Foreshadowing

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler is today releasing a plan calling for major changes to the $1.7 billion Lifeline program that subsidizes landline and mobile telco service for poor Americans, with the goal of including high-speed broadband service as part of the mix, Rebecca Ruiz reports for the New York Times.

With former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum running again for President, Stephanie Mencimer of Mother Jones talks to columnist Dan Savage about whether he will revive his “SpreadingSantorum.com” Google-bomb campaign, which successfully dogged Santorum online in 2011-12.

Led by Eliot Higgins of Bellingcat.com, a team of researchers have documented Russia’s continuing military operations inside Ukraine, using open digital resources including Google’s Street View, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, satellite photos and Vkontakte (Russia’s Facebook), Michael Gordon reports for the New York Times.

#PDF15 is one week away! We’ve posted the Personal Democracy Forum 2015 guide to the 27 breakout sessions taking place during next week’s conference. And I’m happy to report that the overall gender breakdown of our 131 confirmed speakers is 66 men, 64 women and one transgender person. (Who says you can’t #changetheratio? This is our fourth year in a row with gender parity among speakers.)

Food for thought (1): “Innovation That Matters,” a new 154-page report on civic innovation focused on eight major U.S. cities finds that “cities with the most developed civic tech ecosystems are cities where civic entrepreneurs feel confident in their ability to reach out to mentors, investors, anchor institutions such as universities and larger businesses, and gatekeepers within municipal government and receive some type of response,” Andrew Zaleski reports for Next City. “Building better integration between the network of actors within a given community is the most important factor in increasing civic entrepreneurship,” says the report, which is a joint venture of the 1776 incubator in Washington D.C. and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation.

San Francisco, which the report’s authors note obviously has a very strong tech community, is still working to bridge the gap between tech and civic institutions. “[T]he traditional tech entrepreneurship model pioneered in Silicon Valley has not yet discovered a method to fully collaborate with existing institutional resources,” Zaleski notes, citing the report’s authors. New York, he says, “an ‘established’ civic tech ecosystem, proves to be the model on this front.”

Food for thought (2): Here are a few highlights from Mary Meeker’s annual Internet Trends report, released yesterday:

• While the consumer sector of the U.S. economy has been totally impacted by the internet, Meeker says the three least-impacted sectors, by comparison, are education, healthcare and “government/regulation/policy thinking.”

• 87 percent of American millennials say “my smartphone never leaves my side, night or day” and 60 percent believe “in the next five years, I believe everything will be done on mobile devices.”

• 34 percent of millennials prefer to collaborate online at work as opposed to in-person or by phone, nearly double the level for older generations.

• In Shanghai, Tencent WeChat users can get the following government services through their mobile app: hospital appointments, payments for electricity/water/gas bills, obtain travel documents, smog test appointments, property tax lookups, driving violation lookups, and weather/library search.

Food for thought (3): With Vox’s purchase of Re/Code as the latest piece of unspoken context, John Herrman of The Awl takes a hard look at the state of online media and the race for traffic, and comes to two critical conclusions you may want to ponder long and hard: First, “In most cases…a publisher reliant on platforms—reluctantly or enthusiastically—is required to give up a substantial part of its identity. It borrows its audience. It takes editorial cues from the company from which the audience is borrowed. It rents space not just with promises of unusually high-quality content, but, in some cases, with the splitting of revenue. This is a situation in which success is aligned with sublimation.”

And second, “the next year is going see a fairly large shaking-out: an elimination of redundancy by platforms that incidentally encouraged it; a choosing of partners and therefore winners and losers; a fundamental change in the terms that publishers thought they had with the platforms they’ve come to depend on, even though the platforms never actually promised anything. Some of the most successful websites may prove to be the most vulnerable. The speed and nimbleness with which they were able to appear, grow, and surpass their print-centric predecessors’ publishing businesses on the internet was dazzling; so too will be the speed with which they can disappear.”

The Workers Lab 2015 Summer Institute, which is “designed for entrepreneurs & organizers seeking feedback on their business ideas, ventures, and/or platforms focused on empowering and building justice for U.S. workers,” is taking applications for fellows.