Contractor Detractor

Hillary Clinton is going to criticize “gig economy” companies like Uber in a speech today outlining her economic policies, though precisely how tough she will be remains to be seen. An early report by Politico’s Michael Grunwald led Techcrunch to headline its story “Hillary Clinton Plans To Campaign Against Uber’s Contractor Economy” but after a clarification from the Clinton campaign to Politico, John Constine retitled his story “Hillary Clinton Plans To Cite Uber’s Contractor Economy For Dampening Wages.”

However it’s headlined, Clinton’s stance on companies like Uber may become a hot potato. As Republican digital strategist and RNC senior advisor Mindy Finn tweeted this morning, “Nothing says stuck in the past, economically speaking, like a rebuff of the sharing economy…This isn’t 2008 anymore.”

Sarah Kaplan reports for the Washington Post that Ellen Pao’s downfall as CEO of Reddit was intimately connected to her efforts to shut down five “hate-filled subreddits” and that the successful Change.org petition calling for her resignation was started over that issue, not her inelegant firing last week of Victoria Taylor, the moderator of the popular IamA section. She writes of Pao: “To her admirers, she was an advocate for inclusion and a pioneering woman in a male-dominated field (only 11 percent of Silicon Valley executives are female and men are twice as likely to be Reddit users than women). To her detractors, she was shill for the ‘social justice warriors’ who wanted to censor the site and a corporate outsider who was changing their community without bothering to understand it.”

Talk about burying the lede! Deep inside this long story in The Atlantic about the “Marketplace Lite” team of designers and developers that finished the hard work of rebuilding Healthcare.gov after the most critical work of fixing the site was finished, Robinson Meyer notes that one of its successes just came this February, when it launched a new login system for the site. He writes, “It is faster and it is cheaper than the old one: The old system responded to requests somewhere between two and 10 long seconds; the new one takes 30 milliseconds, on average.” Then he laconically adds: “The old login system cost $250 million to build and would have required another $70 million annually to stay online. The new system cost about $4 million to build, and its annual maintenance cost is a little less than $1 million.” (Emphasis added. I’ve actually heard that it cost less than $4 million but government bean-counters can’t technically account for a smaller amount).

As symbols of the Confederacy fall, online organizations like Color of Change and MoveOn are seeing a big rise in their numbers and power. Here’s my just-posted report for Civicist on the moment underway.

Watching Greece circle the drain, Rewired State’s Emma Mulqueeny reflects on the quixotic effort to crowdfund its debt-repayment and argues that “It’s not OK to not scale civic tech any more.” Hear, hear! (This is my and Andrew Rasiej’s motivation behind Civic Hall, in case you were wondering.)

David Weinberger has published “The Rise, Fall, and Possible Rise of Open News Platforms,” the product of his research while a fellow at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center this past spring. In it he examines the “twisty” experience of NPR, the New York Times and The Guardian in their experiments building APIs aimed at creating open platforms for developers to build on their news resources.

In Politico, Nancy Scola reports on the Library of Congress’ effort to archive all of Twitter and make the half-trillion tweets (and counting) available to researchers. It’s five years on, and, she says, “the project is in limbo” with no scheduled date when it may be opened to researchers.

As elections approach in Uganda, the government of President Yoweri Musevini, in power for 29 years, is cracking down on social media users critical of his reign, CIPESA (the Collaboration on International ICT Policy in East and Southern Africa) reports.

Congrats to Indivisible, which launches this morning with our enthusiastic support. It’s a new nonpolitical initiative focused on energizing and informing Americans about the value and potential of government. Learn more here.

Change.org, which recently saw its 100 millionth petition signer, is looking for an Elections Outreach Manager based in either San Francisco or Washington, D.C.