Feeling Naked?

Writing in NonProfit Quarterly, William Schambra of the Hudson Institute’s Bradley Center for Philanthropy and Civic Renewal takes a sledgehammer to Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen’s stated belief that “technology is in the nascent states of completely transforming philanthropy.” Contrary to her assertion that technology is “forcing the entire social sector to be more accountable and transparent about how every single one of our gifts is tangibly transforming individual lives,” Schambra says that “Human problems will not suddenly be solved by the clever flashes of out-of-the-box imagination so prized by technology” and he calls for a “a larger nonprofit insurgency against high-tech imperialism.” And this: “For too long…we have listened passively to insulting and patronizing lectures by the tech titans about the expansiveness of their vision compared to the timidity of ours, the efficacy of their tools compared to the crudeness of ours.” Tell us how you really feel!

Commenting on Schambra’s rant, Inside Philanthropy’s David Callahan offers a semi-rebuttal, outlining “Five Big Myths About Techies and Philanthropy.” One choice bit:

Looking across tech philanthropy, I would say these funders are only marginally more interested in technology than other funders. In fact, over the past few months, I’ve heard a lot more from legacy foundation leaders like Darren Walker about technology than anyone from Silicon Valley, and the big push in philanthropy on net neutrality has mainly come from those traditional funders. One of them, the Knight Foundation, is more infatuated with technology that any Silicon Valley foundation I know of.

Keynoting the Re:publica conference in Berlin yesterday, Ethan Zuckerman of the MIT Center of Civic Media gave a typically wonderful and broad-ranging talk about “civics in the age of mistrust” that is also a meditation on what we have gotten wrong about the internet’s potential to change politics for the better.

Taking a half-page from John Oliver’s advice to Edward Snowden on how to get Americans to care about the NSA’s surveillance overreaching, Fight for the Future is calling on supporters to post pictures of themselves naked from the waist up, using the hashtag #IFEELNAKED “to make Congress ashamed they’re watching us.” The results are impressive. FFTF is also asking websites to install code that will prevent anyone from a Congressional IP address from seeing their sites, instead getting a splash page reading “Stop Invading Our Private Lives.”

Speaking of privacy innovations, the ACLU is trying to find out what kind of overhead surveillance city and federal authorities were conducting last week in Baltimore, after a random Twitter exchange between a resident and a local aviation buff unearthed some very curious data about a Cessna that kept flying over the West Baltimore epicenter of the protests, Craig Timberg reports for The Washington Post.

In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo killings, France’s legislature is moving quickly to expand the powers of its intelligence services, giving them “the right to gather potentially unlimited data,” Alissa Rubin reports for The New York Times.

Want to find interesting live Periscope streams? Klint Finley of Wired writes up Dextro, a NY-based start-up that says it uses “deep learning” AI to find and filter the video people are sharing, in real time. Right now Dextro is making that content available for free, and the results are fascinating. Top “topics” include: “Cats&Dogs,” “Glasses,” “Dashcam” and “Its Getting Dark.”

Seth Myers asks presidential candidate Carly Fiorina about CarlyFiorina.org, and she replies that she owns SethMyers.org. (Actually, it appears no one owns it.)

The Democratic National Committee announced yesterday that it will host six presidential primary debates, starting this fall, working with “a combination of state Democratic Parties, national broadcast media, digital platforms, local media, and civic organizations.” Curiously, the party’s announcement insists on an “exclusivity requirement” mandating that any candidate or sponsor who goes outside this process gives up their ability to appear in these debates. The Republican National Committee debate process, which calls for nine sanctioned debates, appears to have a similar exclusivity rule.

The Sunlight Foundation’s Julia Keseru and James Kin-sing Chan have released the first version of a research paper looking at 110 examples of open data projects around the world, focusing on evaluating their impact.

Modern times: A Florida woman saved herself and her family from a kidnapping by inserting a call for 911 in the comments section of a Pizza Hut online food order, Cyrus Farivar reports for ArsTechnica.

This is 2015: The “Blockchain Summit” on Necker Island has 36 men speaking an one woman, Kashmir Hill points out. Meanwhile, the DLD conference about to happen here in New York City has 60 men and 19 women, 76 percent male.