Civicist

CIVIC TECH NEWS & ANALYSIS

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.