Hello, World

Hello, world! Today we are launching Civicist, our hub for news and analysis of the civic tech world, with a gorgeous new design. And that means we are going to mothball techPresident (keeping all its content accessible), and convert First Post into Civicist’s daily news aggregator. For those of you who get First Post by morning email (a benefit of being a Civic Hall member), all that will change is next week, these emails will start coming from a new email address). And we’ll keep sharing First Post online later in the day, but it will now go up on the Civicist site.

We’re excited to launch Civicist with a diverse group of contributing editors, including Hollie Russon Gilman, Erhardt Graeff, Marci Harris, Mark Headd, Allyson Kapin, David Karpf, Laurenellen McCann, An Xioa Mina, David Moore, Antonella Napolitano, Matt Stempeck, Anthony Townsend, and Ethan Zuckerman. To kick off our coverage, we’ve asked them to share their thoughts on “What is civic tech?” and will be publishing their responses this week and next.

For starters, here is Laurenellen McCann on “But What is ‘Civic’?”, Mark Headd on “The Last Mile of Service Delivery,” Hollie Russon Gilman on “Civic Tech: Empowering the 21st Century Public (Maybe),” and Matt Stempeck on “A Maddeningly Broad Term.”

For more on what Civicist will do, read this. Follow us also @civicist.

It’s not often that the tech sector rolls out a new product that may actually “change the world,” but I will make an exception for the new Tesla home/business battery launch. It will allow solar home owners and electric car owners to substantially withdraw from the grid and quite possibly tip the oil/gas/coal sector toward’s history’s dustbin. Futurist Ramez Naam argues that the economics are “almost there.”

Nearly two years after Edward Snowden blew the whistle on the US government’s massive surveillance programs, Congress is on the verge of major reforms of the Patriot Act, report Jonathan Weisman and Jennifer Steinhauer for The New York Times. They note that “The Snowden disclosures, along with data breaches at Sony Pictures, Target and the insurance giant Anthem, have unsettled voters and empowered those in Congress arguing for greater civil liberties protection—who a few years ago ‘could have met in a couple of phone booths,’ said Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon.”

Snowden’s name appears seven times in that front-page story, in fact. A petition on the White House’s “We the People” site calling on the Obama administration to pardon him, which has 166,771 signatures, has been waiting for a formal response for 22 months.

The House Government Oversight and Reform Committee’s information technology subcommittee actually has two members with computer science degrees on it, and during a hearing this week they made clear they aren’t buying the government’s arguments for “backdoor” access to encrypted communications, Andrea Peterson reports for the Washington Post. “It is clear to me that creating a pathway for decryption only for good guys is technologically stupid,” said one of them, Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA). “You Just can’t do that.”

Cory Doctorow, a longtime critic of the so-called “backdoor” key approach, attacks U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron for pushing the idea, writing in The Guardian that:

Making it possible for the state to open your locks in secret means that anyone who works for the state, or anyone who can bribe or coerce anyone who works for the state, can have the run of your life. Cryptographic locks don’t just protect our mundane communications: cryptography is the reason why thieves can’t impersonate your fob to your car’s keyless ignition system; it’s the reason you can bank online; and it’s the basis for all trust and security in the 21st century.

Matt Taibbi writes in Rolling Stone that Senator Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign should be taken seriously, attacking the mainstream media’s focus on early money-raising. He writes: “We’re conditioned to believe that the candidate who has the early assent of a handful of executives on Wall Street and in Hollywood and Silicon Valley is the ‘serious’ politician, while the one who is merely the favorite of large numbers of human beings is an irritating novelty act whose only possible goal could be to cut into the numbers of the real players.”

As Twitter’s stock tanks, longtime media analyst Mathew Ingram argues that the company made a critical mistake five years ago when it started cannibalizing and shutting down the third-party developer network that had helped it initially grow, and that it should have become more open and decentralized, not less.

While Sridhar Ramamswamy, Google’s senior VP of ads and commerce, is writing here in the Wall Street Journal about how mobile internet use is changing consumer behavior, pitching his argument to commercial brands, everything he says also applies to politics and causes. To wit:

These moments, or “micro-moments,” are when we act on a need—to learn something, do something, discover something, watch something or buy something. They are intent-rich moments where decisions are being made and preferences being shaped. We see them constantly, across billions of monthly searches, billions of hours of videos watched every month, billions of interactions with various sites and apps. These aren’t just people inattentively tapping things into their phone; they rather are the new battleground for hearts, minds and, with them, the dollars their attention brings along.This is a pretty seismic change for advertisers.

Want to really feed your brain? Howard Rheingold’s six-week online course on “technologies of cooperation” is currently signing up learners.