Roaming Freely

This is civic tech: Our senior contributing editor Tom Steinberg unleashes “A manifesto for public technology.” With recent governmental tech disasters in mind and a parade of tech-driven policy horribles upon us, he argues, “If democratically elected governments are going to be able to meet their citizen’s desires to limit and control the activities of digital companies, then a new class of public servants are going to have to be trained up to do that work.”

Related: Andrew Nicklin, the director of open data for Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Government Excellence, responds to Mark Headd’s “Shoveling for Civic Tech Gold” post, asking and answering the question, “Why don’t governments support interesting civic tech projects?” The quick answer: “It’s too risky.” Which is why we have government procurement processes, he writes. Headd responds on Twitter.

The Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, a multi-stakeholder international effort at improving the behavior of oil, gas and other resource-intensive industries, is under heavy fire from the Publish What You Pay civil society coalition, as Isabel Munila of Oxfam America reports. And she doesn’t pull punches, accusing the “‘transparency industrial complex’ where governments seek to burnish their image” of a “shameful scene” when the chair of EITI tried to ramrod an unwanted board nominee onto the civil society slate for the initiative’s board.

Google has announced a new tool for selectively blurring images in YouTube videos, a big victory for human rights campaigners like Witness.org, which has pushed for the feature for a long time. But as Sam Gregory of Witness explains in this oped for Wired, we need a fuller toolset for facial anonymity.

18F is branching out into state and city government tech improvement, as Jason Shueh reports for GovTech.com, with former Missouri Secretary of State Robin Carnahan leading the initiative.

Our friends over at the Robin Hood Foundation’s Blue Ridge Labs (members of Civic Hall) are looking for their summer cohort of tech fellows, and they’re specifically looking for people who want to focus on “closing the justice gap.” Applications are due March 20.

Net neutrality, revisited: Here’s a great profile of Nikhil Pahwa, of MediaNama in New Delhi, by Forbes’ Miguel Helft. Pahwa helped lead the movement in India that stopped Facebook’s “Internet.org” project in its tracks. As he says to Helft, “Why do we have to choose between universal access and net neutrality? Who has a right to limit people’s access to the Internet? Especially for new users, it is important to allow them to roam freely.”

Related: On the one year anniversary of the FCC’s landmark decision backing net neutrality here in the United States, Tim Karr of Free Press looks at how net neutrality opponents in Congress keep trying, and failing, to undermine that achievement. As CredoAction points out, major broadband providers are trying to get around the FCC rule with new “zero rating” initiatives.

Life in Facebookistan: Facebook employees have been writing “all lives matter” after crossing out “black lives matter” on the company’s famous signature wall, prompting company CEO Mark Zuckerberg to admonish them in an internal memo obtained by Michael Nunez for Gizmodo. “I was already very disappointed by this disrespectful behavior before, but after my communication I now consider this malicious as well,” Zuckerberg writes. Two percent of Facebook employees are black.