporting the measure. “Audio fingerprinting of YouTube-hosted advertising was used to identify the same ads in local station programming and cable news networks available in the region, from August 25 through October 26,” she writes.

  • Unmasking: After months of relative quiet, the hacker network Anonymous is resurfacing this week with “Operation KKK.” Timed to coincide with the first anniversary of the Ferguson protests, the group has started posting personal contact information of people it alleges are KKK members, reports Anthony Cuthbertson of the International Business Times. The group claims Senators Tom Tillis (R-NC), John Cornyn (R-TX), and Dan Coats (R-IN) are Klan members, along with several mayors.

  • Hard not to quote this headline from The Register: “Anonymous hack group plans to out anonymous hate group.” With the 5th of November around the corner, Anonymous is also promising a “Million Mask March” in hundreds of cities worldwide this Thursday.

  • Following the money: Alessandra Stanley packed a lot of truth into this essay on “Silicon Valley’s New Philanthropy” in Sunday’s New York Times. Most telling: for all his talk of “disruption,” the head of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, Emmett Carson, which sits on nearly $5 billion from tech donors, has this to say about the Ford Foundation’s new focus on fighting income inequality: “West Coast philanthropy is not influenced by East Coast pronouncements,” he sniffed.

  • Related: Here’s a progress report from four community foundations (including SVCF) on what they are learning from funding media projects that assist in meeting local information needs, written by Steve Outing and posted on the Knight Foundation’s blog. The four foundations—the Dodge Foundation, Silicon Valley Community Foundation, Incourage Community Foundation and the Chicago Community Trust—were winners of the Knight Community Information Challenge, which offered matching funding to local foundations launching news and information projects.

  • Race and place: After examining millions of records, Vocativ’s Jennings Brown and Gerald Rich found more than 1,400 federally recognized places with names that are racial slurs.

  • Amina Elahi reports for the Chicago Tribune on Women of Color in Tech, which is making free stock photos showing people from underrepresented groups who are software engineers, IT analysts and security professionals in tech settings.

  • This is civic tech: The big news from SeeClickFix founder Ben Berkowitz is that starting in 2016, the city-centric problem-solving platform will making it easy for users to communicate laterally with each other. This will make it possible for neighbors to network with neighbors around common concerns, and government officials to connect directly with each other. Either way, it’s an important qualitative improvement in SCF’s platform, which just tallied its two-millionth user report.

  • The Women Who Tech Startup Challenge NYC is coming up Tuesday November 9. RSVP here.

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WHO DOES CIVIC TECH HELP?

WHO DOES CIVIC TECH HELP?

What the open data movement left out; mySociety surveys civic tech demographics; and more.

  • mySociety’s research director Rebecca Rumbul has released an important new study, “Who benefits from civic technology?” It’s the first fruit of mySociety’s big new thrust into user and impact research on civic tech. The report looks at variations in usage of civic tech—defined as technologies “that enable citizens to hold governments to account”—in the U.S., U.K., Kenya, and South Africa, and examines the attitudes of users towards the platforms they are using. A total of 3,705 online survey responses were collected. The sites were FixMyStreet and TheyWorkForYou in the U.K., GovTrack and SeeClickFix in the U.S., Mzalendo in Kenya and People’s Assembly in South Africa. (Other country sites were also in the study but did not generate enough user responses to be statistically useful.)

  • The report found that in the U.K. and the U.S., the vast majority of users of these sites (FixMyStreet and GovTrack, specifically) are older, with roughly half over the age of 55. The opposite is true in Kenya and South Africa. Men account for 2/3 or more of the users except in the U.S. case, where the gender breakdown was even. In the U.K. and South Africa, whites use these sites disproportionately more than their share of the population (that question was not included by the sites in the U.S. and Kenya). Across the board, these civic tech sites attract users who are not surprisingly highly political engaged and better educated than the general population.

  • Here’s one of Rumbul’s key normative findings: “[the] data tells us that in the U.K. and U.S., civic technology users at least in some ways resemble the existing dominant class, and that this class has recognized the potential of civic technology to facilitate and amplify effective civic interaction, whether that be in tracking political information on welfare, researching legislative progress for professional purposes or maintaining the local community environment. This has significant implications for civic technology implementers. Many groups conceive of civic technology as a tool for effective and accessible democratic action. The digital environment is thought to reduce traditional barriers to engagement and access experienced by the less engaged groups within society. If, however, digital democracy tools are predominantly being used by a homogeneous group already dominant in society, this has the potential to skew policy and practical interventions in favor of this dominant group, at the same time compounding disadvantage amongst less dominant groups in society.”

  • This is a very important and sobering conclusion. But we should be careful not to over-interpret this finding. mySociety’s study did not look directly at economic class, so it’s possible that these civic tech platforms are actually helping empower some people who otherwise wouldn’t be in the position to “pay to play” in the political arena the way the top one percent do. It also looked at a narrow band of civic tech platforms: the generic parliamentary transparency sites (GovTrack and TheyWorkForYou) and two community problem-solving platforms (FixMyStreet and SeeClickFix). Notably, it doesn’t provide any user data from the SeeClickFix sample (by the way, the company hit its two-millionth report yesterday and is today launching some impressive new neighbor engagement features). It would be edifying to spread the net wider to include platforms like Vermont’s Front Porch Forum and Minneapolis’ e-democracy, as well the growing array of mobile-centric civic engagement platforms. Finally, civic tech is a bigger field than just government accountability tools. Defining it that narrowly leaves out vital projects like Democracy Works, which focus on helping people register and vote; or the Smart Chicago Collaborative, which makes tools with its urban and working-class community, or whole urban ecosystems like what is happening in Detroit. As Microsoft’s CivicGraph shows, the civic tech ecosystem is much bigger than just the sites mySociety surveyed. So while the issues Rumbul raises are real, more research is needed before saying this is the whole story.

  • Mark Headd chews on the mySociety survey and takes heart that it shows that many users of these sites believe that they are useful, and that using them makes them more confident to engage public officials. But he also notes that if public officials aren’t more responsive as a result, the promise of accountability offered by these sites could lead to disillusionment.

  • Related: On Medium, Abhi Nemani, who was until recently Los Angeles’s first chief data officer and before that one of Code for America’s principals, asks whether the open data movement in the United States has taken the wrong track and should have been fighting all along for governments to modernize their digital services rather than just opening up their data.

  • On Civicist, Eilis O’Neill reports on civic hackers who are taking on the fracking industry as well as other environmental causes.

  • Jason Putorti, a co-founder of Brigade and Votizen, now at Bessemer Venture Partners, offers his idiosyncratic guide to companies working on several major challenges facing American democracy.

  • On FounderDating, Ron Bouganim, the founder of the GovTech Fund, explains why he thinks offering new technology services to government agencies and employees is a huge growth opportunity.

  • Engine is partnering with the Technology Association of Iowa and the Cedar Rapids Gazette to hold a Presidential Tech Town Hall in Cedar Rapids on December 7.

  • Democracy Works, the people who brought us Turbovote, is looking to hire a software developer. If you apply, you have to use this subject line: “Will code for democracy.”

  • SavetheInternet.in posts a scathing open letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who visited India again this week and held a townhall-style meeting in New Delhi.

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MACHINE LEARNINGS

MACHINE LEARNINGS

Big Apps semifinalists; The Electome; Uber Under the Hood; and more.

  • This is civic tech: The annual NYC Big Apps competition just announced the 2015 semifinalists, in the categories of affordable housing, zero waste, connected cities and citizen engagement. Congrats to several Civic Hall members Melanie Lavelle of the Benefit Kitchen team, Maria Yuan of Issue Voter, and Sanjaya Punyasena of Simpolfy.

  • The Knight Foundation is giving $648,000 to MIT’s Laboratory for Social Machines for a new campaign analytics project called The Electome. Research scientist William Powers explains the project’s goals: to move beyond the politicians and media’s fixation on the horse race, and to listen more closely to citizen voices and see if candidates and journalists are responding to those concerns. Twitter has given the lab (which it funds) a gift for this project, too–the full firehouse of 500 million new tweets written each day. The project also plans to use data fro Facebook, Reddit and Google searches, and the Washington Post and Mashable will be working directly with it as well.

  • The Electome could be a transformative project, as a Knight press release outlines: “In development since last spring, the Electome is designed to create real-time, comprehensive map tracking election-related content and show the connections between three main information sources: the media and journalists, messaging from the candidates, and public conversations on social media. It will look to use computer science tools, such as machine learning and natural language processing, to trace the election’s narratives as they form, spread, morph and decline – identifying who and what influences these dynamics and outcomes.”

  • Two questions from this corner: Will the Electome’s algorithms be open for inspection by others? And will its editorial decisions be open? Let’s hope so. I’ll let you know what I find out.

  • Democratic presidential candidate Martin O’Malley is taking his civic tech pitch competition to Boston’s District Hall next Wednesday, Jon Chesto reports for the Boston Globe.


  • Luke Fretwell, the founder of the civic tech blog GovFresh, offers some useful suggestions on how to improve a set of proposals made by the state’s Little Hoover Commission. The bipartisan commission, which is tasked with government oversight, is calling on the governor and legislature to create a new post of chief customer officer along with an internal digital services team. It also wants the state government to focus on open data and human-centered design.

  • The web we want? Writing for Fortune magazine, Mathew Ingram explains how Facebook’s Instant Articles and Twitter’s new Moments feature are jointly killing the web link, and ponders whether that is bad thing. Here’s one reason why it is, as he writes: “because Facebook controls the algorithm that determines what users see or don’t see, then it gets to decide what the news is, and what is important. And that’s a potential problem if Facebook chooses to delete disturbing images or news stories about war and promote peaceful happy stories instead. In some cases, information disappears from Facebook and the social network never explains why.”

  • Seventy-two feminist and civil rights organizations have asked the US Department of Education to issue guidelines to colleges that would urge them to ban Yik Yak and other anonymous social media apps in the interest of stopping the harassment of marginalized students, Amanda Hess reports for Slate. She argues that this is a dumb idea, and points out that while Yik Yak has been used on campuses by racists and homophobes to target students, it has also been used to quickly rally visible support for suicidal students and victims of homophobia. She also notes that “no social network has been more aggressive about stemming harassment and encouraging community than Yik Yak has.”

  • Sara Watson of the Tow Center is building an annotated guide to “Constructive Technology Criticism,” and she’s posted it up on Medium so folks can add their comments in the margins.

  • Uber just launched a policy blog called “Uber Under the Hood” and the Washington Post’s Brian Fung has the preview.

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OPPORTUNITY KNOCKS

OPPORTUNITY KNOCKS

Facebook starts 2G Tuesdays; SXSW’s troubles with gaming panels continue; and more.

  • Government openings: As the Open Government Partnership’s annual summit starts in Mexico City, Martin Tisne, the Omidyar Network’s director of policy for its government transparency initiative, argues that it’s not enough for governments to promise to be more open with their data: “Do we change the course of history with the mere existence of more data or because people access it, mobilize, and press for change?”

  • Related: In tandem with the summit, the White House released its third “Open Government National Action Plan,” which it says “both broadens and deepens efforts to help government become more open and more citizen-centered.”

  • A “We the People” petition on the White House website demanding that President Obama publicly affirm his support for strong encryption has received more than 100,000 signatures, which means it is due an official response, Jenna McLaughlin reports for The Intercept.

  • Conference call: With BuzzFeed and Vox Media both threatening to withdraw from SXSW Interactive unless two controversial panels are reinstated, the festival’s organizers are now considering an all-day event focused on combatting online harassment, Re/Code’s Noah Kulwin reports. The “Level Up” panel on overcoming harassment has already been reinstated.

  • If you want to go even deeper into the rabbit hole of abuse and disinformation that afflict just about everyone who tries to take on the GamerGate trolls, read Arthur Chu’s piece in the Daily Beast about how SXSW mishandled a panel on improving online culture that he was involved in proposing.

  • Life in Facebookistan: Facebook is giving its employees the “opportunity” to experience what using the company’s mobile app feels like to someone with a slow connection typical to the emerging markets the company is trying to conquer, Jillian D’Onfrio reports for Business Insider. The initiative, which is called “2G Tuesdays” and is supposed to “help close the ’empathy gap’” between Silicon Valley and emerging markets, works like this: “When a Facebook employee logs in to the app any Tuesday morning, they’ll see a prompt at the top of their News Feed asking whether they want to try out the slower connection for an hour. ‘For that next hour, their experience on Facebook will be very much like the experience that millions of people around the world have on Facebook on a 2G connection,’ Facebook engineering director Tom Alison says. “They’re going to see the places that we need to improve our product, but they’re also going to see the places where we have made a lot of progress.”

  • No word on whether Facebook employees will also be given the “opportunity” to take public transit to work instead of its private San Francisco shuttle bus service, or be offered the opportunity to buy their own food and do their own dry-cleaning.

  • This is civic tech: Loveland Technologies, the Detroit civic hacking company, has built a city-wide map in support of Angel’s Night, an annual effort to combat the spread of suspicious fires and arsons that take place around Halloween. The map highlights vacant structures that are in arson “hot spots” and those next to occupied homes deserving particular attention.

  • Civic start-up Give Lively, a new social enterprise dedicated to building technology that permits people to “give better” is seeking a senior engineer.

  • Writing for Philadelphia magazine, Hannah Sassman and Gretjen Clausing explain how Philadelphia could negotiate a much better deal with Comcast that would genuinely benefit the city’s poor, provides affordable internet to all, and expand technology education in all the city’s schools. The city’s franchise agreement with the giant Fortune 50 company is up for renewal.

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DISAPPOINTMENTS AND DISAGREEMENTS

DISAPPOINTMENTS AND DISAGREEMENTS

SXSW cancels panels about gaming culture; NY Attorney General to investigate internet providers; and more.

  • Today’s civic tech must-read: Rachel Cohen, a writing fellow at the American Prospect, argues in “Pushing civic tech beyond its comfort zone” (a feature article in its Fall 2015 print issue) that technologists who talk about “revolutionizing” local government by improving its IT, making it more responsive, transparent, data-driven and cost-effective are “set[ting] up people for later disappointment.” She writes, “Accountability, however, is ultimately a political matter, and civic tech cannot simply steer clear of politics in the belief that technology will solve problems on its own.” Among the civic tech leaders cited in her piece: Ben Berkowitz of SeeClickFix, Stephen Goldsmith and Susan Crawford (co-authors of The Responsive City: Engaging Communities Through Data-Smart Governance), Sean Moulton of the Project on Government Oversight, Tiago Peixoto of the World Bank, Dan O’Neil of the Smart Chicago Collaborative, Haley Van Dyck of the U.S. Digital Service, Sheila Krumholz of the Center for Responsive Politics and Eric Liu of Citizen University. Oh, and some dude named Sifry and some conference called Personal Democracy Forum.

  • Just launched by Political Animal and Poderopedia: NarcoData, a digital platform tracking 40 years of Mexico’s drug cartels, including their emergence, geographic expansion, international relationships and criminal activities.

  • Embattled Empaneled: Hugh Forrest, the longtime organizer of SXSW Interactive, has announced that two previously announced sessions related to online harassment and gaming culture—one that was seen as pro-GamerGate and one that was not—have been canceled due to “numerous threats of on-site violence related to this programming.” (GamerGate refers to a loose-knit online network that has viciously targeted women in the gaming industry.) Forrest’s statement noted that SXSW’s “big tent” of ideas requires civil and respectful dialogue and that if a “safe and secure place that is free of online and offline harassment” cannot be assured, the “sanctity” of that big tent would be compromised. Not explained by his statement: why the conference organizers couldn’t assure sufficient on-site security for these two panels to take place.

  • “Level Up: Overcoming Harassment in Games,” was the non-GamerGate panel canceled by SXSW. On Twitter, one of its organizers, Randi Harper of the Online Abuse Prevention Initiative, shared a stream of protests about the decision, noting that “we didn’t demand that the GamerGate panel be removed from the schedule. We just asked that safety precautions be taken.” She also noted, “Our panel was not about GamerGate, but instead making design decisions in abuse systems.”

  • Another co-panelist, Katherine Cross of CUNY Graduate Center, said, “The panel was meant to be a wide-ranging discussion about how we might design websites, social media, and online games to be less susceptible to online harassment and hate mobbing. We were going to discuss various design proposals, including some already extant in the gaming industry that have been proven to work, but our panel was meant to be a solutions-oriented discussion of harassment in general.” She also told Austin Walker of Giant Bomb News that SXSW had not alerted her panel about threats of violence before announcing their panel’s cancellation.

  • The other canceled panel, “SavePoint: A Discussion on the Gaming Community,” featured several supporters of the GamerGate movement. Perry Jones of the Open Gaming Society says the group is raising money to hold its panel during SXSW somewhere nearby.

  • As Noah Kulwin writes for Re/Code, SXSW’s decision shows that “The online hate mob of Gamergate is good at two things: Sending horrible threats to women online, and forcing people to shut down events featuring people critical of Gamergate.”

  • Digital politics: The White House is disagreeing with FBI Directer James Comey’s recent claims that increased scrutiny of local police behavior and fear of officers that their actions will go viral—the so-called “YouTube effect”—is leading to a rise in violent crime in some cities, Michael Schmidt and Matt Apuzzo report for the New York Times. “The evidence we have seen so far doesn’t support the contention that law enforcement officials are shirking their responsibilities,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest said in response to a question about Comey’s remarks.

  • A new study from the Brennan Center for Justice, “Voter Registration in a Digital Age: 2015 Update” looks at the 38 states that now offer electronic and/or online registration and finds that it is boosting registration rates, increasing voter roll accuracy, and saving money.

  • With the help of his newly installed senior enforcement counsel Tim Wu, New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has told Verizon, Time Warner, and Cablevision that he is probing whether their so-called “super-fast” “premium” internet connections are actually ripping off customers with slower-than-advertised speeds, Christie Smythe reports for Bloomberg Business.

  • The news from Facebookistan: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is continuing his charm offensive in China, giving a speech in Mandarin while on a visit to Tsinghua University in Beijing (where he is on the board of its school of economics and management), the Los Angeles Times reports.

  • Meanwhile, as Vindu Goel reports for the New York Times, Facebook’s Internet.org project (which was recently renamed “Free Basics”) is struggling to gain acceptance in India. As Goel notes, one of Facebook’s local telco partners, Reliance, is known for shoddy service. And as he writes, one phone shop owner told him, “Even if Reliance’s network were good…the package excludes WhatsApp, a popular messaging app owned by Facebook, and users must pay to see the photos in their Facebook feeds. ‘If you have to pay for data, what’s the point of calling it free?’ he said.”

  • Your moment of zen: Former President Bill Clinton tells Mark Halperin of Bloomberg Politics that he likes the “selfie” phenomenon. “In a way I like it, though, because it’s democratized record-keeping of memories—because if you can afford a cell phone, you’ve got a camera, and a camera will operate at a fairly high resolution, with a fairly good amount of clarity, and if you need to for some reason you can print it out.” He also joked that if selfies existed back in the 1980s when he first entered politics in Arkansas, he “might not have lived” to run for President. “I did not have a selfie with that woman.” No, he didn’t say that.

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Categories
First Post

INSIGHTS

INSIGHTS

Global imagination failures; Ben Carson’s Facebook strat; and more.

  • Today’s civic tech must-read: Civicist contributing editor An Xiao Mina writing on our “failures of our global imagination.” Read the whole thing. Afterwards, you probably won’t think about the “First World” or the “Third World” in the same way, or how we use our devices.

  • Tech and the presidentials: When GOP presidential candidate Scott Walker dropped out of the race, none of the other Republican campaigns sought to pick up his digital team, and as Issie Lapowsky reports for Wired, this may be the latest evidence that conservatives are still lagging behind liberals in how much they prioritize tech for their campaigns.

  • Surging Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson is heavily reliant on Facebook, where he has 4.3 million fans, David Drucker reports for the Washington Examiner. “Carson personally takes and answers three questions every night on his Facebook page; the interaction generates an average of 100,000 responses that are shared approximately 10,000 times.”

  • Doug Watts, Carson’s chief communications counselor, tells Drucker: “…we all came in sharing the ethic of having a social media-oriented—centric—campaign, because we were all totally taken with [President] Obama’s campaign in 2007 and 2008, and of course no Republican has even come close to exercising that kind of a program. And we thought you could.”

  • Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign has finally hired a pollster, Maggie Haberman reports for the New York Times. Sanders’ top adviser Tad Devine explains: “He is not a big consumer of polling, so he did not see the need for it, but I think he understands it in terms of targeting media buys and for voter contact that it has value and can save us money because we won’t waste resources by, for example, buying the wrong shows on TV.”

  • Twitter is partnering with CBS News for the November 14 Democratic Presidential debate, Adam Sharp announces. “Twitter will provide CBS News with real-time data and insights, and will bring live reactions and questions from voters around the country onto the debate stage.”

  • Spying times: A federal court has dismissed a lawsuit brought by the ACLU on behalf of the Wikimedia Foundation and a number of other organizations, stating that the plaintiffs had not proven that their communications were intercepted by the NSA.

  • Fight for the Future is charging that Facebook lobbyists on Capitol Hill are quietly supporting the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act while publicly the company claims to oppose it.

Categories
First Post

PIG IN A POKE

PIG IN A POKE

Why fixing gov’t is no good if we don’t fix politics, too; Google Votes; and more.

  • Today’s civic-tech must-read: Our own Andrew Rasiej reflects in Civicist on this week’s third annual CityLab conference, hosted by The Atlantic magazine, the Bloomberg Foundation and the Aspen Institute, which he attended in London. He writes that the movement to innovate government using technology has never been more robust, but warns: “we are all missing something fundamental that is preventing any of our collective work from becoming transformative….All of us in the field of government re-invention will fail unless we bring our energy and ideas to the urgent need to innovate the political processes that deliver to us the government we truly want.”

  • He adds, “The theory that government innovation will eventually be so successful that its benefits will trickle back up the food chain and deliver us better politics is a false premise. Politics is ‘the horse’ and government is ‘the cart’ and we can have the fanciest cart on the planet but it is being pulled by an elephant and a donkey that when combined cast a shadow that looks like a pig. (And leaves just as bad a mess.)”

  • Jason Shueh of GovTech reports on Google Votes, a fascinating experiment brewing inside the giant company that is essentially testing out a version of “liquid democracy,” where people can either vote directly on a topic or give their proxy to someone they trust to know more. If Google Votes works well, it would be a welcome addition to the deliberative democracy toolset. Google Moderator, the company’s prior contribution to this field, was quietly discontinued some years ago.

  • Former Maryland Governor and longshot Democratic presidential candidate Martin O’Malley helped judge a civic tech start-up event hosted by Microsoft in Washington DC Wednesday, and The Huffington Post’s Alexander Howard offers this round-up on O’Malley’s own pitch.

  • Notably, O’Malley is talking up civic tech, which he variously defined as websites, apps, and social media that “connect caring human beings to one another and the problems we face as a people”; the creation of 911 and 311 systems; and “the use of modern technology for crowdsourced problem solving.

  • Colin O’Connor reports for Gotham Gazette on the rise of participatory budgeting in New York City—it’s now in 27 council districts—and asks why every council member isn’t embracing it.

  • American political technology vendors like Precision Strategies and NGP VAN worked closely with the winning Liberal Party campaign of Canada’s Justin Trudeau, Sean Miller reports for Campaigns & Elections. DSPolitical’s Matthew McMillan wouldn’t say who his firm worked for, but bragged about targeting “individual houses and apartment-building floors” by IP addresses in urban centers like Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal.

  • The European Parliament is about to adopt rules aimed at protecting net neutrality, but Stanford’s Barbara van Schewick says they are flawed and in need of some critical fixes, which she outlines.

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