Rumblings

Marc Caputo and Alex Isenstadt report for Politico on the shake-up inside Jeb Bush’s soon-to-be-announced presidential campaign team, noting the departure of Matt Lira, a top GOP digital strategist, who one source said left because the campaign “was too focused on TV advertising and not enough on building a digital presence.”

Rival Vincent Harris, who is running digital for Rand Paul’s president campaign, tweets “With no digital head, how behind is team Bush at building digital/data infrastructure? Who’s even left to hire?”

Notably, it was just two weeks ago that the Bush non-campaign was touting the face that Lira had been hired to advise its leadership PAC, as Jon Ward reported then for Yahoo Politics.

Many Democratic digerati “are treading carefully as they try not to rein their chances for a future spot on the [Clinton] campaign,” Nancy Scola reports for Politico. The one major exception is Revolution Messaging, which has signed on with Sen. Bernie Sanders’ campaign.

The White House’s chief information officer, Tony Scott, has issued a memorandum requiring that federal websites and web services upgrade to HTTPS by the end of 2016, Alex Howard reports for the Huffington Post. Comments on GitHub appear to have sped up the timeline for adoption, according to 18F’s Eric Mill, who spoke to Howard. “HTTPS everywhere makes the whole government stronger, and the whole Web stronger,” Mill notes.

Republican data firm Echelon Insights, co-founded by Patrick Ruffini, took a close look at Twitter conversations about politics and discovered, to no one’s surprise, that “Beltway Twitter” (partisan activists and the press corps) is far more obsessed with itself than the rest of the country, Paul Singer reports for USA Today. One interesting finding in the data, which goes back a year: So-called “non-political” Twitter users were twice as interested in the Freddie Gray killing in Baltimore than Beltway elites. (That’s #BlackTwitter).

Brigade, the civic engagement start-up that has been operating in stealth for the last year, is about to roll out its first products, founder Sean Parker said yesterday at the Techonomy conference in Washington, D.C., David McCabe reports for The Hill.

Blendle, the news micropayment platform, has just signed up all the major German newspapers to its service, Lara O’Reilly reports for U.K. Business Insider.

Technosociologist Zeynep Tufekci reports for the New York Times on how young activists in Turkey used tools like Whatsapp to coordinate poll monitoring for last week’s parliamentary elections where the ruling party lost its majority.

California’s Civic Innovation Lab has announced Challenge:LA, working in partnership with Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti and focused on transportation, water conservation, and community engagement.

Writing in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, Marcia Stepanek nicely captures the core themes of Personal Democracy Forum 2015: the fact that we have a trust problem and an engagement problem, with nearly half of all Americans staying on the sidelines as “interested bystanders,” in the words of Kate Krontiris’ opening talk.

Martin Maximino, a public policy grad student at the Harvard Kennedy School, reports on his PDF 2015 highlights, zeroing in panels looking at government-as-a-platform and the evolution of political analytics, in particular.