Hands Across America

This is civic tech: Lisa Abeyta of AppCityLife writes for Inc. about the University of Chicago MBA course on entrepreneurship for urban innovators, a lab class aiming to help train the next generation of civic tech makers and doers. (One quibble: this isn’t the “first university-level course” on this topic. Off the top of my head: In 2012 Susan Crawford taught “Solving Problems Using Technology” at the Harvard Kennedy School; Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs has been offering “Technology and the Future of Governance and Public Policy” taught by Ari Wallach and Hollie Russon Gilman for the last two years; and NYU’s Center for Urban Science and Progress and The GovLab (NYU and MIT) have both been offering degrees in the field for several years.)

Writing for the Stanford Social Innovation Review, Alexandra Christy does an excellent job explaining the “18F process.” That is, she shows how 18F is helping dozens of clients inside the government, federal agencies, to learn agile development using user-centric design, prototyping, beta launches, iterating in public, and going live.

Speaking of 18F, this blog post from Colin MacArthur, Carolyn Dew, Michelle Chorister, and John Yuda on what they are learning as they flesh out the plan for the “Federal Front Door” project is absolutely fascinating. Imagine this: government bureaucrats are interviewing ordinary citizens about how they interact with government in order to better serve them. (The whole series of posts on the topic, which is unfolding over the next two weeks, is worth bookmarking.)

New on Civicist: Our Rethinking Debates fellow Christine Cupaiuolo reports on how civic tech fueled the recent presidential debates in Taiwan.

The OpenGov Foundation is looking to hire a senior web application developer.

Tech and politics: NationBuilder and its founder, Jim Gilliam, get a lovely profile in Bloomberg Politics by Adam Satariano, that accurately describes the company’s mission—to provide low-cost, high-quality political organizing technology to anyone—while unfortunately maligning it for having customers with unsavory politics, like Donald Trump. Worse, Satariano’s editors smacked an obnoxious headline on his story: “The Antiwar Activist Who Helped Make Donald Trump Possible.” This, from a publication whose owner, Mike Bloomberg, is a possible candidate for president but won’t allow the journalists who work for him to cover his own personal life or wealth. We’re with Gilliam, who says, “the right to organize is fundamental to American democracy.”

Writing for Raw Story, Paul Hilder—a former online strategist for Change.org, Avaaz and 38 Degrees—argues that using technology and distributed organizing, the Bernie Sanders campaign “is changing the laws of political physics” and “building the most extraordinary grassroots momentum I have ever seen.” On that basis he argues that Sanders could still overtake Hillary Clinton in the battle for the Democratic presidential nomination.

So, it turns out that Marco Rubio’s campaign strategy is indeed programmed by robots, as Sasha Issenberg reports for Bloomberg Politics. He details how the campaign—aware that it would be out-fundraised by rivals but thinking it had the most naturally charismatic contender—has been relying on a data-driven operation focused on getting Rubio into free media opportunities that are most likely to get him in front of the right voters in the districts where he has had the best chance of getting delegates—and how that strategy has been upended by Trump’s greater skill at getting free coverage. And he explains why Rubio is now trying to out-Trump Trump by getting into the gutter with him by mocking his small hands, among other gibes—it’s getting him lots of free TV.

Researchers at MIT have built a Twitter bot, DeepDrumpf, that uses an algorithm trained on some of Trump’s speeches and debate performances to push out tweets that mimic his language, Stuart Dredge reports for The Guardian.

Trump watch: This is a real headline on CNN Politics.

NeverTrump.org is starting to take off. It’s a cross-partisan group led by three men who met online: Jon Copper, a University of Virginia graduate who tells me he “grew up in the Evangelical Right, and now would identify to a large degree with the Evangelical Left/social teachings of Pope Francis”; Jedidiah Crews, a military vet who runs the account @Trump_Truther; and Geraldo Ramos, a Brazilian tech entrepreneur in California who is the co-founder of HackHands.com.

Crypto-wars, continued: Here’s a list of the forty companies and organizations filing briefs supporting Apple in its fight with the government over privacy and encryption, compiled by Dawn Chmielewski of Re/Code.

Your moment of zen: Our civic imagination fellow Andrew Slack has posted a 1999 video of himself as a Brandeis undergrad interviewing Robert Reich, the former Labor Secretary. “Late Night Snack With Andrew Slack,” indeed!