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This is civic tech: And, in my humble opinion, a big deal too. ActBlue, the fundraising platform for Democratic and progressive political candidates that has processed nearly $1 billion in donations since its founding 11 years ago, is launching ActBlue Charities. As ActBlue Executive Director Erin Hill explains, charities of all sizes will be able to use the platform, getting immediate access to ActBlue 2.4 million-strong Express user base and benefiting from the company’s hard-won experience optimizing its contributions interface. Notably, the nonprofit is staying progressive, as Hill writes, “ActBlue Charities is open to any c3 organization that is willing to engage in grassroots fundraising, and whose activity doesn’t contradict ActBlue Charities’ policies and values. Those values include (but aren’t limited to) social equality, women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, racial justice, diversity, freedom of speech, and respect for scientific inquiry, discovery, and data.”
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Crisis Text Line has announced that it is opening its 13 million text message database to universities and other researchers, an unprecedented move that should enable “smart system change on a broad scale,” as its founder and CEO Nancy Lublin said in a press release. Aggregate data is already available at CrisisTrends, but the full data set will allow researchers to ask and answer more searching questions about problems like suicide and depression.
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The New York Times’ Glenn Rifkin profiles ArtLifting, an online and offline marketplace that is giving homeless artists a way to sell their work and change their lives.
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Now TED knows about the work of the U.S. Digital Service, thanks to this talk yesterday by its co-founder Haley van Dyck. But hey, if you were at Personal Democracy Forum last June, you already knew their inspiring story—and for a fraction of the ticket price. (Speaking of which, early bird tickets for PDF 2016 are on sale.)
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This is civic dreck: Tech entrepreneur Justin Keller of Commando.io unloads his frustrations with San Francisco’s homeless population with an open letter to the city’s mayor and police chief, reports Julia Carrie Wong for The Guardian. Keller wrote, in part: “I know people are frustrated about gentrification happening in the city, but the reality is, we live in a free market society. The wealthy working people have earned their right to live in the city. They went out, got an education, work hard, and earned it. I shouldn’t have to worry about being accosted. I shouldn’t have to see the pain, struggle, and despair of homeless people to and from my way to work every day.”
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Does Google’s newly branded “Jigsaw” project have an “old imperial mindset”—even embodied in its name? Julia Powles of The Guardian thinks so.
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Tech and politics: Darren Samuelsohn offers Politico readers a guided tour of the sprawling network of volunteer coders who are fueling the Bern. It’s a great piece, full of dueling quotes from different camps in the tech-politics arena. On one side are the new generation of DIYers like start-up entrepreneur Daniela Perdomo, the spearhead of feelthebern.org, who touts the efficiency and passion of organic grassroots contributions. On the other side are people like Hillary Clinton spokesman Jesse Ferguson, who takes a dig at all the headlines the Berniacs are getting, insisting that his team’s focus on “optimization” will win the day.
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The only note Samuelsohn gets wrong is in writing that “The dispersed nature of Sanders’ operation may be familiar in the tech world, but it’s a novelty in politics…” Actually, if you were there for the 2003-04 Howard Dean campaign, none of this is new; the Dean campaign was renowned for its decentralized support base—including an army of volunteer coders.
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What is different about the Sanders coder base is that it is spinning its wheels in an age of ubiquitous social networking platforms. Those “Hack4Dean” coders were virtually connected back in 2003; now everyone (just about) is connected. Facebook was actually founded a few days before Dean ended his campaign, in fact. Now, according to a recent Pew Internet survey, 37 percent of American adults say that sometime in the past week they got information about the presidential election from Facebook. Local TV news is the top source (57 percent), cable TV news is second (54 percent), then national nightly network TV news (49 percent), followed by radio (44 percent). In terms of the news sites considered “most helpful” to learning something about the election, cable TV news ranked highest at 24 percent, followed by local TV news (14 percent), radio (11 percent), national nightly network television news (10 percent) and then Facebook (9 percent).
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Crypto-wars, continued: In the wake of Apple CEO Tim Cook’s impassioned post denouncing the government’s effort to force Apple to break its strong encryption policy, large tech companies are rallying to his side, as Tasneem Nashrulla reports for BuzzFeed.
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In case you are confused by the technical issues raised by the government’s specific demand that Apple de-encrypt the iPhone 5C that belonged to one of the San Bernardino shooters, this post by Ben Thompson on Stratechery should clear things up.
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Longtime tech journalist Dan Gillmor makes the case in Slate for more consumer reporting on the safety and security of the electronic devices so many of us have become dependent on. In fact, he argues that Consumer Reports should do it, and that the company “is actively investigating ways to incorporate (product) security testing” into its methodology.
Correction: I mistakenly described ActBlue as a for-profit company when it is in fact a nonprofit. And I also erred in transcribing some data from the Pew Research Center about where Americans get their news about the presidential election. Both have been fixed above. Credit to John Kaehny of Reinvent Albany for alerting me to the latter mistake.