Archive: Year: 2014

Messiness This video of NY Governor Andrew Cuomo and NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio doing their best to ignore Fordham law professor Zephyr Teachout as she approaches Cuomo during the Labor Day parade is going viral online, reports Adam Sneed of Politico. The Democratic primary in New York is this Tuesday. Commenting on this encounter, Lawrence Lessig calls Cuomo "the Nixon of New York." The Buffalo News interviewed Tim Wu, Teachout's running mate, who is challenging western NY Congresswoman Kathy Hochul, and Wu flunked on his knowledge of the region. Speaking of not knowing anything, here's a video of liberal Democratic NY Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, campaigning with Hochul in Manhattan, and admitting he doesn't know anything about her backing by the National...

This past Wednesday, we hosted a fascinating conversation with three innovative thinker-doers: Ben Berkowitz, the co-founder of SeeClickFix; Marci Harris, the CEO of PopVox; and Erhardt Graeff, an MIT Civic Media grad student who is working on a project called ActionPath. The conversation was the result of my hearing Graeff's short presentation on his research at last June's MIT-Knight Civic Media conference. He's focused on how we can improve the design of projects that aim to increase civic engagement, and envisions ActionPath as a mobile tool that would connect people with relevant civic information that literally crosses their path as they go through their daily lives. Imagine an app on your phone that knows your location and sends you push...

Elevation As previously reported, the White House has confirmed that Google executive Megan Smith will be President Obama's next Chief Technology Officer. In addition, Alexander Macgillivray, Twitter's former chief lawyer, will come on board as deputy CTO. With these two picks, the White House is getting two highly respected tech leaders, one with intimate knowledge of innovation and the other a keen intellect on Intellectual property and online speech issues, the Washington Post's Nancy Scola points out. (Don't miss the photo credits she pulled for her story.) In Wired, Issie Lapowsky explains why Megan Smith's elevation is "a massive win for women in tech." 18F is looking at revamping the government's FOIA portal, Alex Howard reports. With Twitter suggesting that it will soon impose...

Fireworks Etsy CEO Chad Dickerson has a great piece in Wired.com explaining why the business community should be supporting net neutrality. He writes, "The FCC proposal threatens any business that relies on the Internet to reach consumers, stream video, process payments, advertise services or products, speak their minds, or do just about anything else." Rui Kaneya takes a tour of Chicago's venerable civic hacking scene for Columbia Journalism Review, with snapshots of Open City, the Smart Chicago Collaborative, 1871 and Everyblock. Civic tech wonk Michael Connery has a long and well-argued piece on Medium explaining why he thinks Sean Parker's Brigade start-up is unlikely to revolutionize the field. The tl/dr version: the field already is given active citizens plenty of ways to self-organize...

Government Clouds Google's Megan Smith is about to be named the next White House CTO, reports Dan Primack for Fortune. Less than one percent of more than 800,000 comments submitted to the FCC on its "open Internet" proposal were clear opposed to net neutrality, the Sunlight Foundation's Bob Lannon and Andrew Pendleton report. In addition, 60 percent of the comments were form letters coming via organized campaigns, which they note "is actually a lower percentage than is common for high-volume regulatory dockets." Regulators in Maryland are the first in the country to rule that Uber should be treated like other common-carrier taxi companies, as Andrew Zaleski...

Endorsed We here at Personal Democracy Media are endorsing Zephyr Teachout and Tim Wu, who are running in next Tuesday's Democratic gubernatorial primary here in New York. Armed with $1.5 billion in venture capital, Uber is waging a stealth campaign to undermine Lyft and other transportation networking companies, reports Casey Newton for the Verge. Its tactics include Uber employees ordering and then canceling thousands of Lyft rides and giving them burner phones to avoid detection. Salon's Andrew Leonard picks up on Newton's story to argue that Uber's actions are the equivalent of the 19th century's robber barons and asks, "What happens when a company with the DNA of Uber ends up winning it all?…What happens when Uber’s priorities turn to generating cash rather...

If We Didn't Have the Open Web "Algorithms have consequences," writes Zeynep Tufekci in a must-read post about the role of yes, net neutrality in #Ferguson. Twitter, she points out, is a relatively open platform where users have a lot of control of what they choose to see and whose "trending" algorithm rewards spikes and helps spread news to places. Facebook, on the other hand, has a completely opaque system for deciding what to show users, throttling the display even of what your friends are posting (unless you pay the Zuck). And in the five days before Ferguson became a national crisis befitting President Obama's intervention, Twitter was driving attention to the nightly protests, while Tufekci's Facebook feed had nothing on...

A few months ago, Significance Labs was little more than an idea with a beautifully designed home page, a home at Blue Ridge Foundation's hub in Brooklyn, and the seed funding to back up a daring pitch: Why not build technology aimed directly at addressing the needs of low-income Americans? Now, after picking six fellows from a pool of 150 applicants, the Labs is showcasing some inspiring results: five promising examples of working civic tech tools that can demonstrably help the poorest among us. Unlike other start-up incubators, which seek to attract budding companies and then provide them with business development support aimed at helping entrepreneurs impress high-net-worth investors, Significance Labs focused on helping its fellows zero in on the needs...

Ten years ago, an emergency medical services technician in New York City responding to your 911 call took down information about you—your name, address, patient history, medications, allergies—on paper. That record of your pre-hospital care—your patient care record—was then handed to the nurse or healthcare practitioner when you got to the hospital, or faxed in from a central EMS office. It was possible for faxes and loose papers to be lost and the hospital had no chance to get ready for the patients coming in the door. Today, thanks to years of sustained effort on the part of FDNY and the City of New York, pre-hospital paramedics can enter this crucial history on a secure tablet and transmit it across a...